Then he said, “I watched your speech online.”
I said nothing.
“Many times.”
Still, I said nothing.
His voice broke slightly. “I did not know you had been carrying all that.”
I looked at him. “You mean you did not know I would say it out loud.”
He flinched.
Good.
Truth should not always be softened.
“I deserved that,” he said.
That surprised me.
He rubbed his hands together, a nervous habit I remembered from childhood. “When your mother died, I stopped knowing how to look at you.”
My body went still.
He rarely mentioned my mother. Her absence had been the first silence in our family, the one that taught every other silence where to sit.
“You looked like her,” he continued. “You asked questions like her. You had her stubbornness. And instead of loving that, I avoided it. Then I married Diane because she made life simple. She told me what to do, what to think, who needed what. Haley wanted attention loudly. You needed it quietly. I gave it to the loudest person in the room.”
My throat tightened.
That was not enough.
But it was more honest than anything he had ever said.
“I let them reduce you because it was easier than admitting I had failed you,” he said. “When you told me about school, I heard what I wanted to hear. Hospital. Shift. Scrubs. I made you small in my mind so I wouldn’t have to see how big your life had become without me.”
I looked down at my hands.
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