Chapter 15
Thanksgiving was just another workday for Sophie, with the exception of letting herself sleep in for as long as she wanted to before she got down to business. That’s why she was confused when she awoke to someone ringing her doorbell … again.
Her first thought was of Nate, but there was no way it was him, she knew. Iona was the only other person who might be out and about on a holiday and who knew where she lived.
The condo was chilly, so Sophie threw on a sweatshirt over her pajama pants and camisole.
As she hurried to the door, she twisted her hair through an elastic band to the back of her head.
Glancing toward the kitchen on her way, she figured she could whip up some scrambled eggs and toast for an impromptu Thanksgiving brunch if Iona stayed for a while.
She opened the door without looking — a mistake she’d learn to never make again.
“Oh,” she said, stopping short.
“Sophie, don’t slam the door, please,” her father said. He held out a bouquet of light pink tulips. “May I come in?”
Sophie stared at him for seconds, dumbfounded. She scowled and started to close the door.
“Sweetheart, wait.” He held a hand out against the door, stopping her.
“First thing, do not call me sweetheart. Second thing, how the hell did you find out where I live?”
He looked up and down the hallway. “It wasn’t that hard to track down. Could I please come in for fifteen minutes? Then if you want me to leave, I will.”
She stared at the thinning dark hair that matched the color of hers, at the lines that traversed his face — no laugh lines or crinkles from smiling too much — and saw a weary, old, unfamiliar man.
“Fine. Fifteen minutes.” There was no if. He would leave the second his time was up.
She opened the door and stood back, wishing herself a happy fucking Thanksgiving.
“Where to?” he asked, gazing around her apartment like a spy.
“Right here’s fine.”
He held up the flowers. “Got a vase?”
She didn’t want anything that would remind her of him, but skipping the argument would get him out of here faster. She took the bunch and slapped them onto the pass-through to the kitchen.
“Sophie,” he said when she turned back around, “I am the world’s worst father.”
She leaned against the wall and crossed her arms over her chest.
“I owe you an apology.”
“I stopped waiting for anything you might owe me years ago,” she said, not bothering to hide the bitterness from her tone.
“I deserve that.” He nodded. “I don’t blame you for hating me, but I’m wondering … I’d like to try to earn your forgiveness.”
He looked at her imploringly, and she merely raised her brows.
Being such a bitch was almost uncomfortable, but this was the father who’d deserted her family, she reminded herself.
The father who had turned his back yet again, for the last time, two weeks after her mother had died, when Sophie had dropped every last bit of her pride and asked him for help paying for college.
Had money been the issue, she would’ve held it against him less, but his reason had been that he had a new family and hadn’t wanted to “rock the boat,” as he’d said.
“You can’t earn forgiveness,” she said.
“Well, I sure can’t get it without apologizing, so I’d like to start there. Sophie, I am sorry as hell for the way you grew up. I’m so, so sorry I never took your brother’s problems seriously.”
After all these years… She’d waited for so long for her dad to acknowledge any kind of problem, even before he’d walked out on the family.
For as long as she could remember, she’d been the afterthought.
Her brother had been the attention hog, with their mother tirelessly trying to get him psychological help and her father endlessly belittling her mother for being unable to handle a “rowdy, attention-seeking boy.”
There’d been a time, eons ago, when his apology would have changed things for her, but now … it was so little and so very, very late. Her heart had hardened, and she couldn’t just thaw it on a moment’s notice.
“You thought Mom was nuts,” she pointed out.
“I couldn’t acknowledge that my son, a child who came from my genetics, might have serious problems. I can see now that’s due to my own insecurity, but Sophie, after figuring out what he did to you—”
“What do you mean, figuring out? He confessed.”
“He confessed because I essentially caught him red-handed.”
“How so?”
He moistened his lips nervously. “Are you sure you don’t want to sit down?”
“One hundred percent sure. Just tell me.”
He looked around helplessly, then ran his fingers through his thin hair as he sighed. “He’s been staying at my place for about a month—”
“He’s been living with you?” As far as Sophie knew, their dad had washed his hands of both of his children as soon as he’d left.
“He stays there sometimes. When he doesn’t have anywhere else to land, I guess. He’s quite the drifter. I don’t ask questions. When Lorie left me, the place got too big and lonely. I was glad to have the company—”
“Your time’s ticking,” Sophie said.
“The night of the fire, Robert came home in the middle of the night. Which is nothing out of the ordinary. But a couple days later, I noticed the clothes he’d thrown in the laundry room smelled like heavy smoke.
I didn’t put the pieces together until several days later when I noticed the gas can for the lawn mower was missing from the top of my workbench in the garage. ”
“So you confronted him and he confessed?” she asked doubtfully. Her brother had never been one to make things easy.
“Not exactly. But eventually I took him in, and he told the investigators everything. Listening to him, I finally saw what your mom saw all those years. Things are plugged in wrong in his head.”
That was a pretty accurate way to put it. Too bad it came two decades too late.
Sophie gritted her teeth together, unsure whether her anger was sparked more by her brother or her father right now.
“Why’d he do it?” she asked. “They said he didn’t know I was in the building.”
