There is no point pretending otherwise, as I have stepped too far into the open to retreat with dignity. “Yes. A great deal happened between us.”
He shakes his head and smiles without humor. “You are speaking very freely today,” he says. “Should I be worried?”
“You should always be worried,” I answer, and the old reflex makes him almost smile before the mood kills it again. “But not because I’m being honest.”
He leans back slightly in his chair, and there is a kind of exhausted disbelief in the movement. “Do you have any idea how strange this is?”
“Yes.”
“And yet you continue.”
“That is how confessions work, I believe.”
That does get a reaction, a sharper exhale through his nose. “Confession implies remorse, Pappa.”
Ah, now we are closer to the wound.
I look at my son and feel the full weight of what I came here to do. It is much easier to advise men in abstract and to lecture heirs about risk, leverage, and weakness, and the ways power distorts the body around it.
It is something else entirely to sit across from one’s own son and admit that half the architecture of his emotional life was built by design. That I made him distant on purpose and taught him how to survive me before I ever taught him how to trust me. That, when he was young, watching and hungry for any ordinary sign of fatherhood, I gave him strategy instead of parental care.
“Yes,” I say quietly. “It does.”
I don’t fault him for the suspicious way he’s looking at me now. I’ve had years to talk and chose to remain a silent parent. Regret is not something I have ever worn openly. Men like me learn early that remorse is best kept private—if at all—because public regret attracts scavengers.
But there is a difference between public and private, and I am currently in my son’s office with the door closed and age finally stripping some of the vanity out of me. Vanity is a young man’s armor.
“What exactly are you remorseful for?” he asks.
I look at him and hear myself say it before I can make the sentence elegant enough to hide inside.
“I’m sorry, Vincenzo.”
That stops him cold. I have never put an apology next to his name before. It is too intimate, too humiliating, too much like kneeling, and men like me have always preferred to die standing.
His eyes widen slightly. Then they narrow, as if he cannot decide whether he has heard correctly.
I continue because stopping now would be another cruelty.
“I am sorry that by the time I learned what certain losses do to a man, I had already taught my son to hide every wound before I could warn him properly. I am sorry that I spent so many years making sure you could not be used by the people around you that I forgot what that kind of distance does from the inside, even though I had gone through it myself. I thought I was hardening you for survival. In many ways, I was. But I was also making you lonelier than I had any right to make my own child.”
Vincenzo’s expression doesn’t soften, and I am not foolish enough to expect it. Still, the bewilderment on his face is no longer sharpened solely by suspicion. There is sadness there now—a wariness, as if he does not know where to place this version of me. It arrived too late to fit into the father he already survived.
“You regret making me this way?” he asks.
“No,” I say with a shake of my head. “I regret making you feel this alone in it.”
His throat works once, and his gaze drops to his hands. Long fingers, elegant knuckles—he has his mother’s hands, although he hated hearing that when he was younger. He thought they made him look too polished beside boys who wore brutality more openly. But he grew into them later and learned how to make refinement look threatening.
There is blood on those hands, as there is on mine. There is also enough old tenderness left in them to spin a bullet in private when no one else is watching.
“I did not expect this from you,” he says, mouth tightening. “You’ve spent my entire life teaching me that attachment is a liability. And now you’re sitting here telling me you were in love with Ruslan Dragovich and that you regret what it made of you.”
“Yes,” is all I can add.
He offers me a look so cutting that I am painfully reminded of his youth and how much of it I wasted ensuring he became useful. “And what exactly am I meant to do with that, Pappa?”
There is no mockery in the title now, and that somehow makes it feel heavier.
