One night when she was about sixteen, she came home but was loud enough to wake us up. I glanced at the alarm clock with a still sleeping eye and saw that it was a few minutes after four in the morning. Happy conversations and laughter from below completely sobered us up. The voice of Livia, as we know it, was dominated by a different, lower one. When we went down to the ground floor, it turned out that she was with a friend who was not Polish. She introduced us to Taro, a boy from Japan. All in all, we shouldn’t be surprised.
I couldn’t hide that I was angry. I went to bed tired at one in the morning. But it was not about interrupting sleep, because it was not the first time that I had gone to bed this late. I know my anger came from seeing my daughter smiling at someone else, not me. That someone was a young guy, and she was standing way too close to him. It was clear that they liked each other, they were not embarrassed at all. Every now and then their heads almost met. They were actually… flirting. I couldn’t look at it, my blood temperature was rising rapidly in my veins. The level of my objection grew.
