Chapter 27 #2
As he reached for the door at his destination, a shadowy figure on the back deck caught his eye.
He had to do a double take before he recognized it was his father.
Gone was the steely, self-satisfied surgeon—in his place was a man pacing back and forth with a death grip on his phone, the other clenching and unclenching at his side, breath coming hard enough to fog the air in front of him.
The suit he wore looked too tight in the shoulders, and the collar was already wilted.
For a moment, Liam wondered if maybe Cora had finally come to her senses and was a no-show but then remembered AJ sending him a text of Cora in her dress at the venue just thirty minutes earlier.
Was it his dad who was considering making a break for it?
Liam stood at the corner of the lodge, watching, until the older man turned abruptly and spotted him.
Their eyes met, and for a moment both stood frozen.
Then his father pocketed the phone with a jerk, straightened, and tried to muster his usual expression of mild irritation, but the mask didn’t fit.
Liam walked over, hands in pockets, pretending he hadn’t just witnessed his father’s existential crisis/meltdown in real time.
“Is the deck not to your taste?” Liam asked, nodding toward the panoramic view behind them. “Too much nature?”
His father huffed out a laugh, but it sounded more like a cough. “I needed a minute. Being indoors is…” He searched for the word. “Suffocating.”
They stood together, staring into the dark stretch of unlit trees below. Wind combed through the pine needles overhead, rattling the branches.
After a long pause, his dad said, “I wasn’t sure you’d be here.”
“I promised Cora,” Liam replied solemnly, implying the truth, that he was only here for Cora not for his dad.
His dad’s eyes shimmered with emotion. Not in the telegraphed, performative way of someone trying to leverage sympathy.
The gloss that covered his stare was genuine, and it clearly made him uncomfortable.
He immediately cast his gaze to the ground.
Liam had always considered his dad’s face an impenetrable fortress, the kind that kept secrets locked in towers and threw away the key for sport.
Now, for the first time, that shield had cracks.
First a tightening at the corners of his eyes, then a subtle tremor in his jaw.
When his old man finally looked up, it was only to avoid his son’s eyes.
He stared at a spot somewhere beyond the edge of the railing, blinking at the blur of the tree line.
For a moment, Liam wondered if the world had rotated ninety degrees without him noticing and he was standing on a vertical cliff, peering down into some oblivion.
Or maybe he’d stepped into The Twilight Zone, because he watched tears slide down his dad’s cheeks.
Not a flood, but a slow, reluctant leak, the kind that eroded stone over decades.
His father didn’t wipe them away. He allowed them to fall, one, two, three, splattering onto the toe of his bespoke Berluti patent leather Oxfords, leaving tiny, dark sunbursts as evidence of their existence.
Liam’s brain didn’t know how to process what he was witnessing.
The list of things he’d seen in his nearly thirty-four years of life, seven spent in the trauma bays of an ER and four in war zones, was encyclopedic in its horror, but this was no less staggering.
He’d observed his dad incise and peel the dura mater away from the interior of a skull and without flinching.
He’d watched him eviscerate a bourbon decanter in under three minutes at a Christmas party, then drive home as if the glass were filled with tap water.
But this—this was new territory. Unmapped, impossible.
He searched for something sarcastic or irreverent to say, just to shake the universe back into alignment, when his father cleared his throat and started speaking in a voice that was both raw and unfamiliar.
“You know, I never thought I’d get another shot at this. At love, family… any of it.” Edward Tristan Sterling the third’s voice cracked with pain as he glanced back down at his feet. “Cora’s a good woman. Too good for me.”
“You’re right. She is.” If he’d assumed he was going to get an argument, he greatly overestimated his son’s opinion of him as a man.
His dad didn’t seem surprised or hurt by Liam’s response. He didn’t deflect or offer a cutting remark to balance the scales once again. He just nodded along, eyes still fixed on the ground, letting the silence pool between them.
Liam searched for irony, for a trapdoor of cynicism to fall through, but there was only the faint sound of violin music in the wind and the persistent, electric tension of a moment that refused to be cheapened.
The same suffocating sensation that had sent his dad to the deck began to choke Liam, and he decided to call this father-son Taster’s Choice moment and head inside.
As soon as he turned to leave, his father said something that made it impossible to walk away, impossible to even move, to blink, or to even breathe.
“I know I fucked up,” he gritted out. “A lot. With your mom. With you. Even with Tristan.” Each name clearly pained him to say, as if he was counting old bullet wounds.
“I was hard on you. Too hard. I know that now. But it was never because you were… ‘less than.’ Or not my flesh and blood. You were my son. You are my son.” He hesitated, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, then laughed bitterly.
“When you were growing up, I was hard on you, harder on you than Tristan because, let’s face it, you are not a ‘fuck-up,’ and, well, as my father would say, Tristan’s a bright boy, but he likes his own reflection too much, if you know what I mean.
He’s selfish. He was never going to change the world.
” He took a shaky breath. “You, you were smart and good, and I knew you had the potential to make a real difference in this world. And so I treated you how my dad treated me. He was hard on me.” He let out a harsh laugh.
“He was a lot harder on me than I was on you. Nothing I did was ever good enough for him. I could never please him. It didn’t matter how hard I tried or what grades I got, I could always do better.
He constantly reminded me what a disappointment, what a disgrace I was because I wasn’t living up to my potential.
And I don’t know, I guess… that’s what I thought a good father did, because I was constantly trying to prove to him that I was good enough, and in a sick way it worked.
I did end up being successful, in my career at least. That’s why I was hard on you, not because you weren’t mine, but because you were mine. You were always mine.”
For the first time in his life, Liam recognized something in his dad's face that wasn't calculation or contempt—it was truth, raw and unfiltered, cracking through decades of careful control.
“You know, when you were born, I wanted you to be Tristan Edward the fourth, to keep the line going. I didn’t care about DNA. But your mom insisted we name you after her brother.”
“Her brother?” Liam blinked. “Mom had a brother?”
The information fell into him like a pebble into a deep well—endless, echoing.
“Liam Caputo.” He nodded. “She never talked about him with anyone. He died in a car accident when he was sixteen. She was ten and was never the same after that. He was her shield from all the shit her own mother put her through. She was a drinker, and there was a lot of screaming, your grandmother was a piece of work.” He cleared his throat.
“I asked her about him a few times, but she’d always change the subject, I think it was just too painful for her.
” Liam’s dad took a deep breath and met his gaze, his expression so open he barely recognized the man standing in front of him.
“You know I’d never say a bad word about your mom, but I wanted to tell you the truth from the beginning.
I knew your mom was pregnant when we got together.
I didn’t care. Michael, was a…he was a real… ”
Liam waited, not moving, not breathing. No one talked about his birth father.
Not any of his four sisters, not Teresa, not Kerri.
He never asked, because he felt strange bringing him up.
He’d seen photos, family photos, everyone looked happy.
But were they? Really? His father cheated on Teresa.
She had no idea about Kerri or Poppy until his father’s funeral.
And Teresa and Kerri didn’t know about Liam and his mom Celeste until he emailed them after he found them through the DNA site.
Teresa, her parents, and his sisters, embraced and welcomed Kerri and Poppy into their family, and they all did the same for him, but there was this huge Michael Davies sized elephant in the room no one spoke about.
His dad shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t matter. Not to me. I never even knew his last name. That’s why I didn’t know that you had…that that’s why you changed…” His dad exhaled. “The point is, I wanted to tell you.”
Liam felt himself deflate. He wished someone would tell him something about the man he shared half of his DNA with, other than he clearly had a type and it was petite brunettes with light eyes, and he also had no issues lying.