Just like that, my son stopped coming to me. He stopped talking to me about his dragons and his drinks and his friends.
He never stopped with Charlotte, though. I chalked that up to the fact that he always felt closer to her, and while it stung, I left him to his own devices.
Charlotte’s health took up all my time and attention, and I neglected Ronan because of it. I thought he was a grown-up and that he preferred Lars anyway. After all, Ronan talked to him more than he ever talked to me.
My wife told me he respected me as a father and I could get close to him if I tried, but I brushed her off. Perhaps I was scared he’d close himself off to me like I’d closed myself off to Father when he brought me a stepmother and a stepbrother only a year after my mother’s death.
I know how it feels to have a strained relationship with your father, and I didn’t want to repeat it with my son.
Before I knew it, Ronan was as tall as me and also as proud as me. He never divulged his true feelings and deflected all my questions.
After I heard Teal in the car, everything else fell into place. I recalled how Ronan wouldn’t join me for lunches when Eduard was around, but he’d stay if Charlotte was there. He was subtle about it, making sure no one noticed his discomfort. He laughed and joked as usual, but now I know he was proving he was okay.
He has been doing that since he was a boy. My son has been pretending he was fine since he was eight.
That was around the time he stopped coming to me.
I always thought the parties and the weed were to prove something, but I presumed it was his way to get out of the pressure. I never thought it was because I’d opened my house and my business to my son’s rapist.
Not only my son’s, but many other children’s.
Eduard has always been a bit irresponsible, but he worked hard when I told him to. He looked up to me, and he did as I ordered. He always had women hanging off his arm, but I should’ve known from the way he showed them off as prizes that they could be camouflage.
Eduard and Ronan are similar in hiding, in pretending, but I of all people shouldn’t have missed it.
I can blame it on my preoccupation with Charlotte’s illness, but that doesn’t, under any circumstances, forgive the fact that I let my son down.
He needed his father, and I didn’t give him one.
He needed Eduard away, and I brought him back in.
He needed someone to listen, and I wasn’t there.
If Charlotte finds out about this, she’ll sink so low in depression and there will be no saving her.
Like me, she’ll think she let her miracle down. She’ll blame herself for not seeing it sooner and will think she’s a horrible mother. She’s not. She was just sick. She’s sacrificing what’s possibly her last chance at treatment to be with Ronan because, as she told me, she can’t di
e without giving him the happiest memories.
Charlotte won’t know. I’ll be the one to fix it.
I’ll fix everything.
Starting with the mess Eduard left behind.
Maybe then, my miracle will forgive me.
36
Teal
I don’t remember how long I sit in the hospital chair, but it’s long enough that I cry.
It’s long enough that I don’t stop crying.
Knox caught up to us in the forest and held me all the way here, but I didn’t stop crying, not even after Dad, Agnus, and Elsa followed.
I cry like a baby. I cry like I’m just learning what it means to cry.