Six little words. That was all it took to flip my entire world upside down and inside out. Before those words were uttered, I had life figured out. I was a good man—a faithful husband and stepfather. I’d seen my fair share of troubles, but I knew I could take anything that came my way. Then suddenly, like a tornado in the middle of the night, everything in my life was thrown up into the air, only to come down in a way that I’d have never guessed.

I first met my wife, Carly, a little more than a decade ago. We bumped into each other at the gym, and things clicked between us almost instantly. In fact, we got along so well that Carly didn’t mention her daughter, Jasmine, for weeks, out of fear that I’d take off as soon as I found out she had a kid. I made it clear that those fears were unfounded, and a few months later I became a husband and a stepfather.

At first, my relationship with Jasmine, or Jazz as I often call her, was better than either Carly or I could have hoped. Her biological father was a conman who ditched his family to move out to California. My wife and I were concerned that she might harbor ill feelings toward me due to her father's past behavior. In reality, it appeared that the opposite was true. For several years, we had a relationship that could only be described as ideal.

Then she became a teenager.

Practically overnight, the wonder years came to an abrupt halt. Suddenly, nothing I did was good enough anymore. Jazz started calling me “Jeff” instead of “Dad,” and if I dared correct her, she’d make it abundantly clear that I wasn’t her real dad. I still told her I loved her, and I still did all the “dad stuff,” like driving her to school and gymnastics, but all my efforts to show her that I cared were met with cold indifference.

Things weren’t a picnic for my wife, either. Jazz treated her nearly as badly as she treated me. There were fights. There was shouting. Doors were slammed. For literally years, Carly and I tried everything we could think of to reach Jasmine, but nothing seemed to make a difference. Of course, we shared some wonderful moments with Jasmine throughout those years, but overall, I felt as though we were caught in the midst of a terrible storm.

Making matters worse, it was right in the middle of “Hurricane Jasmine,” as I called it, when I’d found out that Carly had cheated on me. She was in the shower, having just gotten home from an evening out with some of her girlfriends, when I heard a notification ding from her phone. Without even thinking, I grabbed her phone, assuming it was her mom or one of her girlfriends. Instead, it was somebody named Rob, thanking her for a wonderful night.

In that moment, I felt like my whole world was collapsing. This was the woman I loved, whom I’d taken into my home and made part of my life. The woman whose daughter was always treated just as if she were my own, even when she treated me like garbage. The room spun, and I felt a knot form in my stomach. Before I knew what I was doing, I charged into the bathroom, ripped open the shower curtain, and told Carly that I knew where she really went that night. I told her we were through and that she and her daughter needed to get out right now.

Almost immediately, Carly broke down sobbing. She admitted to hooking up with somebody she met at the bar that night. She swore it was a one-time thing and that she never meant for it to happen. As she stood there, crying in the shower, she said the only reason it had happened was because she had been under so much stress from Jasmine’s attitude issues that when the guy at the bar offered a shoulder to cry on, she just snapped. She begged me to please let her stay, swearing that she’d never step out on me again.

I didn’t kick Carly and Jasmine out that evening. I did, however, tell her that I needed room to think. I packed up a few things and took off for a hotel for a couple of nights. The weeks that followed were beyond difficult, especially with Jazz still being so awful, but eventually Carly and I worked through our differences, saved our marriage, and got back to a reasonably good place.

With our matrimonial crisis aside, our focus turned back to Jasmine. I still remember the night, about three months after Jasmine’s sixteenth birthday, when we finally got through to her. The evening began with Jazz asking if she could go to a party with a couple of her friends. She was being very secretive about the details, so I put on my detective hat and started sleuthing. The long story short was that she and some friends were planning on crashing a frat party at the local university. Needless to say, we made it abundantly clear that she would not be attending. The resulting explosion was absolutely colossal. She called us names. She told us that she hated us. She screamed all the way to her room and slammed the door so hard that she dislodged the doorframe. Once there, she turned on her music, playing it so loud that when I stepped outside to get some fresh air, I could still hear it blaring.

Then something happened. To this day, I have no idea what it was, but it was as if the storm was suddenly just…over. About an hour before midnight, Jazz shut off her music. For the next hour, she sat in her room and sobbed, just loudly enough that we could hear it from the living room sofa. Carly and I just sat there staring at each other, not sure what to do. Do we go to her room and risk setting off another explosion? Do we sit here and do nothing? I was just about to get up and go knock on her door when she emerged from the hall, sniffling with red, puffy eyes.

