rare, supportive parents

Thomas chimes in from behind the chair, voice even.

“It is still irresponsible,”
he says.
“If it wasn’t you two.”
He looks at you when he says it, not unkind.
“I know you would stay. You have always stayed. You are basically already married in the soul anyway. I can understand what happens when the dam finally shatters. When years of yearning have nowhere to go except each other.”

He glances at Claudia. She does not stop him.

“I don’t want you going through what I had to with her back then. My father-in-law was a real piece of work when I knocked her up. Accidentally.”
A small, dry smile.
“Even she agrees Grandpa was an asshole.”

“He was an asshole, yes”
Claudia confirms, mild as tea.

The story lands on you like a hand on the back of the neck. Pressure. History.
The shape of a man who got someone pregnant and then had to stand in a doorway that hated him.
Before you have thought it through, your mouth is already offering the stupid version of duty.

“if it happens I’ll stop the degree. Find work. I can provide for her. I don’t want—”

“Stupid,” Claudia says, blankly.

“Idiot,” Thomas specifies, almost in the same breath.

You blink.

“For what do we have a family,”
Claudia continues, already moving on as if you have not just tried to throw Jura in the bin,
“if not for this. You finish the degree. Both of you. We will support you until you do. I am already thinking about the tenants in the side apartment near main street. I think we can claim Personal use. You two would have a place that is actually yours.”

The warmth hits you in the chest, unexpected and thick. You kind of knew they already saw you as a son. Seeing it like this—money refused, work refused, an apartment pulled out of a drawer like a spare key—makes you feel held in a way that drained the anxiety.

Sandra does not stay on the couch. She skips the distance into her mother’s arms and thanks her in a tangle of words and hugs, face buried in Claudia’s shoulder, the decent collar riding up on the marks and neither of them caring.
Claudia pets her hair like she is still a kid.

Thomas tips his head toward the kitchen doorway. A small motion. You follow.

He does not tower now. He just asks, quiet, so that Claudia and sandra can be for themselfs.

“Does your Anja know already.”

“Mother doesn’t know,”
you say.
“At least I don’t think she does. After the display in there I’m not sure what she might already have deduced.”

Thomas nods once. No surprise. He has known Anja longer than he has known you.

He advises you without pressure.

“Don’t wait too long. She can be stoic. She still looked forward to you two being together more than she ever said at a table. She will not be as thrilled about an early baby. I could not pretend otherwise.”

You agree. You already know that part.

Anja was always adamant about timing, about finishing things, about not turning a life into a scramble.
She raised you alone. Your father vanished when you were three—the same year you met Sandra, as if the universe had a sick sense of humour about replacements.
He was a deadbeat who left a gap, and Claudia and Thomas helped fill it.
They kept you after school. They treated you like a son years before they said the word out loud in a living room full of cookies.
You are, in a sideways way, thankful the man fucked off. If he had stayed you might never have been in this house enough to end up with the bundle of joy who is currently trying to strangle her mother with gratitude on the other side of the doorway.

“I’ll tell her,”
you say. “Soon. Sandra was supposed to handle her. That was the deal. I handle you two, she handles Anja. We may have to switch, given this morning.”

Thomas’s mouth twitches.

“Your mother will want to hear it from you anyway. The together part. The baby part she will want to hear sitting down, with tea, not in a doorway.”
He glances back toward the living room, where Sandra is still attached to Claudia like a koala that has discovered tax policy.
“And do not try to talk about quiting your degree again in front of Anja. She will call you worse than stupid.”

“Understood.”

From the other room Claudia’s voice filters through, fond and muffled by her daughter’s shoulder.

“You’re crushing my ribs, sweetheart.”

“You bet on grandkids.”

“that was your father, he bet on grandkids before you turn 24”

“That makes it worse.”

You and Thomas share a look that is almost father-and-son and almost two men waiting out a storm they both caused in different decades.

Although it’s not the best point to take a break, I hope I’m not leaving you on too much of a cliffhanger.