“I’ll never be sorrier for anything than I am for abandoning you and your mother. It was selfish, childish, and the biggest mistake of my life.”
Well, there it was. Words I never thought I’d hear. Words I never imagined I’d hear coming from my father’s mouth. And the kicker was that he sounded completely and entirely genuine. I could tell, just from listening to him tell his story, he was sorry, right down to the depth of his bones, for leaving me behind.
“Every time I saw one of my friends with their father, I wondered why I wasn’t good enough. Every time I went to a friend’s house and her dad came home from work, hugging her, asking her how her day was, asking her if she’d done her homework, I wondered what I’d done wrong to push you away. Every time I was with a man I wondered when he was going to leave, so I never stayed with one long enough to figure it out. I also spent most of my twenties wondering if I would abandon my own family one day, so guess what? I avoided starting one. You took more from me than a second income. You took more from me than a good start in life. When you left me, you took all my security with you. You took all my self-confidence with you. You took away my ability to feel worthy of love and my ability to feel comfortable loving someone.”
Riot’s hand found mine under the table and he squeezed it. I could feel him tensing next to me, likely uncomfortable with my emotional state and not being able to comfort me the way he wanted to. The tears stinging my eyes and the pinching in the back of my throat alerted me that I was close to a meltdown, so I sucked in a shuddered breath and tried to take it deep, then pushed it out slowly, all the while feeling Riot’s thumb move lovingly over the back of my hand.
“There’s absolutely nothing I can do to fix that, except to say that I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You’ll never know how sorry I am, but I will spend the rest of my life trying to make you see how much I regret the choices I made. I can’t go back and fix it, Kalli, I would if I could, but I can show you how much I’ve always loved you. I never stopped loving you. I thought, as lame as it sounds, that both our lives would be better if I left.”
I wiped the tears from my face, cursing them, feeling as though they gave a piece of me away that I wasn’t ready to let him see. I wanted to seem strong, to appear as if I were made of steel, like his absence hadn’t really altered me all that much. But I simply could not keep the pain inside. Hearing my father admit it was a mistake to leave me was every kind of emotional warfare I could imagine. It bypassed every security I’d put in place to keep the pain out. It jumped every wall I’d ever put up around my heart, and it simply hurt.
“I’ve spent my whole life thinking the one man who was supposed to love me the most never loved me at all.” The words were hard to push out past the cries. I’d entered into ugly cry territory, but I was trying to keep it in check due to the fact that we were in public. So I was exceptionally thankful when Riot finally wrapped his arm around my shoulders and pulled my face into his neck, letting me cry into him, stifling the sound of my sobs.
I gripped his t-shirt in my hands, my fingers tightening around the soft cotton, pulling myself as close to him as I could get. In the last year of my life, Riot was the one constant. Even when I’d pushed him away, he was still there, just lying in wait.
“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” I whispered as quietly as I could against the skin of his neck. I felt his arms wrap around me tighter, holding me even closer.
“You say the word and I’ll take you home. I’ll carry you out of here and you won’t even have to say a word to him,” he said quietly near my ear, but there was no way Kevin hadn’t heard him. “But, Kal, leaving won’t fix what’s broken inside you. The only way to mend it is to let him in.”
“It hurts,” I said with only breath; I had no voice left.
“For now, baby, just for now. It’ll feel better after a while, after the wound isn’t so raw. And,” he said, now caressing the side of my face, dangerously close to my ear, “I’ll do my best to make you feel better too.”
I pulled away quickly, forgetting for a moment that I was having a life-altering moment with my absentee father, and narrowed my eyes at him.
“Did you just promise to make me feel better?”
He winked at me. “Got you to stop crying, didn’t I?”
At that I heard both Rachel and Kevin chuckling. I wiped my eyes and turned back to them, halfway expecting to see them cringing at my emotional state, but all I saw was concern.
“I’m sorry.”
“No apologies from you, Kalli. I won’t lie, it’s hurting me right here watching you cry,” he said, rubbing the center of his chest, “but I’m not going to ask you to hold back with me. I deserve to know what I’ve done, the pain I’ve caused. I know that if you hold back with me now, if you try and shelter me from the damage I’ve done, this won’t work.”