“Would it be all right if I talked to Dad alone?” He posed the question to his mother.
“Of course,” she said, standing quickly and moving out of the way.
He had a feeling that someone else, in this very same situation, would be slightly offended at being asked to leave. But not his mother. Because of course, she would accommodate whatever was necessary for those in her life. Of course, she would bend and stretch, break even to make things better for a husband who had never done half of that for her.
She moved past him and he reached out, taking hold of her hand and squeezing it. She looked up at him, confusion and fragility and a need that mirrored his own visible there.
“I should’ve been there for you,” he said, the words coming from deep inside of him, regret tugging at his soul.
They could have been there for each other.
“Don’t be silly,” she said, “I had your father.”
He released his hold on her, letting her walk out of the room, aware that she wasn’t going to be able to come to the same place he was. In her mind, it was too late to fix the relationship she had with her children, with him. Too late to change her marriage to Nathan.
Gage wasn’t going to let it be too late.
He walked across the room, sitting heavily next to his father’s bed. “It’s been a while,” he said.
Nathan West treated him to a baleful look. “You could say that.”
“I’m sorry,” he responded.
“For what?”
“For leaving. I... I imagine that it hurt you and I... I’m sorry.”
“It didn’t hurt me. It forced me to prepare your brother for the position that you refused to take on, but Colton is a good man. It hasn’t been difficult.”
“Well,” he said, an unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“And you came back now. When we needed you. That’s what matters. I knew that if I kept your name on all the legal paperwork you would be the one to come through.”
His father’s quiet confidence was void of any warmth. So close to his old man being proud. So close to him caring. But not quite.
Mostly, it came across as the arrogance of a man who no one had ever dared oppose. It had never occurred to him that Gage wouldn’t come through, because everyone came through for Nathan West. And he took it as his due, he didn’t understand. Didn’t understand that he was married to a woman who had given him everything, her trust when he didn’t deserve it, her fidelity when he had not given his own.
Didn’t understand that his sons had come into the world worshipping the ground he walked on. That no manipulation had ever been required.
There had been an endless supply of people desperate to give his father their love, and he seemed unmoved by it, untouched. He continually manipulated, continually used his money, his power and his influence when all he’d ever needed to do was give a soft word. Give assurance.
All he’d ever had to do was show his family that he cared for them even a little bit, and he could have earned loyalty that way.
The thought hit Gage in an uncomfortable way. Because in that, he had to wonder if he was any different. He had come determined to fix things, not for himself the way that his father did, but it was still all manipulation.
And it allowed him to give nothing of himself.
It was so clear to him on the other side of it that his father had only ever had to give that and never had. He didn’t think his father did it out of fear, but maybe Gage was wrong.
After all, the old man was hardly the formidable figure that had lived in his mind’s eye for the past seventeen years. He was just a man.
He and Rebecca had talked a lot about monsters. So far, the only monsters they’d found were inside of them.
It was a funny thing, that because Gage was so much like his mother he had begun to treat the world the way his father did. But, he supposed in a really dumbass way it made sense.
His mother had always seemed easily broken to him. Brittle. While his father had been a rock. Of course he had wanted to fashion himself into the image of the rock.
But now, all that was left was that hardness, leached of all color, left gray and crumbling.