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“How can you say that? Because of you, I’ve lost the woman that I love. If you had just trusted me, if you had just let me do things my own way, it wouldn’t have turned out like this.”
“You’re right. If I hadn’t meddled like you said, you never would have been forced to go out with her. She never would have seen what a great man you are, and you never would have had even the little bit of time you had with her.”
“It would have been better if I never knew. Losing her is worse than never having been with her,” I answered honestly.
“That’s assuming you’ve lost her. Tell her you want to remain friends while she’s gone, that you don’t want to lose that. See where it goes and then when the time is right, go and visit her and rekindle things,” my father suggested.
“Don’t you think you’ve done enough?” I snarled at him.
I didn’t want to tell him I had been thinking the same thing. I would do whatever I could to get back into Hope’s life. If she didn’t want to be involved with someone while she was away, if she needed to concentrate on her work, I could understand and respect that. It didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to do whatever I could to win her back, eventually, even if that meant playing the friend card.
“No. Obviously not, because you aren’t happily married or at least engaged. I won’t stop until you are,” he said.
“It’s for me to do,” I said.
“Then do it,” he replied.
I was taken aback by his comment. Though considering the conversation and the man he was, I’m not sure why.
“It doesn’t work that way. Hope doesn’t work that way. She didn’t like it when I came barging into her apartment and told her I would go to Berlin with her. She certainly won’t like it if I told her we are going to be together. I need to win her over. I need to get her to understand how much I care about her and how I would never do anything to hurt her. I can’t be forcing my way back into her life. She would never accept me.”
“And how do you plan on doing that?” my mother asked.
“I honestly have no idea, but I will figure it out, on my own,”
“Good,” my father said and slapped his hand on his knee.
“Don’t do that! Don’t try to take credit for helping me out when you did anything but,” I said.
“You were always stubborn and unwilling to let anyone help you. You take the burden of your problems and everyone else's on your shoulder. I can see it’s the same here,” he said with a sigh.
It was all for dramatic effect and I knew it, but that didn’t change its effectiveness.
“I am not stubborn.”
“Yes, you’re right. I can totally see that,” my father said. The sarcasm was not lost on me.
“I didn’t like it when you set up Walker and Morgan. Especially when it messed with Walker and the company’s reputation. It was only by sheer luck that it worked out the way it did. Yet, I would almost agree that they are good together and there probably was no other way the two of them might have gotten together. We will never know if they would have found their way to each other because you interfered.
“Which is how it is with Hope and me. You’ve wanted to control our lives from the beginning. Setting up the meeting, making sure I saw her sitting there. You just had to manipulate and make things the way you wanted them to be. You even made sure that I knew that Walker would be CEO long before I even knew what that was. I bowed down to you and your choices for us because I wanted to believe that it was the right decision, even if I agree with you. It wasn’t right for you to do that with Hope and me.”
“I groomed Walker to be CEO because I knew you weren’t right for it. You didn’t have the drive and I was so happy that you didn’t. You are a gentler soul. You take after your mother that way. I couldn’t be prouder of you and I didn’t want you to feel like you had to take the job simply because you were born first.
“Yes, I pushed my sons to be everything that they could be. That’s my job and I won’t apologize for it. I want nothing but for all of you to be happy. You all put your careers first and I could understand that; I did the same thing. You have all done magnificently. You have thrived in ways I never could have dreamed or imagined. But I know how lonely it can be if you don’t have the right person to share it with, and I didn’t want that for any of you.
“If I happened to see the woman I thought was perfect for Walker and you and I gave you a little nudge towards them, then so be it. I won’t apologize for it. I set up the meetings, what happened afterwards was up to you. You didn’t have to go up and talk to Hope. You didn’t have to do anything about the picture in the tabloid,” he said.
“I did it to help out JD, to deflect some of the publicity away from him. Did you have something to do with that?”
“You always needed and wanted to save the family. Lizbeth is her own worst enemy and didn’t need me to do anything to help her with her latest scandal. Like the ones before that one, it would have blown over. You chose to make it more than what it was because it got you your date with Hope. You used the scandal as the opportunity that it was, that’s on you,” he said.
“It’s my life, our life. It should have been our choice when I started things with Hope,” I said.
“You had years to do something, and you didn’t. I even waited to do anything with you and Hope until JD was back and busy with his restaurant and Walker was settled. I hoped that seeing them happy might have given you the push you needed to do something for yourself. When I could see you still weren’t, I did something.
“I won’t apologize for what I did. Nor should you. You wanted to be with the woman you loved and you were. That you lost her, even temporarily, is for you to fix. I promise you, I won’t get involved unless you ask me to,” my father said.
“That’s never going to happen,” I said.
