Chapter Twenty-Two
RYAN COULDN’T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME HE HAD SPENT Christmas with his father.
He had visited Kim a few times over the holidays when she was still living in the Las Vegas area. If he knew Douglas would also be there, he had purposely stayed away, making some excuse about not being able to score enough leave.
He had let the colonel have far too much control over his own holiday celebrations.
Now he stood on the covered deck of his sister’s house, bundled up against the cold and making stilted small talk with the man while looking out at a softly falling snow in the moonlight and the twinkling of neighboring Christmas lights reflecting on the lake.
Originally the plan had been to eat Christmas Eve dinner at his father and Diane’s place in Haven Point. But Kim had been unusually obstinate about her desire to host dinner for the family at her own small—albeit beautifully decorated—house.
“I would love to have it here, if you think Diane can make it up my steps,” she had told their father that morning with an unusual determination in her voice. “I don’t want you to have to do anything.”
She spoke to Doug by phone but had put the call on speaker, as her hands were busy rolling out sugar cookies. That meant Ryan had no choice but to hear the whole conversation.
“What about the steaks?” Doug had asked after a pause. “Can I still grill those? I’ve already bought them.”
“Sure. That would be great and I have a grill here you can use. I want to do everything else, though. Salad, sides, dessert. All of it. I want to do this for everyone.”
“I can make a salad or something,” their father had said.
“I won’t tell you no, but it’s totally optional. You know that feeding people is my love language. The whole time I was in rehab, I kept dreaming about having Christmas Eve here in my house. I owe everyone in the family so much. I want to do this. Please, Dad.”
After a quick conference with his wife in the background, their father had agreed.
Ryan had been sorely tempted to load up his gear and head back to San Diego tonight, but he knew that would have hurt his sister and niece. And, yes, maybe his father and stepmother, too.
So now he stood on the porch with Doug, talking about the weather and a TV show Doug and Diane were binging and the bowl games they each wanted to catch over the holidays.
He would rather be in the kitchen helping his sister but she had sent him out here, first to light the propane patio heater and then to help his father with the steaks.
He wasn’t sure if she was trying to get rid of him so she could chat with Audrey and Diane without him or because she wanted to force him to talk to their father. He suspected the latter.
“Your sister looks good, doesn’t she?” the colonel said as he turned the steaks one last time.
He was glad Kim hadn’t heard their father, as she was becoming heartily sick of that observation from those who loved her.
“She really does. But then, I hadn’t seen her in several months except for the occasional video call.”
“I did see her regularly. I don’t know how I completely missed all the signs that she was struggling with addiction again.”
“Seems like she had become pretty good at masking.”
The colonel sighed. “If I had been paying more attention, I might have seen that, but I thought she was doing fine. Not like she was the first time she went through rehab, after that weasel of a husband went to jail. I thought that part of her life was over. I should have paid more attention to the signs and made her get help earlier.”
He could feel his jaw clench and forced his muscles to relax. “Kim is an adult,” he said, his voice clipped. “You can’t make her do anything. You couldn’t do it when she was a teenager after Mom died and you certainly can’t do it now.”
“Let me rephrase. If I had noticed she was struggling, I could have strongly encouraged her to get help.”
Ryan’s nails bit into his palms as he fought to keep his temper in check. He wasn’t sure why he was so angry, but it felt as if all the years of resentment and bitterness had coalesced to this moment.
“Strongly encouraged her?” he echoed, his tone sharp. “You mean the way you strongly encouraged both of us to bottle up our grief after Mom died?”
The colonel stiffened, a sudden bleak look in his eyes, but Ryan didn’t stop. The dam had broken.
“You were so busy playing the stoic, perfect officer that you didn’t see what was right in front of you. That we were broken. And now you want to act like you could have fixed everything with a few words of fatherly advice?”
“I never said that.”
“You don’t get to rewrite history to make yourself feel better about how you let us down. And you sure as hell don’t get to stand here now and pretend this is just another problem you could have strongly encouraged away.”
“I can’t win with you,” his father said, his tone resigned. “No matter what I say, it’s always the wrong thing.”
He glared. “You make me sound like some irrational hothead, unreasonably angry about my childhood and ready to take offense at the slightest thing.”
“I don’t think you’re irrational at all,” Doug said quietly. “Or unreasonable, for that matter. Everything you said is absolutely true.”
He stared at his father, certain he must have misheard. The colonel never admitted he was wrong about a single damn thing. He had always acted as if no other opinion mattered but his own.
“You have every right to be angry with me,” Doug said softly.
“I don’t need your permission for that, either.”
He almost stalked into the house but that really would make him feel exactly like that moody, unreasonable teenager so he forced himself to stand on the deck, sipping his beer and gazing out at the night sky, where the clouds broke enough for a few stars to peek out.
After a long moment, his father spoke in a voice Ryan had never heard before, low and ragged and filled with pain.
“Your mother was the glue that held every piece of me together. From the moment I met her, I loved her with all my soul. When she died, I was beyond broken. I felt like I had been shattered into a hundred jagged pieces. Like somebody had just dropped a twenty-two-hundred-pound cruise missile into our world.”
He swallowed. “It wasn’t like it was a shock, Dad. We knew it was coming for three months, after her cancer stopped responding to treatment.”
“Even until the end, I couldn’t believe it would really happen. Surely God wouldn’t take her away from us when we needed her so much.”
“Is that why you couldn’t even be bothered to take a leave of absence as she lay dying?” he asked, his voice harsh.
His father pressed his lips together, looking up at those few stars as stray snowflakes settled in his hair, on his shoulders.
