“You have every right to be angry with me,” Doug said softly.
“I don’t need your permission for that, either.”
He almost stalked into the house but that really would make him feel exactly like that moody, unreasonable teenager so he forced himself to stand on the deck, sipping his beer and gazing out at the night sky, where the clouds broke enough for a few stars to peek out.
After a long moment, his father spoke in a voice Ryan had never heard before, low and ragged and filled with pain.
“Your mother was the glue that held every piece of me together. From the moment I met her, I loved her with all my soul. When she died, I was beyond broken. I felt like I had been shattered into a hundred jagged pieces. Like somebody had just dropped a twenty-two-hundred-pound cruise missile into our world.”
He swallowed. “It wasn’t like it was a shock, Dad. We knew it was coming for three months, after her cancer stopped responding to treatment.”
“Even until the end, I couldn’t believe it would really happen. Surely God wouldn’t take her away from us when we needed her so much.”
“Is that why you couldn’t even be bothered to take a leave of absence as she lay dying?” he asked, his voice harsh.
His father pressed his lips together, looking up at those few stars as stray snowflakes settled in his hair, on his shoulders.
“I made sure to be there the final few days. But when the doctors told her there was nothing more they could do, your mom and I talked about it. She thought it would be better for me to take my leave after she died, so I could be there for you and Kim. Among my many regrets about how I handled that time, I wish I hadn’t listened to her.”
He let out another ragged sigh. “I was never good at the parenting thing. That was always your mom’s specialty. I knew how to manage the people under my command but a fifteen-year-old girl and thirteen-year-old boy who were grieving their mother? No. You scared the hell out of me.”
“What was so scary about two children who needed the only parent they had left to step up and be a father?”
He had a hard time believing his father could ever be afraid of anything. This was a man who had been highly decorated for bravery.
“Being a single father felt completely outside my skill set. Especially when Kim was so rebellious and you basically shut down and wouldn’t talk to me. I should have asked for help. Hired someone. I was too proud. Too certain that all you both needed was to get back into a solid routine.”
He remembered that routine only too well. Lights out by nine, no exceptions. Up at six, chores and homework done without argument.
“We weren’t new recruits, Dad. We were kids.”
Doug nodded, his features solemn. “I recognize that now. At the time, I could only go by what I learned about leadership in the military. When your grades started to slip and Kim started to run wild, I did the only thing that made sense to me at the time.”
“Sent me to military school and Kim to a boarding school where she was miserable. So miserable that she ran away with the first guy who came along.”
Doug looked fully at him and Ryan was stunned to see his father’s eyes were watery. The man who hadn’t cried at his wife’s graveside looked as if he was fighting back tears here on a moonlit patio on a snowy Christmas Eve, more than twenty years later.
“I am more sorry than I can ever say, son. For all of it. From the time your mom was diagnosed until she died, I made mistake after mistake. I wish I could go back and change the decisions I made back then. I can’t. None of us can. I can only go forward, trying my best to be the father and grandfather now that I should have been back then.”
Ryan stared at him, the words echoing in the silence between them. For years, he had clung to his anger, fed by memory after memory of his father’s coldness, his inability—or refusal—to show any hint of vulnerability.
One memory surfaced now, spiky and painful. A twelve-year-old boy standing in his father’s office, trying to hold back tears.
He had been desperately seeking reassurance, some acknowledgment that things would be okay after his mom’s latest grim prognosis. But the colonel, seated behind his desk, had barely looked up from his paperwork.
“We don’t have time to feel sorry for ourselves, Ryan. You need to be strong, for Kim and your mother.”
And just like that, the conversation had ended, leaving Ryan feeling smaller than ever.
He swallowed hard, the sting of that moment still fresh after all these years. But as he looked at his father now, he didn’t see the distant man behind the desk. He saw someone older, more vulnerable, trying in his own flawed way to make amends.
Maybe it wasn’t enough. Maybe it never would be. But forgiveness wasn’t about erasing the past. It was about choosing to stop letting it hold you captive.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me for the choices I made back then,” his father said, almost as if he knew what was running through Ryan’s thoughts. “I would only ask you to give me a chance to see if we can build a better relationship now, whatever that might look like.”
He had no idea how to answer. A few weeks ago, he might have told his father off, expressing all the years of anger and bitterness.
Things felt... different now.
