29. Imogen
Imogen
My father gets a hand around my arm and hauls me out of the conference room before I can process Ashton’s declaration.
He marches me down the glass hall, into Ashton’s office, and shuts the door on the suits, Sophia, and the whole mess of it.
Then he drops my arm like he’s just remembered I haven’t been eight years old in a very long time.
For the first time in years it’s just us, with nobody to perform for, no waiter to win over, no important person to charm.
“You’re doing this here?” I rub my arm. “In his office? Bold.”
“I’m doing it where you’ll actually listen to me.
” He drags a hand down his face, and the polished version of him slides off for a second.
“What were you thinking, Imogen. Living in some man’s house as the hired help, minding his kid, not one word to your own father.
You’re better than that. You were raised for more than fetching another family’s child from school, and you know it. I would’ve stopped it.”
“I know you would’ve. That’s the whole reason I didn’t tell you.”
He blinks like I flicked water in his face. “That’s a horrible thing to say to me.”
“It’s an honest thing to say to you. You’re the one who taught me the difference between the two, in the end. Took you long enough.”
“Don’t be clever with me right now.”
“I’m always clever. It’s the one part of me you never got a say in.” I cross my arms. “You shut me out of your whole world, Dad. Every dinner, every deal, every room that had men like him in it. You kept me on the other side of a locked door for twenty-six years and never once told me why.”
“Because those rooms chew up girls like you and spit out the bones.” He says it like it settles the matter. It used to.
“And look how safe that kept me.” I take a step toward him.
“You hid your whole world from me to keep me safe, so I hid mine right back from you, because it was the one thing in my life you couldn’t reach in and rearrange.
That’s the deal you set up, whether you meant to or not.
You taught me that keeping secrets and being loved were the same thing. ”
“I never taught you any such thing.”
“You taught it to me every time you fixed a problem before I even knew I had one. Every check you tried to sneak into my account. Every guy you ran off without ever telling me there’d been a guy.
” My voice climbs and I let it. “I answered a blind ad under Mom’s name because that’s the move you trained into me.
Keep it quiet, keep it mine. And it sent me straight into the one penthouse in this whole city you’d have torched before you let me near it, and I had no clue, because you never once let me close enough to your world to recognize it when I was standing in it. ”
“Imogen.”
“If you’d let me into it instead of putting a wall around the whole thing, I’d have known whose house I was standing in on the first morning.
Your big plan to keep me safe is the only reason I wasn’t safe.
” I’m breathing hard now. “You didn’t stop the disaster, Dad.
You built it. You just built it slow enough that the whole time it looked like love. ”
His mouth opens, and I watch the rebuttal start loading behind his eyes, the practiced one, the wounded father who only ever wanted what was best. I brace for it, but it doesn’t come.
The argument falls apart in his hands instead, his shoulders dropping out of the line he’s held since he walked in.
He turns to the windows and stares down at the gray drop of the street like the answer’s parked somewhere on it.
“Oh,” he says, mostly to himself.
“Oh what? You don’t get to just stand there and say oh.”
“I just did the exact thing I stood in that room and listened to him own up to.” He turns back, and there’s no trace of the smile left on him, which on my father might as well be a storm rolling in.
“Every move I’ve wanted to wring that man’s neck for since I walked in here.
The managing. I taught him to dress up control until it strolls right past you looking like concern, and then I sat there hating him for doing it to my own daughter.
” He lowers himself onto the edge of Ashton’s desk, sits straight down on another man’s furniture.
“I made him. He’s not my opposite, Imogen.
He’s the copy. I taught him every step, then I hated him for being good at it. ”
I sit on the arm of the sofa. “Welcome to the inside of my whole childhood, by the way. It’s a lot, I know. There’s tea around here somewhere if you need to sit with it.”
He huffs, and it’s almost a laugh, closer than we’ve come to one in years.
When he speaks again, his voice is low. “I don’t know how to love you without managing you.
And that’s not me making an excuse. It’s me telling you I never learned how to do it any other way.
Your whole life, all I’ve ever wanted was for you to be safe and to be happy, and the only thing I ever knew how to do about it was take control.
So that’s what I did. Every time. With you, with him, with everyone I’ve ever cared about. ”
My dad has never once apologized without sticking a “but” on the end of it, never owned a flaw he wasn’t already busy fixing. My grip tightens on the arm of the sofa, because I walked in here loaded for a fight, and he just went and took it clean out of my hands.
“How long have you known?” I ask. “That it was the same thing.”
“About thirty seconds,” he says. “It hit me when you said I built the disaster.” He looks at his hands. “I’ve been building it your whole life and calling it protection.”
“Yeah,” I say. “You have.”
We sit with that for a moment, the two of us in Ashton’s office with the city going about its business forty floors below.
“I’m safe, Dad,” I tell him. “I’m safe, and I’m happy.
Most of the time, which is honestly the best anyone gets, and you’d already know that if you spent less time trying to arrange it for me.
You don’t have to keep me behind glass for both of those to be true.
You just have to back off and let me figure it out myself. ”
He nods slowly, taking it down like medicine he doesn’t enjoy. Then he lifts his head and looks at me straight.
“Are you in love with him?”
The question knocks the air clean out of me. I go reaching for the easy answer, the deflection, the joke that gets me out of the room, but not one of them shows up, because he asked it straight and he’s earned a straight one back.
“I don’t know,” I tell him, and it’s the truth.
“A lot has happened. He lied to me. Then twenty minutes ago he stood up and did the bravest thing I’ve ever seen anybody do, in front of you, in front of everyone in that room.
I can’t tell which parts of what I’m feeling are real and which parts are just everything being on fire at once. ”
“Can I tell you something?” he says.
“That depends on what it is.”
“It’s about him. You don’t have to do anything with it.”
I nod.
He’s quiet for a long moment. Then my father, the man who built Ashton Fraser out of spare parts and spent fifteen years holding the bill over his head, surprises me one more time.
“He’s a good man.” He stands and straightens his jacket, the old habit climbing back into him.
“I’d know. I made most of him, and the parts worth keeping he found on his own, in spite of me.
So if you love him, Imogen, don’t do what I did.
Don’t keep it at arm’s length the way I did.
Do that long enough and there’s nothing left to save. ”
He stops at the door with his hand on it, not turning back to me.
“Go fight for him.”