For the Likes

 The video had 47,000 views before Ramey even got to court.

They watched him walk into the other man’s house. Watched him find the living room. Watched what he did there. Thirteen brutal and destructive seconds, looped a million times. Strangers typing “finally” and “he deserved it” and “father of the year.”

Ramey watched it too, on a tablet in holding. His face pale. His knuckles still scabbed.

He had read the comments first. That was the mistake that swallowed all the others.

Levi was fifteen. Levi hadn’t called him “Daddy” in three years, not since Ramey moved out. What Levi called him now was worse: nothing at all. Just silence when Ramey picked him up every other weekend. Headphones on. Face angled toward the window of the still not fully paid off BMW he struggled to purchase to impress his son.

Ramey tried. He truly did. But he didn’t know how to reach a boy who spoke in memes and measured his worth in likes. So he did what he always did when he didn’t know something: he opened his phone and let the algorithm tell him what to think.

Be a real man

Boys need fathers.

Weak men raise weak sons.

Society hates masculinity.

He scrolled. He nodded. He liked, subscribed and saved the videos.

The men on the screen spoke with absolute certainty. No doubt. No nuance. They called it “the mission.” They called softness “betrayal.” They told him the world was taking his son, and only a real man could take him back.

Ramey felt something kindle in his chest. Not love, he had love, and it didn’t worked. This was hotter. Sharper. It felt like permission.

The other man’s name was Derek. Twenty-three. He posted photos of Levi on his Instagram, both of them grinning, Derek’s arm slung loose around Levi’s neck. The captions were harmless, weekend vibes, but Ramey read them like scripture.

He’s not his father.

He doesn’t know him.

He’s taking what’s mine.

The comments under Derek’s posts were soft, affirming. “Cute couple.” Ramey’s jaw clenched.

He didn’t tell anyone what he was planning. Not his ex-wife, who had stopped answering his calls about Levi months ago. Not his own father, who had taught him that men handled things quietly. The men on the screen didn’t ask permission. They acted.

He drove to Derek’s apartment at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday. He brought his cricket bat he’d had since secondary school. He didn’t plan to use it. He told himself that. He just wanted to be seen. To stand in the doorway and remind the world that Levi had a father. That no other man should be close to Levi.

But Derek laughed.

And Ramey swung.

The sentence was six years. Aggravated assault, unlawful entry. The magistrate called it “a catastrophic failure of judgment.”

But that wasn’t quite right.

It wasn’t a failure of judgment. It was the total collapse of it, his own judgment hollowed out, replaced by the voice of a thousand strangers who had never met him or his son, never sat across from him at a silent dinner table, never watched him grow distant by inches and felt powerless to stop it.

In the cell, at night, Ramey played the video in his head. Not the one from the man’s  living room, but the one he’d never shown anyone. He couldn’t

Levi at eight years old, fishing off the pier in Macqueripe, reeling in nothing but seaweed, laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe.

That boy was gone. And Ramey had spent years searching for him in all the wrong places, in comments sections, in outrage threads, in the approving nods of angry men who told him he was right. He had followed them straight into a room where his son would never visit him.

The letter came six months in.

Levi’s handwriting was jagged, unpracticed. He probably hadn’t written anything by hand since elementary school.

I saw the video. Everyone saw it.

You don’t know me. You never did. You don’t even know what was happening. Derek is nothing! You just assuming. You always too busy being mad at people you’d never met to actually talk to the one person in front of you.

Derek’s fine, by the way. He moved. I don’t talk to him anymore. I don’t really talk to anyone.

I don’t know who you were trying to protect. But it wasn’t me. And I don’t care.

Ramey folded the letter into his pillowcase. He slept with it there, a flat square over his heart.

He had 47,000 likes and one son.

The algorithm never told him which one mattered more.