Author's Note: Thank you for the lovely review, Phildev!

Having just written from Maddie's point of view, it seemed only fitting to put Jack next. It's been more of a challenge than his wife's chapter – I realised after writing Cosmo's segment in "How Much Do You Love Timmy Turner?" that stupid fathers are the hardest for me to write about. Hopefully this one's all right…

I've previously hinted that Danny is a cousin of Timmy Turner, and now I'm adding Vicky's family into the mix as well. Please read and review!

Jack Fenton

First Danny, and now this! How can I make myself any clearer? My son means the world to me!

What did he think I'd said that one time? "Poor Jazz. She's always been my favourite." He shouldn't have taken it so seriously. Jazz had just been bitten by a ghost bug. I was scared. People always say things they don't mean when they're scared. Even if it was true, which it isn't, why should Danny care? It wouldn't mean I didn't love him. It would just mean I loved him ever so slightly less than Jazz. So –

Great globs of ghost goo! No wonder he didn't tell us anything! If all he knew was that he was ranked below Jazz, and he had no idea how low he sat under her, why would he trust us with anything? Wouldn't he be scared of dropping further down in the pecking order? If he realised how loved he was, maybe he'd have been more honest with us.

In some ways, our family is growing stronger than ever before. In other ways, we're falling apart.

I see the strength in the girls. Jazz has become a lot more enthusiastic about ghost hunting, and she's getting the hang of those bulky weapons pretty quickly. When she slips into Maddie's hand-me-down jumpsuits, she looks unstoppable. And the new girl Danielle is a lot of fun. She may have had a tough time with Vlad, but somehow she always knows what to say to put a smile on our faces. She'd make a great sidekick. (Plus, it turns out she loves fudge almost as much as I do, so that's a definite bonus.)

I see the weakness in me, and in my wife, and in our son. Danny is a strange kid. He can dodge bullets, take down screeching wraiths and cram them into the Thermos as if it's as easy as breathing. Yet when he gets home and sees us, his parents, he goes pale and starts stuttering. He makes all kinds of excuses to avoid talking to us. He hides in his room and we can't make him come out.

It's pointless asking Danny if he's okay. I've sat at the breakfast table talking about peeling him apart like an onion – while he was right there. Of course he's not going to be okay.

What hurts the most is knowing that we went through so much to bring Danny into our family in the first place, only to push him out again.

To be honest, I wasn't completely enthusiastic about the whole adoption thing at first. You know how people tell you not to make big decisions in the first year of mourning? Well, Maddie must have forgotten about that. Our son hadn't even been buried and she was looking for another one. She latched onto Sophia Turner and wouldn't let go.

Sophia told us some stuff about the father that concerned me. She'd met Vic's family a few times while they were dating. He had a niece called Victoria who looked almost exactly like him – the same red hair, the same thin smile, the same pink eyes that gave me the creeps. Who knew what other bad things he'd been up to? Who knew how his kid would turn out?

There were plenty of points that got my goat. If it was a boy, Maddie wanted to give the second one the same name as the first. Why? Wasn't it a little morbid? Wouldn't it seem as though we were trying to shape a replacement to fit the mould of the original?

Maddie and I had our biggest fight over the adoption, bigger than all the Christmas debates about Santa Claus's existence combined. All I did was suggest that Sophia shouldn't come over to our house in case the ectoplasmic residue lying about messed with the baby. For some reason, Maddie thought I was blaming her for continuing to work at Axion and causing our first son's death. We were inches away from divorce.

But things changed after Danny was born.

He came a month too soon. He lived in an incubator for weeks. He seemed miniscule and delicate compared to the surrounding machines, like a china doll thrown among stampeding bulls. We had to stick our hands through these too-small holes if we wanted to touch him. I nearly got my fat wrists stuck a few times, but I learned to be careful. I somehow managed not to dislodge any of the tubes. I stroked the skin on Danny's arm and I tried to let all my love flow through my fingertips into him, in the hope that it would help him get better.

If I could go back in time and relive those years, I wouldn't change a thing. I wouldn't stop the adoption going through. I can't imagine a world without Danny.

