Harriet was wailing out loud, and so I patted her on the back.0

Of course, she cried even more, telling me not to touch her body.0

With no idea how to soothe a crying child, I took a piece of candy from the ready-to-eat food storage area in the cafeteria and handed it to her.0

She squawked that she wouldn’t eat it, but when I unwrapped it and brought it toward her mouth, she reluctantly ate it.0

I’d rate her adorableness at ten points out of ten…4

Watching her nibble on the candy while crying was truly an endearing sight.1

“Hey, I was just joking. Are you seriously going to cry like a three-year-old kid? Come on, surely you didn’t think I actually was going to do that.”0

As soon as she stopped crying, munching on the candy while wiping her eyes, I couldn’t help but start teasing her again. At that, she glared daggers at me.0

“Of course you really meant it! I know for a fact you weren’t joking! You might not do it to other kids, but you would do it to me!”3

‘Hmm, you do have a point.’0

She was right. I wasn’t interested in doing anything to the other students, but if Harriet took a leave of absence and came back the next year, It was highly probable that I would actually go out of my way to bother her even more than I was now.0

I guess she really was smarter than me after all. She had correctly anticipated my behavioral patterns that even I wasn’t aware of. 0

She seemed to be expecting some kind of romantic confession when I told her not to take a leave, but there she was now, suddenly looking at me as if I were her sworn enemy.0

Harriet made me realize that if I ever got the chance to have a daughter when I was alive, I would have teased my daughter the same way I did her. The little girl would cry, saying “You’re the worst, dad!”, but that would only make me want to tease her even more. I would have been a master at parentin...12