When I met my now-wife, she had a 3-year-old daughter. I treated her like my own, and by age 4, she called me daddy. Her biological dad was inconsistent in her life, and she called him by his first name when with us.
Last night, while visiting him, my stepdaughter texted me to pick her up. I arrived to find her with a swollen, painful arm from a skateboard fall. When I asked why he hadn’t called my wife, he dismissed it as “dramatic.” My stepdaughter, in pain, asked to leave, and I told her bio dad, “This is why I’m her real dad, not you.” At the ER until 1 a.m., it turned out her arm was broken.