“Can we talk?” she asked, to which we both nodded. For the next few hours, Jasmine vented, sharing years of thoughts and feelings that she’d been bottling up and using as ammunition against not only us but also herself. We listened to her. We cried with her. We told her that we loved her. Hours later, I collapsed in bed, thoroughly exhausted, but hopeful that this was finally the start of a new chapter for us all.

Every problem with Jazz didn’t magically vanish overnight, but from that point, things rapidly improved. We started doing activities as a family again. We started playing board games and going on walks like we used to. Jazz even went back to calling me Dad. Little by little, our family grew closer again. She still held on to a few streaks of rebellion, like her hair that she’d dyed bright blue, but overall, I felt like I had my kind, sweet stepdaughter back.

By the time Jazz turned eighteen, she and I were practically inseparable. We had the kind of relationship that most fathers could only hope for, whether we were playing basketball, jogging, or just chatting at home. I even wound up giving her a job. I owned and operated a fabrication shop, where I produced everything from awards all the way up to custom furniture and art installations. Jazz had always been interested in what I did for a living, so as close as we’d grown, it made sense to give her a position working with me. I started her off as a shop assistant. She took to the job quickly, and before I knew it, she became an indispensable part of my operation.

While things between Jazz and me were better than ever, for whatever reason, she and Carly still seemed to clash fairly regularly. It wasn’t as pronounced as it had been during Jasmine’s peak rebellion years, but you could tell that the two struggled to see eye-to-eye. More than once, I found myself acting as a go-between, listening to the girls as they complained about each other or trying to mediate their arguments. Occasionally this was helpful, but other times it irritated Carly and would lead to an argument breaking out between the two of us.

That brings me to last Friday. The day started with Jazz and Carly bickering over a pair of shoes. I tried to step in to calm things down, but that only resulted in Carly getting upset with me. By the time Jazz and I left to go to my shop, she was still in a pretty foul mood.

Toward the end of the workday, I was in my office doing some paperwork when my phone rang. The caller ID told me it was Carly, so I answered the call, putting her on speakerphone. She was still upset over the situation earlier that morning and started the call by making it abundantly clear that I needed to “stay in my lane” when she was dealing with her daughter.

I was just finishing my apology to Carly when Jazz stepped into my office to grab a work order off my desk. Jazz didn’t interrupt the call but stopped in place when she heard my wife’s voice. I briefly looked up at her face, catching the briefest glimpse of a downturned expression. Carly continued on, letting me know that she was going to go up to her mom’s place for the weekend, and she’d be back Sunday night. I told her that was fine, and we said our goodbyes. When I ended the call, my eyes met Jasmine’s, and I could see a storm brewing behind them.

After quietly staring at me for a few moments, Jazz finally spoke up, asking if we could talk. The tone of her voice was serious, but at the same time a little unsteady, almost as if she wasn’t sure whether or not she really wanted to speak up. I gestured to the chair across the desk from mine, and she took a seat. For what felt like an eternity, she just sat there without saying a word. As we stared at each other, I could see the tiniest tear welling up in the corner of her eye.

Eventually I couldn’t stand the silence any longer. “Jazz, what’s going on?” I asked her.

“I’m sorry,” she finally blurted out. “I should have told you years ago when I first found out. It’s just that… I mean… I didn’t want you to go away, and I was afraid you’d leave us if you found out.”

“Found out what?” I asked her, confused.

“That mom’s a cheater. God, Dad, I’m so sorry.” Tears rolled down her cheeks as she spoke, and after she finished, she broke down crying.

I rushed around the desk, pulling Jasmine up into a tight embrace. “Oh, Jazz, it’s okay,” I said, doing my best to comfort her even as I began to feel the sting from Carly’s one-night stand all those years earlier. “It’s okay. Just take a deep breath. Come on, I’m not going anywhere, kiddo. Look at me.”

I pulled back from her and looked her in the eyes. Jazz wiped at her tears, her eyes full of sorrow as she did her best to stifle her crying.

“Listen,” I continued, “if this is about that fling your mom had back when you were sixteen, I knew about that already. Your mom and I worked through our issues, and everything’s good now, so you don’t need to worry, okay?”

