Chapter 45
Teddy
I should have been at training.
That thought came and went, softened by the sound of the ocean, by the way the tide rolled in slow and steady, like it had nowhere else to be. I stood barefoot in the sand with my shoes hanging loose from my fingers, the cool grains pressing into my skin.
The air stayed warm against my skin despite the sun fading on the horizon. My eyes closed, my sensations multiplied as the world narrowed to the steady rise and fall of my breath.
I loved the beach, the salt-heavy air sweeping in and settling into my lungs, easing something tight and overworked inside me. Out here, the world felt wider, less demanding. I needed to remember to come here more.
The familiar thump of boots on the wooden promenade behind me brought me back to here and now.
I knew that sound. Had known it my whole life, memorized it every time he walked away from me.
Except now, he was here, and my body felt like it might split right open if I didn’t look at him and check he was real.
He stopped beside me, close enough that a faint stir of air brushed my arm.
I didn’t look yet, though. A part of me worried he wasn’t real. Or that he’d changed so much that I wouldn’t recognize him.
“You should be at training,” he said. Disbelief swept into my chest, trying to escape, but I managed to keep it down. The man was missing days ago, and he’s worried about me missing training?
“I should.” The words were empty when they shouldn’t have been. Missing training wasn’t something I did, ever. Yet here I was, doing just that and not caring.
I was untethered. Out of sequence with myself.
Today, I didn’t have the strength to carry everything at once—the team, the expectations, the love I hadn’t planned for, the anger I didn’t know where to put, the grief that didn’t belong neatly to any one moment. So I stood there instead, letting myself be quiet in a way I rarely allowed.
The wind lifted my hair, tugging it loose around my face, and I didn’t bother pushing it back.
I focused on the waves instead, the way they broke and pulled away again, never rushing, always being pulled by something bigger than themselves.
I wished I could have moved through things like that.
Arrive, retreat, repeat, without carrying everything with me.
But I was learning that wasn’t a way to live.
“I watched the replay before the flight in,” he said after a moment. “You were solid out there.”
I exhaled slowly, not wanting to delve into that. “That’s not why we’re here.”
He went quiet. I wanted to shake him and shout at him, tell him how angry I was for trying to leave me like that. How reckless he was for not caring enough. But none of that was the truth. Instead, I decided to do something neither of us had done for a long time. I was honest.
“When they couldn’t find you,” I said, keeping my eyes on the horizon, “it was the first time I felt the loss of mom.”
The breeze pressed against my back, warm and insistent, but I barely felt it.
“I never understood the weight of it,” I went on. “Not really. I didn’t miss her, and I know that sounds harsh, but I couldn’t.” I shook my head slightly. “You can’t miss someone you never had, right?”
I looked at him then, noticing how much he’d changed.
His hair was more gray at the sides now, his eyes framed with deeper lines, the kind left by years I hadn’t witnessed.
There were fresh grazes along his cheekbone, a beard I’d never seen before—evidence of a life lived beyond the version of him I remembered.
It’d been well over a year since I’d seen him last, more probably.
My appearance hadn’t changed like his, not beyond my hair being longer, I suppose.
Everything he didn’t know, he couldn’t see.
I hadn’t softened. I hadn’t even learned how to be smaller, or quieter—at least, not until now.
I wondered what he saw when he looked at me.
Whether he noticed how much I missed something from him that I never really had.
When I spoke again, my voice was quieter.
“I thought I might lose you, and I realized that I wouldn’t just be losing my dad.” My breath caught. “I’d be losing the only person who remembers her. The only link I have. I’d truly be alone.”
My lungs stuttered, the next inhale catching halfway in, my lip trembling. I hadn’t meant to say it so plainly, but I knew our relationship could handle the truth. It had to if we were to move forward.
“I’ve never been scared like that before. Not of losing a game, or failing.” I swallowed the emotion lodged in my throat. “But of having nothing left.”
That awareness scared me more than I’d realized at the time. Especially because our relationship wasn’t perfect, but the finality of not having him, the only biological parent I had, tore me up inside.
