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Well, fuck. That was honest. Viv had expected him to make excuses or give her some bullshit reason but he just owned it. She sort of respected that.
“I didn’t know when your mom died. I was out of the country in jail.”
She may have jumped the gun on the respect.
“Jail? Where?”
“Columbia. I got mixed up with the cartel and crossed the wrong person.”
“Doesn’t the cartel usually just kill people?” She wasn’t trying to be a smartass. In her mind that was a valid question.
“They do. Or they frame you to take the wrap for a murder you didn’t commit. With me they chose the latter.”
He had an answer for everything.
“But it was for the best. When I was in prison, I got clean. And when I got back to the US, I did try to find you girls and your mom, but I was too late.” Tears formed in her father’s eyes and his glasses pushed up as he wiped them away. He sniffed and blew out a breath. “Your mom had been gone for five years at that point. You and your sisters were all adults.”
“If you were clean, why didn’t you try to find us?”
“I did find you.” He scooted forward in his chair and pulled out a box from under the coffee table and set it on top. “I kept up with all of you.”
Much like her box with print outs of articles and social media pages that catalogued her search for the man sitting in front of her, his box was filled with printouts of social media posts, newspaper clippings, and pictures of her and her sisters.
He had a record of it all. Their college graduations. The cases Grace won as a lawyer. The photo of Ava in New York when she was going to NYU. The Hope Falls newspaper clipping announcing Brewed Awakenings Grand Opening with a picture of all four of the sisters standing in front of the building. He even had the article the Sacramento Bee had run just a few months earlier on the Single’s Week she’d organized and what a huge success it was.
As she sifted through the box her brain couldn’t compute what it was seeing. “If you found us, why didn’t you reach out? Why didn’t you contact us?”
His lips pursed and he hung his head down. “I thought about it. There were so many times I almost messaged you girls. But honestly, I figured I lost the right to be in your lives. I wasn’t there for you girls growing up, or when Cora died.” His voice cracked and he had to clear his throat and wipe beneath his eyes again. Viv might not like the man sitting in front of her, but she would be blind if she didn’t see that he still obviously loved her mother very much. “And I was embarrassed. My life has been… a mess. I fucked up, time and time again. I’ve relapsed twice since I’ve been back in the States. I’m five years sober now, but what if I relapse again? I didn’t think it would be fair to bring that into your lives.”
Viv suddenly felt very overwhelmed. It was like all the feeling she’d thought she’d have when she first saw the man hit her all at once. Anger. Happiness. Relief. Sadness. It was all too much. She felt like the walls were closing in on her.
Glenn must have sensed the shift in her energy because he started asking her father about the cabin and the view. He even got up and walked over to the window and her father followed giving her a moment to herself to breathe.
The diversion made her feel something that she’d never felt before. She’d always loved attention. Loved all eyes on her. But she’d never actually felt seen. Glenn distracting her father made her feel like he saw her, he knew her. The real her. And that was more overwhelming than seeing her father face to face after thirty years.