“That’s just it,” she replied, her tears starting to flow once more. “It wasn’t just one time. Mom’s been cheating on you for years. She’s still cheating on you. She thinks I’m just a dumb kid, so she’s careless around me, but I hear her on the phone talking to other guys whenever you’re not around. I’ve heard her making plans to meet them. I’ve even heard her brag that you only caught her once. I know I should have told you. I know I should have said something. Now you probably hate me for not telling you sooner. Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Daddy. I swear I am."

Jazz fell against my shoulder, openly sobbing. I held onto her as my head spun. I just couldn’t believe it. Had Carly really been cheating on me for all these years? I found myself leaning against my desk for stability as I held Carly. Tears welled up in my own eyes as the realization started sinking in. Suddenly, everything made sense. Jasmine’s behavioral outbursts. The way she never got along with her mom. For all this time, she’d been living with this enormous secret, stuffing it down in hopes that she wouldn’t lose her one source of stability—me. This secret had been eating her alive, and knowing that hurt me nearly as much as Carly’s cheating.

“I could never, ever hate you,” I reassured Jasmine as her tears soaked into my shirt and her sobs filled the air. “I know you were afraid to say anything. It’s okay. You’re still my girl, no matter what, and regardless of what happens with your mom and me, I’m always going to love you.”

Jazz and I rode home that night in relative silence. My mind was still reeling from the revelation that Carly was a serial cheater. I was embarrassed. I was hurt. I was angry that Carly cheated on me. I was more angry that she was so brazen about it that her own daughter, who had already had enough trauma from losing her biological dad, had to live in constant fear of losing me, too. As the thoughts swirled, I felt an increasing desire to numb the pain, to find some escape from the hurt I was feeling. That’s when I saw it.

Without saying a word, I put on my blinker and turned into the parking lot. A moment later I pulled into an empty stall and shut off the engine. “Wait here,” I said to Jasmine as I climbed out of the car. A few minutes later, I emerged from the liquor store with two bags full of liquor. I wasn’t really much of a drinker, but tonight, I needed an escape, and this felt like the easiest way to do just that.

By the time we arrived home, I felt a little guilty about my purchase. I didn’t want to just abandon Jazz and go drink in my room until I passed out. She was upset, too, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do that to her. Instead, I made her an offer. I told her that we should both go change into something comfortable, and after that we could watch a movie together.

Jazz gestured to the bags I’d purchased. “Can we split some of that?”

“We’ll see,” I said.

Half an hour later, we were both cuddled up on the couch, scrolling through a list of movies and sipping the bourbon I’d picked up. Eventually we picked a film, and for the next hour and a half we did our best to forget the terrors of the day.

By the time the movie was drawing to a close, we’d gone through enough of the liquor I’d purchased that we were both at least a little drunk. As the credits started to roll, I found my eyes drawn to the girl cuddled up next to me. As I watched her sip her drink and read the names on the screen, a realization hit me like a ton of bricks—Jasmine was hot.

Up until that moment, I’d only ever looked at her through fatherly eyes. Don’t get me wrong; I knew she was beautiful, and I often told her so. But as her stepfather, I’d never viewed her as anything apart from my child. Now, as I was sitting there and feeling the effects of the alcohol, I began to see her as a man. My eyes traced the contour of her generous breasts barely hiding beneath her tank top. They moved down past her tiny shorts and scanned her long, smooth legs. They traveled back up to her face, with those full, kissable lips and looks that reminded me of a younger version of her mom. Even her colorful hair, which I often poked fun at her over, looked sexy as she rested her head on my shoulder. I knew it was wrong, but the more I looked at Jazz, the more I found myself wanting her.

As the credits came to a close, Jasmine looked up at me, catching me staring at her. She smiled warmly as she looked into my eyes. “Thanks for inviting me to watch a movie with you,” she said. “Oh, and for the drinks,” she added as she held up her glass.

“No problem. Thanks for joining me,” I smiled right back at her. “So what now?”

“Let’s just talk,” she responded.

I told her that was a wonderful idea, and for the next hour, we talked about life as we continued working our way through the liquor. As we chatted, the conversation gradually became more and more flirty. It was hardly noticeable at first. I reminded Jazz how beautiful she was, and she replied by resting a hand on my leg and telling me how handsome I looked when I was working in the shop.

Over time, the flirting escalated, and we even began discussing our sex lives. I found myself giving Jazz advice on what guys like when they’re with girls, from how they like to be touched to the words they like to hear. Jazz was genuinely interested in the topic, asking lots of very sexual questions, like whether guys really like giving oral or what it felt like to come as a guy. I answered her as honestly as I could, all while doing my best to keep the growing bulge...