My grip on my shoes tightened until the straps dug into my fingers, but I needed the pain to focus.
He turned fully toward me then, his expression stripped of rank, of distance, of everything but being my father, and I really saw him, weathered and worn, tired but still my daddy. The wind rushed past us, but I couldn’t tell if the sound in my ears was the ocean or my pulse.
He didn’t reach for me. Somehow, he knew I wasn’t ready yet. Didn’t crowd the space between us. He simply stood there, eyes roaming over my face, and I knew he was seeing something he’d spent years avoiding.
“You know,” he said finally, his voice rough, “you’re so like her.
” He sighed, but a soft smile tipped his mouth quickly.
“Strong, resilient, beautiful.” He huffed a broken laugh.
“I know you didn’t know her, and I’m sorry I didn’t let you,” he admitted, his eyes glistening.
“After your mom died, I thought the safest thing I could do was let you grow without watching me fall apart.” His jaw flexed.
“God, she would’ve hated that,” he said, almost to himself.
“But I didn’t feel capable of being a dad.
The only thing I could do was throw myself into deployments, to forget about the grief. ”
“And leave me.” My voice cracked.
He grabbed my hand, the movement startling me.
Not because it was sudden, but because it was rare, and I don’t remember the last time he held my hand.
“I understand that I don’t have any right to know you now, and you have every reason to shut the door on being my daughter.
” His grip tightened slightly, as though he needed to know I was really here.
“I can’t ask for forgiveness. That’s something I need to earn. But I’m willing to.”
I’d spent so much of my life preparing for disappointment where he was concerned, building careful distance so nothing he did could knock the wind out of me.
If I pushed it all away, I would be safe.
But hearing him admit that he didn’t want to lose me, I wasn’t prepared for that.
It was worse than grief, far more fragile and unknowing that I couldn’t speak.
Eyes fixed on our joined hands, he swallowed audibly. “I spent so long lost in my grief that I forgot my family still existed. That she still existed—in you.” His voice faltered then. “I’m so sorry it’s taken me this long to come back to you.”
And that’s the ugly truth; somewhere inside me, I was still that little girl watching her daddy go somewhere unknown. Too young to understand the fear, but feeling it all the same. I’m still that scared, fragile heart that he left on the doorstep.
Only now I was better at protecting it, teaching it how to survive, how to keep it beating, even when it hurt.
And standing here now, with his hand wrapped around mine, both versions of myself collided at once. The girl he’d left behind. And the woman who had learned how to live without him.
“I spent a long time thinking there was something wrong with me,” I admitted. “Because leaving was so easy for you.”
“It wasn’t easy,” he said, shaking his head. “You were a kid, and I wasn’t there. I’ve made so many mistakes, but leaving you is the one I regret every day.”
I didn’t trust myself to speak, hadn’t expected him to own his mistakes. The ocean rolled in close, the foam licking at the sand near our feet before retreating again.
I drew in a slow breath, filling my lungs until it burned, then let it out just as carefully. My grip tightened around his hand, tentative at first, then firmer.
An urge to pull away was still there, familiar and well-practiced, but it no longer felt like the only option. The old reflex tugged at me—build the wall, step back, protect what’s left—but for once, I didn’t obey it.
This wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t resolution. But it was something.
“I don’t need you to make up for the past,” I told him, my voice watery and weak.
“I just need you to stop disappearing.” The words left me exposed, bare in a way I wasn’t used to, and I held still in the discomfort.
“I’ve spent my whole life proving I can handle things on my own… I don’t want to do that anymore.”
I stayed there, hand in his, waiting for him to choose me back.
Time had no meaning right now. But I can’t deny that when his hand left mine, I braced.
What I hadn’t accounted for was him stepping closer, his arms coming around me, solid and unsure all at once.
He held me like it was something he was still learning how to do, and I understood that.
I was surrounded by the same scent that lingered in our house he rarely lived in.
Soap and musk. Home. I breathed him in, letting myself believe he’d stay.
“I’m here, Teddy. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long, but I’m here now.”
Twenty-six years of loneliness unraveled with those words.