We've feared for that boy's life more times than we're comfortable with. The early days were tough enough, but then came the Accident. Tucker ran upstairs as we walked through the front door, babbling something about being electrocuted. Immediately pictures of our first boy flickered in front of my eyes. We raced past the messenger and found Danny sitting in the basement with his arms wrapped around his legs, rocking and groaning. His white jumpsuit peeled away to reveal more scorched clothing and patches of raw red skin. Sam knelt beside him and tried to tell him he'd be okay. They were bathed in the green glow of the now-active portal.

As he heard us coming, his face turned as white as a sheet. He shuffled backwards when Maddie examined the burns. I called him stupid for going near a portal that wasn't working properly, and he nodded in agreement. He wouldn't say anything when we demanded to know where he was hurting; he just squeezed his eyes shut so we wouldn't see his tears. He had the perfect opportunity to tell us about his intangibility and his invisibility and the way he kept floating away. He didn't take it.

That sounds like I'm blaming him, doesn't it? I'm not trying to. If I'd been blasted by a ghost portal and found myself disappearing and slipping through the floor at odd moments, I'd be pretty scared, too. Maddie and I could have handled it better. We could have been gentler with him. We could have scolded him less for being in the lab unsupervised. We could have been more comforting, giving him plenty of hugs and letting him open up in his own time, instead of instantly hitting him with question after question. It would have saved us a lot of problems down the line.

Instead, things only got worse from that point onwards. His grades began slipping at an alarming rate. We Fentons always got As. (Or, in my case, Bs. Solid Bs!) Then again, Danny wasn't really a Fenton, was he? But that was no excuse. We cared about education. It was the key that could open almost any door – and those doors might have closed forever if the Accident had been more serious. I tried telling him this, but he never wanted to hear it. Apparently he had bigger things to worry about than a couple of bad grades.

He kept shirking his chores (leaving me to pick up the slack) and coming home hours after his curfew. The worst time was not long before the Disasteroid incident. He got home at 3:26 in the morning. 3:26! He was supposed to be back by 10:00 the night before. To say we were angry would be an understatement. We were fuming. Sam and Tucker's parents had formed a search party to find him. We'd sat at home waiting for him, perched at the bottom of the stairs until our eyes ached and our butts went numb. Jazz was about to call the police when he finally crept in.

When we asked for an explanation, his response was a ragged, "Can't we talk about this tomorrow?"

I bellowed, "It is tomorrow!"

And still he kept his mouth shut and scurried upstairs. Unbelievable. I could have grabbed him and hit him there and then. But what good would that have done? We later learned that he'd teamed up with Valerie to save Danielle from Vlad. He'd been doing something noble with his time out. Did we have any right to criticise him for that?

I never saw the signs, not even when they were right in front of me. Mr Lancer spoke to us once about some bruises he'd seen on Danny's face. I assumed that some kid at school was giving him a hard time and that it would blow over soon. I forgot all about it. Another time, Maddie asked me about Danny and Phantom's similarities. I thought she was being ridiculous. There was no way our son could be a ghost! Wouldn't he be setting off our detectors and alarms? Wouldn't he have dozens of scars from the fights? Wouldn't he have run away from home long ago out of fear of us destroying him?

How stupid can one man be?

Part of me still can't believe he was ever afraid of us. We're his parents! We would never dissect our own son! But another part of me can believe it. That's the part that keeps me awake at night. That's the part that replays all the missed signs, all the raised voices, all the fearful sideways glances.

Everything changed after the Accident. We can't get back what we had before. The evidence is all around us. The Fenton Finder picks up on Danny's presence in both ghost form and human form. The room temperature drops whenever he comes in. He's spending more and more time in the Ghost Zone, and sometimes he brings a few so-called friends back with him – a blue-haired singer, a green-skinned princess, that punk who used to date Jazz, and more. I'm worried he'll go through the portal one day and never come back. I'm worried he might already be more ghost than human.

It won't change a thing, though. After all that time spent ignoring his problems and sabotaging his heroics, I'd better back off and give him a little independence. I'll support him whatever he decides to do. A good father is always there for his son, whether his son is a ghost, a boy, or something in between.