“I made sure to be there the final few days. But when the doctors told her there was nothing more they could do, your mom and I talked about it. She thought it would be better for me to take my leave after she died, so I could be there for you and Kim. Among my many regrets about how I handled that time, I wish I hadn’t listened to her. ”
He let out another ragged sigh. “I was never good at the parenting thing. That was always your mom’s specialty. I knew how to manage the people under my command but a fifteen-year-old girl and thirteen-year-old boy who were grieving their mother? No. You scared the hell out of me.”
“What was so scary about two children who needed the only parent they had left to step up and be a father?”
He had a hard time believing his father could ever be afraid of anything. This was a man who had been highly decorated for bravery.
“Being a single father felt completely outside my skill set. Especially when Kim was so rebellious and you basically shut down and wouldn’t talk to me. I should have asked for help. Hired someone. I was too proud. Too certain that all you both needed was to get back into a solid routine.”
He remembered that routine only too well. Lights out by nine, no exceptions. Up at six, chores and homework done without argument.
“We weren’t new recruits, Dad. We were kids.”
Doug nodded, his features solemn. “I recognize that now. At the time, I could only go by what I learned about leadership in the military. When your grades started to slip and Kim started to run wild, I did the only thing that made sense to me at the time.”
“Sent me to military school and Kim to a boarding school where she was miserable. So miserable that she ran away with the first guy who came along.”
Doug looked fully at him and Ryan was stunned to see his father’s eyes were watery. The man who hadn’t cried at his wife’s graveside looked as if he was fighting back tears here on a moonlit patio on a snowy Christmas Eve, more than twenty years later.
“I am more sorry than I can ever say, son. For all of it. From the time your mom was diagnosed until she died, I made mistake after mistake. I wish I could go back and change the decisions I made back then. I can’t.
None of us can. I can only go forward, trying my best to be the father and grandfather now that I should have been back then. ”
Ryan stared at him, the words echoing in the silence between them. For years, he had clung to his anger, fed by memory after memory of his father’s coldness, his inability—or refusal—to show any hint of vulnerability.
One memory surfaced now, spiky and painful. A twelve-year-old boy standing in his father’s office, trying to hold back tears.
He had been desperately seeking reassurance, some acknowledgment that things would be okay after his mom’s latest grim prognosis. But the colonel, seated behind his desk, had barely looked up from his paperwork.
“We don’t have time to feel sorry for ourselves, Ryan. You need to be strong, for Kim and your mother.”
And just like that, the conversation had ended, leaving Ryan feeling smaller than ever.
He swallowed hard, the sting of that moment still fresh after all these years. But as he looked at his father now, he didn’t see the distant man behind the desk. He saw someone older, more vulnerable, trying in his own flawed way to make amends.
Maybe it wasn’t enough. Maybe it never would be. But forgiveness wasn’t about erasing the past. It was about choosing to stop letting it hold you captive.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me for the choices I made back then,” his father said, almost as if he knew what was running through Ryan’s thoughts. “I would only ask you to give me a chance to see if we can build a better relationship now, whatever that might look like.”
He had no idea how to answer. A few weeks ago, he might have told his father off, expressing all the years of anger and bitterness.
Things felt... different now.
Being here in Shelter Springs had softened something inside Ryan.
Was it possible for them to move past the wounds of the past? Did he even want to try?
“I know I haven’t said it nearly enough but I love you,” the colonel said into his continued silence. “I have been proud to be your father every single day of your life.”
How could he simply release all of that resentment and pain and move forward as if none of it mattered?
He thought of Holly at the wedding of her ex-husband’s sister. Troy had cheated on her, had walked away from her and their gift of a child and married his mistress.
Somehow, despite everything, Holly had managed to smile and chat with his family and do her best to make Kristine’s wedding joy-filled and memorable.
More than that, she had handed over her daughter to her ex-husband so that Lydia could spend Christmas with her father.
She was amazing and brave and resilient. In contrast, he felt shriveled up inside with old resentment and pain.
His father wanted to forge a new relationship. Ryan had no idea what that would look like but he suddenly realized it didn’t matter. Christmas was a time of forgiveness and healing.
What had his anger accomplished anyway? Ryan was the one who had suffered because of it. He was the one who had deprived himself of a closer connection with his family.
His father had moved on. He had met and married Diane, had moved here and started a flight business so that he could enjoy semiretirement with the woman he loved in a small mountain town beside a lake.
Doug had done the hard work to repair his relationship with Kim, healing it enough that Ryan’s sister had moved here for a new start and to be closer to their father and stepmother.
Ryan was the one on the outside now. The one who had spent virtually every holiday of his adulthood either working or on his own.
He needed his family, with all their scars and imperfections.
These past weeks here in Shelter Springs had showed him the importance of connections. Of family. Of community.
He didn’t want to be on the outside anymore.
At his continued silence, his father finally looked away. “These steaks need another five minutes. You don’t have to stay out here in the cold.”
“I’m not cold,” he said. It was true, despite the softly falling snow and the winter wind coming off the lake. Something inside him had begun to thaw, some hard kernel of ice that had built up inside him layer by layer since his mother died.
He smiled. “How often do I get the chance to talk to my dad on a beautiful snowy Christmas Eve?”
His father gave him a long, steady look and something passed between them. Nothing more needed to be said.
Doug’s smile was warm and filled with joy. His father looked happier than Ryan had seen him in years.
As he stood beside his father in the fragile peace of a snowy Christmas Eve, Ryan felt as if he had set down a heavy weight he hadn’t realized he had been carrying for years.