Chapter Overtime #3
But I need you to understand that I didn't leave because I didn't love you.
I stayed because I was terrified of what she'd do if I tried.
She told me she'd take you kids. She told me she'd make sure I never saw any of you again, and she had the connections to do it.
She told me no one would believe me. And she was right that I was too broken by then to fight her.
That's on me. The fact that I let myself get that broken is on me.
When I finally got sober, the first thing I felt was shame.
Not about the drinking. About every morning I didn't get up and fight for you anyway.
About every night I chose the bottle over being the father you deserved.
About the look on your face when you realized you couldn't rely on me and had to start doing it yourself.
You were seventeen years old and you picked up everything I dropped and you carried it for years, and I don't know how you did it.
I don't know how you're still standing. But I need you to know that I see it.
I see what you built out of nothing. I see what those kids are because of you.
And I see you now, choosing to get well and choosing to let people in, and it's the bravest thing I've ever watched happen.
I just needed you to know that I loved you then and I love you now and the failure was mine, not yours. You were never too much. You were never the problem. You were the best thing in a situation that should never have existed, and I'm sorry I wasn't the father who could protect you from it.
I'll keep showing up quietly for as long as you'll allow it. And if the answer is never, I'll understand that too.
Dad
I folded the letter along its creases and held it for a moment and didn't say anything, because there was nothing useful to say. The room was very quiet except for the muffled sound of the party down the hall and the ocean outside the window.
Soren had his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.
I set the letter down on the nightstand and put my arm around him. He didn't cry. He just sat there with his face covered for a long time, breathing.
“She was hurting him,” he said finally, into his palms. “The whole time we were growing up. She was hurting him and he couldn't get out.”
“Yeah.”
“I hated him.” His voice came out rough and flat. “For years I just hated him for being useless. For not being there. And he was — “ He stopped. Pressed his hands harder against his face. “Fuck.”
“You didn't know.”
“I called him a coward. To his face. After everything went to shit with the kids. I said that to him and he just—he took it.” He lifted his head and stared at the window. “He took it because he thought he deserved it.”
“He was trying to protect you,” I said carefully.
Soren was quiet for a long time. Outside, someone laughed at something, and the sound drifted through the walls, warm and distant.
“I don't know how to hold all of it at once,” he said. “Being angry at him and understanding why it happened. Grieving what we missed and knowing it wasn't just his fault.” He looked at me. “Is that supposed to make sense?”
“It doesn't have to make sense,” I said. “It's just true.”
He reached out and picked up the letter again. Looked at it without unfolding it. Then he set it down carefully, like he was putting something fragile away somewhere it would be safe.
I didn't push. Just sat with him until he was ready to go back.
After a while he picked the letter up and folded it and slid it back into the envelope and set it on the nightstand. He pressed his palms flat on his thighs and took a long breath.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He looked at me sideways. “Can we go back out there? I want — I need the noise for a minute.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Come on.”
We went back out into the kitchen and the party folded around us like it had never stopped.
Poppy appeared immediately, leaning into Soren's side with the ease of someone who didn't need a reason, and he wrapped an arm around her and kept it there.
Micah caught my eye across the room and I gave him a small nod that said everything was okay, or okay enough, and he went back to his conversation without asking.
The party stretched into the evening. Food appeared from various sources — my mom had brought lasagna, June had contributed some kind of elaborate salad, and Tate had shown up with enough pizza to feed a small army.
We ate standing up and sitting on the floor and crowded around the kitchen island, and the noise level suggested nobody was planning to leave anytime soon.
My dad cornered me near the coffee maker and pulled me into a hug that lasted long enough to be embarrassing.
“Proud of you, kid,” he said when he finally let go. “That interview this morning took guts.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“And Soren's good people.” He glanced over at where Soren was laughing at something Poppy had said, his whole face open in a way he used to guard so carefully. “You hold onto him.”
“That's the plan.”
People started trickling out around ten.
Hugs at the door, promises to do this again soon, Finn carrying an exhausted Jamie to the car while his grandfather followed behind.
The team left in a cluster, still arguing about something hockey-related.
Soren's siblings headed upstairs — my parents had offered to stay the night and take the guest rooms with the kids, and the offer had been accepted in the easy way of people who trusted where they were.
And then it was just us.
Soren was cleaning up, loading the dishwasher with the mechanical focus of a man whose brain was somewhere else entirely.
I walked up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist, pulling him back against my chest.
