37. Ainsley
Chapter 37
Ainsley
“ D ad,” I exclaim in surprise. “I…” It takes me a full second to process why he’s looking at me like that before I remember myself and stand aside so he can come in out of the cold spring rain. “Sorry, I just wasn’t expecting you.”
“Do you have company?” he asks as he hangs his coat on the back of a bar chair.
I search his tone for disapproval, as usual, but find nothing. He must just be hiding it well. “No. I was finishing up one of my last finals for the quarter.”
He nods. “That’s right. Graduation is just around the corner.”
I nod back. He’s got a trip planned in a few weeks for the ceremony, he and Vicki will be staying in the city for two weeks. That’s one of the reasons I was so surprised to find him here now. “It’s coming up quickly.”
“I didn’t like how we left things on Faraday,” he says, apparently finished with pleasantries and cutting right to the point. I expect nothing less.
“When you bailed on our breakfast date by sending me a text?”
The words surprise me as much as they clearly surprise him. I stand taller, claiming them. Proud of myself for saying them, even though I hadn’t intended to.
“Yes. I apologized for that.”
I nod. “In your text.”
Something flares in his eyes then, so briefly you’d miss it if you hadn’t been trained on those eyes since birth. He’s sizing me up, measuring my worth as an opponent. Deciding whether this conversation will be worth the trouble.But for once, it doesn't make me want to back down. Quite the opposite. I walk to the other side of the kitchen island and slide casually into a chair, leaning back and folding my arms across my chest in a move I learned from him.
After a long moment, he turns and takes a seat at the counter across from me. “I didn’t come here to fight.”
I consider him questioningly. “This isn’t a fight.”
“Then why does it feel like you’re preparing to battle?”
I let my gaze drop in concession. I know he’s right. I’ve been on the defensive since the second he set foot in this space. My space. The space I share with Taylor and Gem. “Why did you come?” I ask finally.
“I told you I wanted to apologize for how we left things back on Faraday. I want to talk. Catch up.”
“Go ahead then,” I respond, keeping my voice level, not flippant.
His eyebrows raise. “Go ahead and what?”
“Apologize.”
The word sits on the counter between us like a pot of poisoned tea.
He blinks at me, face characteristically unreadable, for a long moment. “I’m sorry. ”
I can’t help the eyeroll that flares out of me as I shake my head and try not to get up and walk out of the room. He’s not sorry. He’s never sorry.
He sits stoically, watching me turn back into the child he thinks I am.
I shake it off, refolding my arms. “Okay, then. And you wanted to catch up, huh? Let’s catch up. My boyfriend and girlfriend are out right now, but they pretty much live here. I’m going to graduate in two weeks. I have tarot cards and incense. Maybe you can smell it. And no, I’m not going to cut my hair.”
He says nothing, amused.
For some reason, it only makes me angrier. “What about you? How’s that fiancé of yours doing? Surprised to still be a fiancé after all these years? Well, the rest of us are, too. And your giant empty house? How’s that doing? Staff still enjoying being the only ones living there? No, wait, how’s work, dad? Now there’s a topic you’re always happy to talk about.”
My second spiel does nothing to break down his impenetrable walls. He just watches me, an older, wiser version of my own face staring back at me as I start to sweat. I’m not sure what I thought my words would accomplish. It’s certainly the first time I’ve ever questioned him like this. I’d never have dared to in the past. Things are different now, though. I’m worth something all on my own. I’m not waiting for my worth to be offered to me by him.
At least, not entirely.
“What else?”
His voice shakes me out of my thoughts. “Excuse me?”
He looks at me with something in his eyes that I can’t decipher. “What else do you want to say? It sounds like there are a few things you’ve been holding back over the years.”
My mouth drops open, and I clamp it shut, determined to not show him how much his words affect me. How I know he’s taunting me. How I know he doesn’t care what I have to say. I sharpen my weapons. “Gemma wanted to be my friend when we were kids and lived at our house. She told me all the staff kids thought I was lonely and wanted to ask me to play but they knew they weren’t allowed. Why is that? Why wouldn’t you let me play with them?”
His eyes narrow and the slight clench of his chin gives away his surprise. “I don’t know anything about that. There were never any rules about you playing with the staff children.”
“Was I lonely?”
He cocks his head to the side. “I don’t know, Ains. Were you?”
My gaze drifts out the bay window across the living room where the rain has taken up a fevered pitch. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember any of it.”
“What do you remember?”
I gape at him, unable to keep it together anymore. “From the estate?”
“The estate. Your childhood. Do you remember anything from the apartment?”
Where we lived when my mother was alive. Where she wasted away in bed.
The thought strikes me through the heart. I nearly gasp, but luckily hold it in. I shake my head instead. “I remember her reading. I remember walking up the stairs holding her hand. I remember how she used to smile.”
“Do you remember anything about me?”
