บท 289: Sleeping Beauty

It was strange, thought Gustav. I expected a fight, and I got... encouragement?

This was unlike Olaf. Gustav didn't know him like that. But maybe, just maybe, Gustav had never known him?

It's not that Gustav didn't want to know his father, he just never had the opportunity. For Olaf, the company always came first. It was the company that was Olaf Meiden's whole life, not family, not home.

Sometimes Gustav wondered if he and his mother ever mattered to Olaf.

He wondered this often when he was a teenager. When he saw in movies how fathers took their sons to games, how they did homework with them, how they ate dinner together and asked them how their day at school had been....

Olaf would come home from work so late that Gustav had long been in bed. Sometimes he didn't see his father for weeks.

Sometimes he wondered if he still had a father.

Especially when he no longer had a mother.

Olaf Meiden had always been like a stranger to him.