“Leave it,” I said. “We can deal with it tomorrow.”
“There's like forty dishes.”
“I don't care about the dishes.” I turned him around to face me. “Come here.”
I led him out to the deck overlooking the ocean.
The stars were out, bright against the black sky, and the sound of the waves was loud enough to drown out everything else.
We stood at the railing for a minute, just breathing in the salt air, and he leaned his forearms on the wood and looked out at the water.
After a while he turned to look at me, and his face had settled into something steadier. Not resolved. Not at peace with any of it. But upright, which was the thing that mattered.
“Thank you,” he said. “For sitting with me in there.”
“I'll always sit with you.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then something in his expression shifted, softened, went somewhere past the hard day and the letter and everything the evening had carried.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.” He smiled, small and real. “Just you.”
I held his gaze. And I thought about the ring that had been sitting in my jacket pocket for three weeks, waiting for the right moment, and I thought about how there was no such thing as the right moment — there was only the moment you were in and the person you were in it with.
Fuck it. Just say it.
“I've been thinking,” I started, and Soren turned to look at me with a slightly wary expression.
“That sounds dangerous.”
“Probably.” I took his hands and laced our fingers together.
“I've been thinking about the fact that we've known each other most of our lives.
That we lost over a decade because life was a disaster and neither of us knew how to fix it.
That we got a second chance most people don't get, and I don't want to waste any more time.”
“Rook—”
“Let me finish.” I squeezed his hands. “Coming home to you, waking up next to you, having you in my space and in my life — it's everything I didn't know I needed. And I don't want it to be temporary. I don't want it to be a trial period or something we're testing out. I want it to be permanent.”
I let go of his hands and reached into my pocket, pulling out the ring I'd been carrying for three weeks. Simple platinum band, no flashy stones, just solid and real and meant to last.
“Marry me,” I said. “Not because everything is perfect or because we've got it all figured out. But because I know who you are and I love every fucking part of it. Because I want you in every version of my future. Because you're home, Soren. You've always been home.”
His eyes were shining in the starlight, and for a second he just stared at me like he couldn't quite process what was happening. Then his face crumpled and he laughed and it sounded like crying and joy all mixed together.
“You absolute bastard,” he said, his voice wrecked. “You're asking me to marry you on the deck of your ocean house under the stars after the hardest and best day of my life.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Of course it's a yes, you idiot.” He grabbed my face and kissed me hard enough that I stumbled backward into the railing. “Yes. A thousand times yes.”
I slipped the ring onto his finger and it fit perfectly, and when I looked up at him he was still crying and smiling and looking at me like I'd just handed him the world.
I thought about a clearing off a back road outside town and a boy who'd tilted his face up at the stars and said he'd wish for more time.
I thought about thirteen years of separate silences and all the nights I'd stayed up trying to locate the version of my life that felt right, and all the mornings he'd woken up carrying things nobody else knew he was carrying.
I thought about what it cost to survive, both of us, in our different ways, and what it meant to end up here anyway.
“I love you,” he said, and his voice had gone soft and certain. “I've loved you since I was seventeen and didn't know what to do with it. I loved you through all the years apart. And I love you now, exactly as we are.”
“I love you too.” I pulled him close and held on, feeling his heartbeat against my chest and the ocean breeze in my hair and the weight of everything we'd survived to get here. “You're stuck with me now. No take-backs.”
“Good. Because I'm not going anywhere.”
We stood there on the deck for a long time, just holding each other and looking at the stars.
The same stars we'd looked at as teenagers when we'd thought we understood what the future would look like.
The same stars that had watched us lose each other and find each other again and build something that was stronger for all the breaking.
Eventually we went inside and fell into bed still wearing most of our clothes, too exhausted and overwhelmed to do anything except hold onto each other. Soren's ring caught the light from the hallway and I couldn't stop looking at it.
On the nightstand, the envelope sat where he'd left it. He'd deal with it in his own time, on his own terms, the way he dealt with everything that mattered. Not alone. But in his own way.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“That I get to marry you. That we actually made it.”
“We made it,” he agreed. “Through all of it. Every fucking bit.”
“And we're going to keep making it. For the rest of our lives.”
“For the rest of our lives,” he echoed, and kissed me soft and slow.
I fell asleep with him in my arms and the ocean loud through the open window, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I wasn't waiting for the other shoe to drop. This was it. This was home. This was the life we'd fought for and earned and chosen every single day.
And I was never letting it go.