It seems like a dangerous question to ask such a well-trained opponent. But, if pain is what he’s searching for, I don’t disappoint him. “I remember you telling me she wasn’t smiling anymore because she was gone even though I could see her smiling. ”
I watch my direct hit do nothing to his perfect mask. I try again.
“I remember you sending me to the estate to live with Grandma and Grandpa, and when you finally came you didn’t bring her books. I remember you telling me they were gone. I remember thinking that meant they were dead, because she was dead, and you called her gone.”
The rain prevents silence from falling this time, but the air still feels heavy around me. I can’t bring myself to utter another word, so I just sit there. When my father finally speaks, it makes me wish I’d filled the space with mindless chatter, jokes, insults. Anything to avoid having to watch him tell the story I never thought I’d hear.
“Those weeks we watched your mother die in the apartment,” he starts, the words trapping my breath in my lungs and making every cell in my body scream at me to run, “was the end of a very long journey through cancer for her.”
I’m too astounded to speak right away. How had it never occurred to me that she might’ve been sick longer? That her dying wasn’t the only cancer story?
“When…” I can’t get the question out, but he understands.
“She was diagnosed when she was pregnant with you. Highly developed metastatic breast cancer.”
“But how does that work? Don’t you have to get chemo for cancer? Can you get chemo when you’re pregnant?” I’m overcome with the desire to pull out my phone and start searching for answers. Instead, I sit there stupidly while the man who’s taken care of me my whole life slowly, gently, dismantles everything I’ve ever known.
“You cannot get chemo when you’re pregnant, no. You can get certain types of localized radiation that have been deemed safe. ”
“How pregnant was she?”
“Three months when we got the diagnosis.”
Air rushes out of my lungs like a hurricane. “But…so she had to wait until after I was born. Seven more months?”
“Around that long, yes.”
“What did that do to her chances of survival?”
I’m not sure if I actually expect him to answer me, but I’m not surprised when he doesn’t.
“We discussed it, we talked to the doctors, and we decided?—”
I push up from my chair in a rush of blinding anger. “You…you decided you wanted a son so badly that you sacrificed your own wife?” I turn away from him and drag my hand down my face. I can hear my own heartbeat pounding in my ears as I struggle to comprehend what I’m hearing. “No wonder you’re so disappointed in how I turned out. You wanted a protege so badly that?—”
“No.” His single word stops my tirade in its tracks. “No, Ainsley. That’s not what I wanted. That’s not…the decision I would have made. If the decision was mine to make. I would have done anything?—”
“Oh my god.” I’m a child again, unable to make sense of or regulate my emotions. “All these years you were forced to raise the child that you would have aborted to save the person you actually wanted. Your wife.”
“No.”
“No? You don’t get to say no. You already admitted that you would’ve chosen her.”
“It’s more complicated than that, Son. She was the person I knew. The person my entire life was anchored to, orbited around. She was my world. The baby was a complete unknown. An abstract concept. All I knew was that she would forgo lifesaving treatment in order to have a healthy pregnancy. Her doctors were very clear about what that could mean for the progression of her disease and their ability to prolong her life. I argued to save the only thing I knew.”
“But you lost.”
He shakes his head. “I’ll never call it that. But yes, in the end, your mother was very clear about her decision to carry the baby, you, to term before starting treatment.”
“And I cost her her life.”
“There’s no way to know if it would’ve gone differently had she started chemo earlier. Cancer is not a straight line with hard yeses and nos. It’s its own entity.”
“I was three when she died,” I say, just to have something to say. Just to break up the swirling emotions threatening to suffocate me.
He nods. “And I was more grateful than anything to have her with us those first three years. You have so much of her in you, Ains. And I know it’s because you had that time with her. She taught you kindness and to see the best in everything.”
“Even as she was dying.”
“That was her way.”
“Was it enough?”
“What do you mean?”
I can’t look at him when I ask the real question. “Was I enough all on my own? Was I enough like her to make me worth the trade?”
My dad is on his feet in an instant, closing the distance between us. His arms reach out, threatening a hug, but I stand up and back away. “Don’t. It’s too late for that. I already know I’m not.”
His mask is gone. His face a battlefield of sadness and worry. “What do you mean? Not enough for what?”
“For you!” I shout, losing my cool completely. “For anything. You wanted me to be better. And I’m not. And I’m graduating now from the program that I demanded you let me go into, even though I hate it, and I’m only going through with it so I don’t have to tell you you were right. And when it’s done, I’ll have nowhere to hide from the fact that I made a bad decision out of a childish desire to grow up to be anything but you.”
He takes a step back, arms dropping to his side. In his defense, he never looks away from me, not even as I try my best to hit him where I know it will hurt the most. “Is that what this is about? All this anger?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know anymore.”
“You couldn’t be like me if you tried, Ains.”
I hear it as the start of a criticism and roll my eyes. He stops me with an upheld hand.