“Well…” Her father rubbed his chin and looked at the floor.
“The investigator said he’s jealous, but that’s just stupid.”
“He’s full of hate, Sophie. His life isn’t good, and that’s a lot his doing, but that man harbors so many bad feelings. Some are my fault, no doubt. If I could do anything to turn back time and change everything—”
“You can’t.”
“I will regret the way I treated you for the rest of my life. Your mother was right in her never-ending search for answers, for help for Robert. But because I didn’t see it, he could have killed you.”
“I have a hard time believing that would matter to you.”
His head sank to his chest, and there was no mistaking his shame.
Sophie couldn’t deny a tiny bit of gratification, but she didn’t want to think about what that said about her. She’d tried so hard to move on, to get over not just his lack of love but his total disregard for his own daughter, but obviously she still had emotional scars.
“I’m not a good person, Sophie. I’ve got nothing. Nobody. And it’s my fault completely.”
“What happened to your new family?” she asked. “When I called after Mom died, you told me you couldn’t help me because your new wife was pregnant and wouldn’t understand.”
“Lorie probably would’ve understood if I’d helped you. She was a much better person than me.”
“Did she die?”
“She divorced me. Rightfully so.” He straightened, as if summoning the last bit of dignity he possessed.
“I’m not here for your sympathy. I just wanted to tell you that what Robert did to you …
it chills me to the bone. I’m ashamed that it took such an irrevocable action on his part for me to see the truth. And again, I’m sorry.”
“So what do you want from me exactly?” she asked.
He studied her for so long she became antsy. Finally, he shook his head. “Just wanted you to know I’m genuinely sorry.” There was nothing in his stance or his face that said he had an ulterior motive, and he looked so empty, so beaten down that she almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
“I want nothing for you but happiness,” he said. He glanced around the condo again. “But I suspect maybe you don’t have that yet, otherwise you wouldn’t be alone on Thanksgiving, like me.”
That did it.
“Go. Get out of my house. What I do and what I have is no business of yours.”
“I didn’t mean that as a shot at you, swee— Sophie.
I truly don’t want you to end up like me.
Alone. You’ve got so much going for you — look at your career.
I couldn’t be prouder of you. For someone to survive the kind of childhood inflicted on you…
” He shook his head. “You’re special, Sophie.
And I’d like to believe you’re going to be okay, but…
” He gestured to the empty condo. “It’s a holiday, and you’re as lonely as I am. ”
Clenching her jaw so hard she thought she might chip a tooth, she marched to the door, opened it, and waited for him to leave.
Her father lifted his chin and arched his neck back in defeat.
“I haven’t handled this right at all, but then I imagine neither of us is surprised.
” He glanced at the tulips that lay scattered across the pass-through, no longer neatly arranged, then hiked up his pants and walked to the door. “Happy Thanksgiving, Sophie.”
She met his eyes with a glare in an attempt to convey all the years of feeling unloved, unlovable. It took every bit of willpower she had to shut the door quietly, calmly, when she felt anything but calm inside.
Leaning her forehead against the closed door, she breathed in, willing her body not to collapse like a tower of blocks when someone kicked it.
When she felt steadier, she walked to the refrigerator, opened it, took out the half-full bottle of chardonnay, got a glass down from the cabinet, and stopped with the bottle tilted over the glass.
No.
She put the glass away, set the bottle back in the fridge.
Drinking away her loneliness was not the answer. That would make her no different from her father. And dammit, what he’d said had hit too close to the truth.
She wasn’t happy. And maybe part of that was because she was alone. Maybe a big part.
That, of course, brought Nate to mind. He was never far from it anyway.
The last time her father had called, when she’d still been in the hospital recovering, Nate had been with her.
She closed her eyes and remembered what it’d felt like to have him offer his silent, nonjudgmental support.
His touch on her shoulder had been so simple and so …
exactly what she’d needed, whether she’d been able to see it then or not.
It occurred to her at that moment that the bad stuff was less bad, a little easier to handle, when you didn’t have to handle it alone. When you had someone who cared. Someone who you cared about.
She’d spent so much of her life, so much effort convincing herself that alone was how she wanted to be, to keep from getting hurt or let down again, but from the moment she’d found herself in the fire, facing the possibility of death alone, it’d become harder to believe in.
Sophie was alone, she realized, chiefly because of the people who’d been unable to love her the way she needed to be loved — her mom to some extent, but even more so, her father. For almost twenty years now, maybe more, she’d lived in fear of not being lovable, but the problem was him.
She didn’t want to be alone anymore, and that was in large part because there was someone she wanted to be with badly enough to try.
The instant the thought coalesced, she jumped into action, pushing herself away from the kitchen counter and checking the clock on the microwave. Just after eleven a.m. She tracked down her cell phone in her purse and punched a number from her contacts.
“Iona, hi, it’s me. Are you still in town?”
“Hey, Sophie. Happy Thanksgiving! I was just getting ready to load up the car. What’s up?”
“I have a baking emergency of sorts. I was wondering if I could have your caramel brownie recipe … and, since the grocery store’s closed today, maybe you have the ingredients?”