Page 84 of Melt the Ice

He shakes his head. “No.”

“Now what?” I ask, voice void of emotion. “We just pick up where we left off? Pretend I didn’t die a little bit when they lowered your casket into the ground? Act as if Miller was just some guy you were pretending to be?”

He sits on the edge of my bed, it’s the closest he’s dared to come since the truth came out. “No. No pretending,” he says. “At the end of the day, I am Miller, but I’m also your dad, that hasn’t changed. But you have, and I’m so proud of the man you’ve become, Lucas. I’ll respect however you want to handle this. I won’t pretend to know what you’re feeling, but I can promise to be here if you want me to be.”

My hands clench the blanket. I want to hit him, shake him, and pull him into a hug all at the same time. But hell, those words, those eight words, I would have given up everything in life to hear them when things were too dark to see through to the other side.

I blink back the tears, looking up at the ceiling when I say, “You should have trusted me.”

“You’re right,” he agrees. “You were seven when I ‘died’, but you’re a man now. I should have told you the second Scarlett came back. We could have saved ourselves a lot of heartache if we had dealt with this together from the start. But she wasn’t ready. She was mad at the world. I could have pushed harder, though.”

Damn it. I almost forgot about everything outside these walls. “The man who hurt her, Damien. Where is he?” I crack an eye, looking back at him.

A smirk crosses my father's face, “Jail.”

“And her dad?”

He looks down at the floor, “He’s been a little harder to track down. But both Scarlett and I have told the agents working his case that we’d testify against him.”

My eyes widen.

“It may not be enough to make up for the years of hell you’ve been through, but I’ll do everything I can to make the next part of your life the best. So will she.”

I’ve played scenario after scenario of seeing my dad again for twenty years. There was always screaming, crying, then silence because he was gone. But I never thought it’d feel like this. Like realizing home isn’t a place, but split between the two people who loved me through my childhood.

The wind burns against my cheeks as I skate another lap, pushing myself faster and harder than the previous one. I’m almost to the red line when my skate clips the ice wrong, causing me to stumble, sliding on my knees toward the boards.

My head hangs in defeat, unable to outrun the monsters in my head. The ones telling me to go home and grab the bottle. The ones that tell me to push harder, because if I leave it all here, there won’t be any energy left to pick it up once I get home. The ones that tell me I have nothing left to lean on.

Not my mother’s silence. Not my childhood. Not the lie my grief was built on. No, now it’s on me. How I move forward from here is my decision. There’s still a hole in my chest, one that seems to have carved itself out overnight. One day, I think my dad’s dead, the next he pulls me from a car, and I learn he’s the man I’ve seen as a father for the last decade.

My dad is alive. He’s been alive this entire time, quietly inserting himself in my life, in ways a father would. Yet he’s kept his distance, kept up the facade that he’s just some ranch manager. Rage bubbles in my gut, flowing through my veins until my hands find my hair and I tug, hard.

I tip my head back and yell, the sound bouncing off the walls of the practice arena, hitting me from every angle. It’s not fair that I’ve done all this work to put myself back together, just to unravel again.

I meant it when I told Scarlett that I’ve been grieving my parents for a long time, but I don’t know how to act now that one of them is still here. One of them watched me suffer for years. Granted, he was always there to help me. Always there when I needed someone, showed up to games when I played in town.

But never as my dad. Always as Miller.

Tears fall down my face, my breath coming out in harsh bursts as my fist hits the ice once. Twice. Three times. I’d begged for one more day with my dad, and now that I have it, I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t want to waste it, but I also don’t know that I can just say, ‘Okay’ and move on with our lives.

My legs push out behind me so that I’m starfished flat against the ice. Time passes in a blur, and I stay in that position long after my cheek goes numb.

I am a pretty tough guy. I’ve been dealt a lot, and yet I’m still standing. Still trying, and whether that’s for me, or the people around me, I don’t know. But I know I show up, I know I put in the work, and I know I’m enough for the people who matter.

I roll over to my back, staring up at the buzzing lights that hang overhead. My ribs expanding as I try to regulate my breathing. I haven’t actually been cleared to be here. The doctor would probably tell you the trauma to my head should keep me from driving and off the ice for a week or so, but I felt like this was the healthiest way for me to work through my jumbled thoughts.

I mean, I could have one hundred percent asked Lettie to call me a good boy, maybe tie me up this time, but she’s got enough going on with her own father, and truth be told, I wanted to deal with this myself. If for no other reason than to prove that I could.

That I’m capable of standing on my own, even if I don’t want to.

My phone vibrates in my back pocket. I smile before I even take it out because I know I’m about to get my ass handed to me.

“Hey, pretty girl.” My voice echoes through the empty rink.

She huffs. “No, don’t you butter me up. Why does it say you’re at the rink?

My smile grows at her annoyance, “‘Cause I’m at the rink.”