“Not like that. You are so much like her, the opposite of me. I want clean, straight lines and predictability and routine. Because those things make me feel safe. After your mother died, I never felt safe. Not in my own life, not with you. But you didn’t let losing her do that to you. You were too young at the time to really know what was going on, but you’re not that young now. You understand what it is to lose someone important. And yet look at you. You live and love fearlessly. You give your heart to people and causes and animals as if it could never be broken. You will do great things with your life. I have no illusions that one of those things will be courtroom law. But?—”
I huff out a laugh. “There’s always a but.”
“But a law education could be a great platform for the work I know you’re meant to do. It could focus you and teach you how to be an even better communicator. You will be an unstoppable force for good in this world, and all I see are opportunities for you to learn from people who are worthy of your time. Do you know how many presidents we’ve had who don’t have law degrees?”
I laugh again, this time softer, kinder. “Yeah, Dad, I do. You tell me all the time.”
He nods. “It’s an important thing to remember. The world we live in might not be perfect, but it’s our world. There are ways to get ahead, and I know damn well I’ve sacrificed some of the closeness we could have had by constantly reminding you of them, but it’s a tradeoff I chose. Because seeing you become the best version of yourself is all I have.”
“I don’t think you understand what the best version of me is.”
It’s his turn to smile, a sight rare enough to make me pause.
“I learned the futility of telling you you’ll understand things when you’re older long ago, so I won’t bother.” He holds up a hand for me to wait as I start to turn away in annoyance. “But I look forward to watching you understand someday, when you’re with your own children.”
Doc makes a timely appearance, and my dad kneels to scratch his neck. “Doc is a great example, actually. You’ve raised this guy from a pup. Remember when we picked him up from the kennel upstate and brought him home in that little shoebox? He was so tiny. So curious and sleepy. You had big plans for him, and we hired the trainers and bought the leashes and balls and rainproof vests. But in the end, Doc trained you as much as you did him. He let you know when it was time to go out, when he was hungry, when you were being too loud when he was trying to sleep. All of that without even speaking the same language.”
He stands and smiles down at Doc before locking eyes with me. I know where this is going, but I listen anyway. I want to go there.
“You mean far more than any pet, of course, but the parallels are impossible to ignore. I’ve watched you since the moment you came into this world. There is not a single scraped knee or failed friendship or favorite book or birthday gift that I haven’t been right there with you for. Watching how you perceive the world, how you communicate with your breath and your body and your eyes. I’m not a perfect man, Ains. And I know I’ve pushed you hard over the last few years. But I did it because I knew you had it in you to be great. I know you can take it. Going soft on you was never an option. You hated that. You always wanted to argue for your own way. You still do. What is it you want, Son? The world is laying open at your feet. There is no opportunity that you cannot seize with the might of your mind and your tenacity and your endless fortune. The limits you see, you’ve put there yourself. Set your course and go for it.”
“I just want you to see me for who I really am.” Even as I speak the words, I can tell they no longer hold the power over me they did even just an hour ago.
He shakes his head, and I know he’s right. “This isn’t about me, Son.”
I nod. “I’m scared.”
He nods, another of those rare smiles shining on me like the north star. “And you’re going to be scared for the rest of your life. That’s just how life is.”
I laugh softly. “Wow, Dad. Thanks for the pep talk.”
He shrugs, taking a step toward me. I don’t pull away from the embrace this time. “Just when you think your child is an adult and things will be smooth sailing, life teaches you otherwise.”
“I’m alright. You don’t have to worry too much.”
He takes a step back and shakes his head. “It’s not you I’m worried about.”
My forehead crinkles as I wait.
“Victoria’s pregnant.”
A gasp escapes my lips before I can stuff it down. “Oh.”
“It’s good news, Ains.”
“I mean, yes, of course. Congratulations. You just surprised me.”
He nods. “It was a bit of a surprise for us as well.”
“How far along is she?”
“Four months. I wanted to tell you sooner, but we were waiting until we knew for certain…”
I shake my head. “It’s not going to be the same, Dad. It’s going to be great.”
“I know. And she keeps telling me. But I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my life. Before, the first time, I had no idea how much I had to lose. How quickly it could all be taken from me. But this time I do know.”
It’s my turn to pull him into an embrace, feeling his chest rise and fall against my own, quicker than usual. The only sign of emotional distress I’m likely to get from the guy. “Vicki knows?”
“She knows everything.”
“Good, okay. We’ll get through this. It’s going to be great. I’m going to be a brother.”
When he pulls back, his smile is wide, and his eyes are soft. “You’re the best big brother any kid could hope for.”
“You’re going to be an old dad.”
He scoffs and takes another step back. “I’m not that old.”
I shake my head, preparing to lean into the lightened mood with another joke, but his eyes catch on his watch.
“I’m going to try to get downtown to my hotel before traffic, but if you’re free tomorrow, let’s get together. I’m going to be looking at a few places in the city?—”
“What time is it?” I interrupt him, panic rising in my chest and turning my vision gray.
“Ten to five?—”
“Oh my god. I have to go.” I snatch up my coat and run from the apartment, straight into the black car waiting for my father at the curb.
I shout the address at the driver, already knowing it’s too late.