"Is daddy going to show up?" Tris asked for the upteenth time.
"Tris, I don't think so. Your dad is busy. You'll get to talk to him when you come back from school," Amy replied.
The quarterly PTA meeting that took place at Tris's school was being held today, and Tris had been asking for Cole to tag along. According to him, he wanted to show him off and show his friends that he wasn't lying when he said he had a new father.
Cole was a busy man, and Amy didn't want to bother him with Tris's silly requests. Plus, she didn't want to put too much faith in him, only for him to disappoint, after Tris would've promised his friends that his father would show up.
They were okay without him before he came into their lives, so they could be okay without him now.
"Are you coming with us to the PTA meeting, aunty Kayla?" Tris turned to Kayla.
"No, honey. I need some people I need to see today. But you'll tell me everything your teacher says when you get back, deal?" She asked.
"Deal!" He smiled.
Kayla returned his smile and faced Amy.
"Did you properly ask your boss for a leave, or you just gave him some notification or text? You might have another court case, and he'd tell the judge that you were incompetent, lazy, disrespectful, dumb, unproductive and every other bad attitude he could think of," she taunted and sipped some coffee.
Amy rolled her eyes in frustration. She had gotten Kayla to understand and forgive her for taking Liam's offer, but she was bent on taunting her with it whenever she had the chance.
"Look, I don't have your time now. I need to leave," she said and Tris gave Kayla a hug before they left the house.
Immediately they exited, Kayla grabbed her phone and dialed a number.
"Good morning, Cole. There's somewhere you need to be right now,"
***
The PTA meeting finally came to a close, and the parents began leaving with their children one after the other.
While Amy engrossed herself with a deep conversation with a teacher, Tris stared at his friends leaving with their parents.
He watched as his friends and classmates left with their dads and their moms, and he sighed loudly.
"I wonder when I'll be able to do that," he muttered.
"Why can't you do it now?" He heard a familiar voice question him gently from behind.
He took a sharp turn and just as he'd guessed, it was his father standing behind him, a smile on his face.
"Daddy!!" He screamed in excitement and ran to hug him.
Amy noticed the sudden noise her son was making in the corner, but she was so deep in the conversation with the teacher, that she only managed to shoot a glance at the corner for a second, and turned her focus back to the teacher.
Wait a minute...
She shot a double take at the corner she left her boy, and she saw that he was with a man. Her eyes met those of the man, and she got shocked to realize that it was Cole.
She bade the teacher a quick goodbye and began approaching them.
"Cole! Wh... What are you doing here?" She questioned, perplexed by his presence.
"What? I can't show up for my son's PTA meeting?" He frowned.
"What - of course you can! I'm just....I didn't expect you to come. I didn't even tell you about the meeting, so how did you know?" She asked.
"That's not important. What's important is that I'm here now," he said with a smirk on his face.
"Dad, can you follow me to my class? I need to show you off to my friends!" Tris pleaded.
"Come on, let's go show them who's real," Cole said with a smug smile and Amy tried hard to stifle her laughter.
Amy sighed with a genuine smile on her face as she watched her son and his dad walk hand in hand and out of the room and down the hall. This was what a family was.
"Hey, Jane! Hey, Benson!" Tris waved to his friends outside. He began approaching them, dragging Cole along with him.
"I told you I wasn't lying, but you didn't believe me. This is my father. I got him last month!" he said with innocent excitement.
They looked quite surprised to see Cole, and Cole found the scene wholesome.
He greeted everyone and introduced himself to them.
"Are you really his dad?" Jane asked.
"Yes, I am," Cole replied with a smile.
"Does that mean Miss. Amy is your wife, and that you both kiss everyday like my own parents?" Benson questioned.
"Well, not everyday," Cole laughed.
They asked him a couple more questions before their parents came for them
Tris and Cole went to his car, waiting for Amy to talk to the teachers.
"Ice cream!! Ice cream!! Can we get an ice cream, dad?!" He jumped up in excitement and pointed from the backseat at the direction of an ice cream truck.
Cole knew Amy wouldn't like that he bought Tris some ice cream, but she wasn't here anyways.
He called it over and bought two. He was about to hand one of them to Tris and as Tris stretched his hands, the sleeve of his school uniform revealed a mark on his skin.
It was as though he was scratched by a sharp object.
"What happened to you here, Tris?" He pointed to the mark.
Tris instantly got moody when the conversation started.
"What's wrong?" Cole asked when he noticed the sadness in his son's eyes.
"If you don't want to talk about it, it's fine-"
"I was bullied," Tris muttered.
Cole stared at Tris in shock.
"What!!?" He didn't even believe him.
"I got bullied by the same group of boys that bullied me when you snuck into the school as a janitor," Tris confessed.
"Why? What did you do to them?" Cole questioned.
"I didn't do anything wrong to them. I just didn't finish their homework," he replied.
"They make you do their homework?!" Cole was stunned.
"Yeah. I didn't do it, so they cut me with their pen," he confessed.
"And how long has this been going on?"
"For as long as I can remember,"
"And what did you do when they hit you? Did you report them to your teacher? Did you hit them back?" Cole questioned.
"I didn't do anything. It's no use reporting to my teacher. She won't do anything," Tris replied.
Tris managed to lick the rest of his ice cream, but Cole had lost appetite instantly.
They waited in silence until Amy joined them in the car.
"Hey, boys. I'm sorry, I was talking to a teacher. What did I miss?"