How much he means to me.
How much he influenced and shaped me.
I am who I am, and I’m not changing. I can’t change for anyone. Not even for my own dad.
“Look,” Ryke says, “you have to be honest with him, even if it fucking hurts him—”
“No—”
“Moffy.” Ryke grips my shoulders until I stare him in the eye. “You can’t be afraid to hurt him. It’s going to fucking happen.”
It already happened.
I’m rigid and cold. “You know what I think?” I take a tight breath, my gaze hardening. “I think the Hales are a line of dominos, and when my mom or dad falls, my siblings topple with them.”
Ryke doesn’t refute.
I nod a few times. “And I already pushed them down. I’m never doing it again.”
“That’s your fucking choice, but I’m telling you that I’ll keep your dad and your mom standing. If you need to be upset—”
“I don’t.” I make a plan. I’ll be honest with my dad, but not enraged or overly emotional. I’m not coming at him with guns blazing.
Ryke lets go of my shoulders. “They can handle a lot.”
“But you know I still have the power to hit them where it hurts the worst. And they’ll relapse.”
Ryke brushes snow off his dark hair. “But here’s the thing, Mof. You’ll never hit that place.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re the furthest fucking thing from callous and vindictive.” He gestures with his head to the hot tub. “My brother raised a good man.”
I inhale stronger, and in a silent beat, a lot goes unsaid in our eyes. Less about my parents. More about him and me. And his aggression towards me dating a bodyguard.
“Later?” Ryke asks.
“Yeah.” One thing at a time.
We rejoin Connor and my dad at the hot tub. Steam rises off the water, and my uncles decide to take a walk and make some phone calls.
Leaving me and my dad alone.
Not saying much of anything, we shed to bathing suits and then quickly lower into the hot, soothing water. Snow flutters in the horizon, and I watch white powder cake on the mountainsides and frozen lake.
I hear a splash, and I turn my head.
Across from me, my dad slicks his hair back with his wet hands. When he was in his twenties, he modeled for a single day and then quit. But he could probably still model if he wanted to.
Why the fuck I’m hanging onto this—out of everything—I try not to overanalyze. Yay me.
“I was wrong,” he says. “That’s the first thing you need to know.”
I already knew that. My words aren’t even close to surfacing. I just stare at the one man who means the most to me in my life. I teeter between worry and hurt. I fear saying the wrong thing, but I wade in this murky pain from our blowup.
My dad rubs the back of his neck again. “At your charity event, I made a mistake.” His amber eyes lift to my forest-green.
I cradle all my words before I let them loose. I speak with ten-billion times less emotion than I really feel. “This isn’t a normal mistake, Dad.” I rest my arm on the hot tub edge. “This isn’t forgetting to sign a field trip slip or missing a birthday. You sided with the…” I pause to avoid a curse word. “You sided with the media over me.”
His brows cinch. “I didn’t side with anyone. I didn’t know what to believe.”
My muscles burn. Don’t get angry. Don’t get fucking angry. Hear him out. I hold his gaze. “But you couldn’t fathom believing me.”
I’m starting to wonder if he brought me to the hot tub because it’d be twice as hard for either of us to just walk away.
My dad squints as the sun brightens. “What do you remember about your grandfather?” His dad. He died of liver failure when I was a little kid.
Most of my memories are good. He always bought me a new toy when I saw him, and he tried to give me life lessons: listen to your parents and be grateful.
But I was also aware that my dad would never leave me alone with him.
“I remember he had a loud, distinct voice. Pretty forceful, but I was never scared of him.” My shoulders stiffen. “I guess he was nice to me.” I know the history.
I know my grandfather verbally abused my dad.
A quick Google search says as much, and I’ve seen a few clips of We Are Calloway where my dad and Ryke talk about their father.
“Nice…” My dad mulls over that word, and then he shakes his head. “He wasn’t that nice. I still loved him, but he was a terrible father. Just…goddamn awful. And it took me years to come to terms with that.”
He leans his neck back, gazing at the hut’s wooden rafters as he says, “Living with someone who tears you down every goddamn day—it’s like living with a constant monster. You start believing his words. That you’re a piece of shit. You’re the problem. Until you just…become him.”
He tilts his head towards me, strength in his amber eyes.
“For the longest time,” he continues, “I thought I was as awful as my father. Some parts of me were. And I believed that those parts would make me an equally terrible dad…it’s why I never wanted kids.”
I didn’t know that.
I rub my lips, hand warm from the water. “What changed?”
“You,” he says. “You weren’t planned. As you know.”
“Yeah.” The media loves toting around that fun fact about the surprise pregnancy and my subsequent birth. It’s not a big deal to me.
My dad stares at the snow-capped mountainside. “When Lily said she was pregnant, I told myself that if I fucked up, I’d ruin everything good and pure in my life. I made a promise to stay sober. To do better. I hung onto something that made me feel like I could.”
I hesitate to ask, “What?”
“I hoped for a girl.”
I bottle something inside. What’s the feeling I feel? I don’t know. I won’t let it rise, but it amasses inside me like a cement block.
“I was afraid to raise a boy,” he explains. “I was afraid to find out decades later that I raised someone just like me.” He lets out a dry laugh. “I don’t know why I thought I’d get what I want. I was such a shitty person back then; I didn’t deserve any kind of shortcuts or easy outs.”
I stare at the water and force myself not to defend his character. I didn’t know my dad in his early twenties, and I need to stop protecting someone who’s gone. My dad isn’t that guy anymore, and he knows it, too.
“Maybe three months after your birth,” he tells me, “I started actually believing I could be a halfway-decent dad. But that fear never really went away. It’s still there. I’ve been terrified that you’d make the same mistakes as me. The same mistakes as my father.”
This is where we diverge.
“You know me,” I refute. “You know I would never—”
“You haven’t lived in my house for four years, Moffy,” he interrupts with quick-paced words. Eyes on mine again. Intensity laces his voice that silences me. “We talk, but you’re not around all the time. I’ve been more concerned with Luna, Xander, and Kinney. And I know who you are. You’re kind and compassionate, and I’m so goddamn proud of the man you’ve become.”
My eyes burn. I know there’s a but coming.
“But I thought somewhere in those four years you could’ve become someone different, and I missed something. People change.” He gestures to me. “You can change.”
I shake my head. “I don’t feel like I can.”
My dad looks like he wants to reach a hand out, but his face twists as he keeps to himself. He shakes his head once. “You’re stubborn like Ryke. He thought that too, but he’s not the same as he was at twenty-two. You have years to grow and be someone different. Someone you like more or less, and it’s terrifying. I know it is. Because at twenty-two, I was shitting myself thinking about it.”
I don’t blink as I take it in.
“I know you’re a lot like my brother. But you?
?re still my son. You have all the best parts of Lily—thank God for that. But there’s a chance you could have the worst parts of me.”
I open my mouth, but everything I’d say next to appease him would be a lie.
“You know it, too,” he says. “If you didn’t think there was a chance, then you wouldn’t be as careful around alcohol.”
A chill bites my exposed skin, maybe by the weather or his words. I drop my shoulders beneath the hot water, and I listen intently as he keeps going.
“The thing about addiction is that it changes you,” he tells me. “You don’t care about the people you love. All compassion and kindness dissolve in the face of your own wants and needs.”
He extends an arm in the freezing air to point towards where Ryke disappeared. “I was that person lying to my brother. To my family. To your mom, a woman who has half my soul. That’s how bad it gets. And when we confronted you at the summer camp, all I could see was myself.”