“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Chev’s eyes turn soft with understanding.
“It’s for the best. I left home when I was young. They weren’t the kind of parents I can see you two are.”
“Christopher didn’t grow up with much of a relationship with his parents either,” Chev says.
“My dad took off when I was five, and when I was thirty-one, he passed away. That’s when my brother and I learnt that my father wasn’t quite the picture our mother had painted him to be.She had passed a few years before him, so we couldn’t get further answers from her, but his passing put us in touch with a whole bunch of family members in Barbados.”
“So you never got to know your dad?” I ask.
“Not in his life.” Chris shakes his head. “I’ve learnt a lot since his passing.”
“Was that hard? Knowing your mum kept you from knowing him?”
“I had a lot of anger and confusion at first. Sadness for what I had lost. Shame for carrying the wrong impression about my father for so long without pushing for more. But we were able to learn a lot from my relatives. My dad left us a letter in his will, admitting that he was partly to blame for pushing our mother away. He was young and felt like he’d been chained to a life he didn’t pick before he even realised he was stuck in it. He tried to come back quite a few years later, and my mother told him we were doing fine, so he decided he didn’t want to disrupt our life. That’s why we’re very open in our family. We’re vocal about what we want for ourselves, we don’t shy away from tough conversations, and we get comfortable with making mistakes and apologising if need be.”
Chris’s words hit harder than I expected. The bravery to be vulnerable, to learn from your mistakes. I can see how much Westley takes after him. There’s something so strong about his softness.
“That’s something Westley has helped me with, too. Being louder and more assertive with letting my inside thoughts be outside ones.”
Chev lays a hand over Westley’s, smiling proudly.
“How is your hand feeling, Chris?” I ask, remembering his recent injury.
“Right as rain.” He holds it up, wiggling his fingers. “It was a bit tender for a week or so, but I’m back to work now. Thank you.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a photographer.”
I look around at all the walls covered in family photos. “Did you take all these?”
Chris nods. “I rarely find a moment where I don’t have a camera in reach.”
“We try to stop and take photos as much as we can, too,” I say, smiling down at my daughter. “Collecting all the memories.”
“The food is delicious,” Aurora says, helping herself to another pancake.
“Thank you, dear.”
“Do you enjoy cooking?” I ask. She feels like one of those mums who says the secret ingredient to all good food is love.
“Oh, I love to cook. They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” Chev winks at Aurora.
“Hope you love takeout,” I quip.
I don’t realise the implication until West looks at me the way he does. So many words unspoken, but eyes that convey them all. I said love. I admitted that his heart is something I’m even considering finding a way to.
“I do.”
“Very outdated notion anyway.” Chev pours herself and Chris some juice as she shakes her head. “Men should be getting to our hearts through the kitchen.”
“Now, we’ve talked about this, and we both agree, for our health, I shouldn’t cook.”
“A gesture every now and then is nice.”
Aurora and I chuckle at their antics while West shakes his head.
I’ve never met anyone’s parents before. I had nothing to compare to coming into this, apart from what I’d always known growing up.
