mine.
I see the darkness there, the aching loss so clear, it steals my breath away when I identify it, because it’s the same mess going on inside of me.
He doesn’t say anything, so I decide to go another route. I have no idea what to say about Aiden. I don’t even want to go there right now.
“She’s gone,” I growl, the anger I’ve been reserving for this moment now resurfacing, demanding to be felt.
“Yes,” he says, his voice low. Then I watch as he gets up and walks past me to the highboy where he keeps his decanters of scotch and shit. He pours himself a drink. “Would you like one?”
What the fuck?
“You look like you need a drink,” he says. “I heard everything, Julian.”
“So you heard and did nothing about it?”
I watch as he pours scotch into another glass, then he walks back and passes the glass to me. I just stare at him like he’s out of his damn mind. He shrugs and walks around to his chair, plopping down on it and goes back to staring at the TV.
“What did you want me to do, Julian?”
“To stop it, to do something…”
“If I stopped the truth from coming out, how else would you have known how your mother works, the lengths she has gone to just to make me suffer? How would you have remembered?”
“I guess that’s one thing you both have in common, huh?” I grit out. “The ability to hurt people.”
What did I do to deserve the parents I got? Did I commit some kind of crime in a previous life? Is this now my punishment for that shit?
“I’m nothing like that bitch,” Dad growls, now looking at me. “Your mother hurt my boy just to spite me!”
“Why didn’t you make her pay for it then?” I fire back. “You could’ve, but you didn’t. You stayed married to her! You continued on like nothing ever happened.”
“I made sacrifices, Julian,” he mutters.
“Sacrifices?” I scoff, shaking my head. “You think ignoring Aiden for all those years, until to the moment he took his last breath, was a sacrifice?”
“Yes!” he says, banging his fist on his desk. “That was a fucking sacrifice I paid a high price for and hate myself with each day the sun rises to this day for it. I had to stare in that woman’s cold, hard face and make that sacrifice over and over again, like I was on the threshing floor my entire life, fighting for my son! Fighting for my boys.”
“Cry me a fucking river, Dad! You could’ve done more!”
“I did more, damn it I did more!” he shouts. “You think I wanted to do that? Do you think I wanted to stay away from my son like that? Ignore him when he needed me?”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I just clench my jaw tighter.
“You think I liked staying in the shadows, watching like a fucking stalker as the three of you played ball together in the backyard? Don’t you think I wanted to join in and spend time with my boys?” he questions, his voice raw and hard. “You think I didn’t love him?”
“Yes!” I shout. “If you loved him, if you cared at all for us, you would have dealt with her accordingly!”
“I couldn’t” he mutters, as if all the energy he had just bled out, leaving him spent and nothing more than a pile of bones with no life in them. “I still can’t.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I demand. “There are so many things you could have done! You could have had her arrested for child abuse! You could have divorced her, but you waited until Aiden is dead to take that route!”
He looks agitated and tired as he grabs his glass and drinks the entire contents without stopping. Then he reaches for the glass he poured for me and chugs it back too.
“We’re not divorced,” he mutters after an eternity of tense silence.
“What?” Did I hear that correctly?
“Your mother and I, we’re not divorced.”
I stare at him, blinking like a fucking cartoon character. I have no idea what to say as all my anger seems to bleed right out of me in one breath.
“How?”
“Well, it’s complicated.”
“Complicated?” I scoff, looking around his large office. I always hated coming in here. Dad never gave us the time of day, always claimed to be busy so whenever he was in here, I’d sometime fantasize about trapping him in here and set him on fire. The