All the Lies - Charlotte Byrd Page 0,27

likes to play golf.

While I have enjoyed it the few times that I have played, that's not an activity that women are typically encouraged to play, especially not in his circle.

The golf course seems to be the domain for the partners and the few occasional associates, which almost all of them are men.

I know that the firm now employs a number of female associates and even has a few partners, but I'm not sure whether they are laying out the red carpet for them to spend their weekends with everyone else at the club.

“So, the wedding is off?” Dad asks, taking a seat behind the bar.

There are a few people his age milling around him but they quickly scatter as soon as he sits down and invites me to take the seat next to him.

“You know them?” I ask.

“They work for me,” he says nonchalantly.

Despite the fact that he’s an attorney, he is an expert at the understatement.

The culture of our world seems to be going in the direction of exuberance and exaggeration with words like awesome and great being thrown around all over the place, but my dad doesn’t play that game.

If he were to say that he knows someone then they are likely friends, but not very close ones.

If he were to call someone a friend…

Well, frankly, I don't think that he has ever bestowed that word on anyone besides our dog.

Dad turns his chair toward me and props up his head.

Suddenly, he looks exhausted.

It's not just because he is head deep into a very difficult and high-profile trial, this has to do with me.

“I'm sorry. I should've told you sooner, but I actually thought that maybe Mom did.”

“I thought that after all these years you would know that your mother and I aren't on the closest terms.”

He laughs, tossing his head back and shaking it slightly from side to side.

“I thought that maybe you two talked about things that involve us kids.”

He furrows his eyebrows and moves a little bit closer to me, making his disappointment quite visible.

“What happened?” he asks.

I don't want to talk about this, but I owe him an explanation.

I wish Mom weren’t so discreet and that this didn’t come to him as a surprise as it did for the rest of the audience.

“Yesterday, everything was fine. We were in love. I thought that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together.”

“And today?”

“Today it feels like he's a stranger.”

“What happened?”

“I found out that he's cheating on me. He has been seeing his boss since three years before we got together. He says that it’s nothing serious. She's married. About a year ago, they got back together and started fooling around at the office again. I walked in on them today at lunch.”

My dad nods his head slightly and leans back against the chair. I don't know what he's going to say.

I only just found out that he has been on the other side of this conversation with his own wife, apparently on more than one occasion. There’s a strong possibility that he’ll try to make excuses for Alex.

“You shouldn’t marry him,” Dad says without a moment of hesitation. “Men like that don't change. I should know. I'm one of them.”

I shake my head.

I can't believe what he's saying to me. Suddenly tears start to bubble up at the back of my eyes and explode onto the surface.

“There's no need to cry,” he says, putting his arm around me.

I don't know why I'm crying. It has been quite an emotional day, but somehow his support in all this means everything. He's the last person that I ever thought would understand and yet, here he is, standing and taking my back despite everything.

“Your mother and I have had quite a complicated relationship,” Dad continues. “I love her, always have, but there's another part of me that nothing is ever enough. I never have enough clients, enough money, enough success. That thinking spills over into my personal life.”

I’ve never heard my father talk like this…with so much self-awareness.

"It's not that I don't love your mother. It's just that sometimes I want more. I know that’s selfish. I know that I'm hurting her. I can promise her that I will never hurt her again and that’s true when I say that, but then I can’t help myself. My intentions are good but I don’t have the best impulse control.”

My father has never been this honest with me about anything. Frankly, I had no idea that