“Do you not think I know that?” I asked. “It’s not about the admin. It’s about wanting something different.”
I saw the moment Dad went from exasperated to offended. “What, my business not good enough for you?”
“Darling,” Mum said, putting her hand on his arm, but he shook it off angrily.
“You think you’re better than me? Is this your little girlfriend’s work? Telling you you’re better than a hard day’s work?”
My hands curled into fists hearing him mention Morgan like that. “This has nothing to do with Morgan. We’re not even together anymore.”
“Like hell it’s not,” he said, standing up.
“Alan!” Mum shouted, standing up with him. “Don’t be like this.”
“I’ll be like this if I want,” Dad said, turning on Mum. I’d never seen him raise his voice to her before. “I’ve worked hard to build a business, so I’ll say what I like. You talk to your ungrateful son about this if you’ve got a problem with it.”
“I’m not ungrateful, Dad,” I said, standing as well, but he just pushed past me to the front door.
“Please don’t leave,” Mum said, but Dad was out the door before she could get it out, and she sank back onto the sofa. I stepped over to sit down with her, putting an arm around her. A few seconds later, I could hear death metal coming from the direction of his workshop.
“I’m sorry, Mum,” I said. “I’m not trying to be ungrateful. I’m just trying to do what I think is best for me. For my future.”
She turned to me and smiled sadly, putting her hands on my cheeks. “Of course you are, darling.”
“I’ve thought a lot about this,” I said. “And it really wasn’t Morgan’s idea.” Sure, Morgan had pushed me, but so had Amy. And really, that magazine had been lying open for months before either of them had found it. It wasn’t their doing. It was mine. And that made me proud.
“I’m proud of you,” Mum said, echoing my own thoughts, and I frowned.
“You are?” I asked. “But what about Dad?”
Mum dropped her hands and sighed. “Did I ever tell you that your dad didn’t want you to work for him?”
I remembered the day he’d asked me to join the business; when he’d offered me the deal I’d been holding myself to for years now. “What are you talking about? It was his idea.”
Mum shook her head. “No, dear, it wasn’t. It was mine. Your dad was afraid that if you started working for him, you’d never leave.”
I balked. “But isn’t that what the deal was designed to do?”
Mum chuckled softly. “Well, I can see why you’d think that. But no, he just wanted to know that you were taking things seriously. That if he put the time and energy into training you, you’d stick around.”
“But you just said he was afraid I’d never leave.”
“Not stick around in the business, silly boy,” Mum said. “He wanted to know you weren’t going to run off to be with that horrid girl again.”
I sighed. “Not this again,” I said. “I broke up with Aria, remember?”
“Oh, we remember,” Mum said, her eyes going wide as she patted my knee. “We remember all of it. You really scared us for a while there.”
“Scared you?”
Mum nodded. “Building that house with no idea what you were doing, never leaving the property, not talking to anyone but Chloe and Phil … honestly, thank god for them, because I thought we’d lost you.”
Maybe for the first time ever, I realised what it must have been like for them when I came home. I could understand why they would have been concerned. Why they were worried I would run off again.
“So why offer me the job then?” I asked.
“Because,” she said, “you were our son. And we wanted you to be well. And you seemed to be better here than you had in years. So we did what we needed to do to keep an eye on you. We never expected you’d still be working for your dad all these years later.” She looked out the window as if looking at Dad over in his workshop. “And I think maybe he hoped you’d come to love it like he does.”
I thought about all the times I’d come home after a day of hard work, and how my whole body would feel alive. Just like it did when I was climbing a mountain, or paddling a river.
