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I nodded.
“When this is over, he’ll be back. We all respond to stress differently.”
“You’re a saint…and we’re monsters.”
She shook her head. “No. You are two men whom I admire greatly. I’m just…better with the emotions. That’s all.” She pulled her hands away and looked at me, wearing a slight smile. “I’ll talk to him in the morning. I think this conversation has been coming for a while. I hoped he would work through his issues on his own, but it seems to be getting worse, not better.”
“Yeah.” She didn’t know the half of it. She didn’t know the kind of verbal abuse I received from him on a daily basis. The man looked just like my father, my hero, but he was a whole other person right now.
“Emerson and Lizzie are visiting tomorrow?”
I nodded.
She smiled. “I’m excited. I’d love to see them.”
“Yeah, they want to see you too.”
She studied my gaze, observed the sadness in my eyes. “I’m sorry…about Emerson.”
“Yeah. Me too.” I felt so much pain in my chest. A constant hum of grief, a constant state of anxiety.
“But don’t give up, okay?”
“Her answer is pretty definitive.”
“Does she still love you?”
I nodded.
“Then there’s hope. You’ll just have to be patient.”
“You really think that?”
She took a long pause as she considered the question. “I think that when two people love each other as much as you two do, they will find their way back to each other. She’s been through a lot, Derek. It’s been a long and painful breakup for her. Her heart needs time to heal before it can love again. Give her that time. You’ll have to be in this relationship by yourself for a while, but when she’s ready, she’ll come back.”
“By myself?”
She nodded. “I’ve been in a relationship before with your father without him being in that relationship. I had to wait for him to join me. I had to keep it going so it would stay alive until he was ready to be present. But there was no one else I wanted to be with, so I was fine with it.”
“Why are you so confident that it’ll work?”
She dropped her gaze for a moment. “Before I told you I was sick, I told her I could help her get a job so she could stop working for you. She rejected the offer and said she wanted to cut ties with us, because it was too hard. The only reason it’s hard to be around us is because we remind her of the life she had with you, the life she still wants on some level. If she were really over it, she would have taken the job and run with it. But she didn’t.”
My mother was usually right about everything, so I hoped she was right about this.
“If you can build rockets and write novels, you can do this. You can earn her trust again, earn her love again, and be what she deserves.”
I watched movies with my mom on the couch until she fell asleep. When she was out, I straightened on the couch and covered her with a blanket so she wouldn’t get cold. It was almost midnight, so I headed home, choosing to walk instead of taking a taxi because I wouldn’t sleep when I got home anyway.
After I stepped out of the elevator at my building and headed to my front door, I noticed the man sitting on the floor with his back against the wall.
It was my dad.
With his arms on his knees and his head against the wall, he narrowed his eyes on me as I approached.
I stilled in the hallway and almost turned around to walk away.
He got to his feet and straightened, his eyes no longer mean like they’d been the last six weeks. They were soft, his shoulders were strong but not aggressive, and he looked like the man I knew—my father.
I continued down the hallway and pulled out my keys.
He stepped back slightly from the front door, so I had room.
I got the door opened then turned to look at him, unsure what to do now, if I should invite him inside or just walk in and shut the door in his face. Normally, I’d be so angry that I wouldn’t speak to him again for a long time. But now, I looked at him with new eyes, with a haze of compassion I didn’t have before.
He moved his hands into his pockets and stared down at the floor, like he couldn’t look at me. “I’m ashamed…of the way I treated you.”
I stayed still and listened, let him compose his thoughts without interruption. I knew he didn’t have his phone on him, so my mother hadn’t called him and told him what to say. This was all him, coming to his senses the second he left the condo.
