Chapter 46
GARRETT
Nothing had ever made me more nervous than walking up to my son’s townhouse this morning, two weeks after I’d resolved everything with him and Liam. I wasn’t even sure I needed the coffee I was carrying; caffeine was the furthest from my mind right then.
Stopping along the way to pick it up had given me a few extra minutes to gather my thoughts, though, so… fine.
Coffee in hand, I rang the doorbell. Chris let me in without saying much. Then he and Jasmine made a quick, quiet exit with the baby while I took a seat at the table in his empty kitchen. In silence, I sat there, turning my coffee cup between my fingers as I waited. Listened. Waited some more.
Above me, the floor creaked now and then with movement. Every squeak made my heart jump and my stomach flip.
She was here. She was in this house. Sooner or later, she’d be in this room, sitting across from me at this table, and if I didn’t say or do the right thing…
I squeezed my eyes shut. Ally hadn’t outright said this was my one and only shot at fixing things between us, but it was the first opportunity I’d had since she’d cut me off.
There was no guarantee there’d be a second.
I had to get this right. Even if she gave me a million chances after this, every failure meant more time without my daughter in my life. Six-plus years was more than enough.
Please don’t let me mess this up. Please let her forgive me.
After a solid ten minutes, the footsteps above me changed direction. Then they started down the stairs.
I held my breath, watching the kitchen doorway.
Outside the door, the footsteps paused. I wondered if she was having second thoughts. Or steeling herself. Or both.
After a brief hesitation, though, my daughter stepped into the kitchen.
As soon as she did, all the air left my lungs.
Oh God, it was really her. The long dark hair I remembered was a short, highlighted bob now.
The band on her T-shirt was different from the ones she’d worn back then, but still one I didn’t recognize.
Still the same brown eyes she’d inherited from me, though they weren’t full of cheerful mischief like they’d always been.
The last time I’d seen her, she’d been barely twenty-one. Now she was almost twenty-seven. She was all grown up, but still every inch the little girl I’d been missing for six years. Seeing her now drove home just how much time I’d lost with her.
It was also hard to imagine that at her age now, I’d already been married for the better part of a decade.
I’d already been a father of four. She was still so young, which just drove home how young and unprepared I’d been back then.
Hell, even now, twenty years later with a grandchild, I still felt young and clueless sometimes.
Especially when I was facing down my daughter, who’d been angry enough to cut me off. There hadn’t even been any dramatic parting words—she’d just blocked me everywhere and stopped speaking to me.
Now here she was, and more than ever, I felt like that terrified nineteen-year-old holding his newborn for the very first time and wondering what to do next.
Neither of us spoke for a long moment. She took a couple of tentative steps into the kitchen, and her expression was closed off as she sat down opposite me. The hurt and anger in her eyes were impossible to miss.
For a moment, we faced each other across the table. I’d rehearsed a million ways to start this conversation and all the things I’d wanted to say, but sitting here now, I broke the silence with just two words:
“I’m sorry.”
Ally blinked.
Voice as even as I could keep it, I went on, “I just want to say that right out of the gate. I’m sorry.
Your mother and I—when we decided to stay together even though we were unhappy, we thought we were doing the right thing.
But it doesn’t matter. We were wrong. I was wrong.
I messed up, I made it worse, and I kept making it worse, and I’m sorry. ”
Her lips were pulled into a thin, taut line, but the corner twitched ever so slightly. She still didn’t speak, though, and the silence was killing me, so I kept going.
“I know it doesn’t change anything,” I went on softly, “but if I had the chance to do it differently—all of it, especially the part where I cheated on her—I would. In a heartbeat.”
Ally’s jaw worked and she looked away.
“I can give you a million reasons why we did it the way we did. Staying together even though we were unhappy. All of them made sense to us at the time. But we hurt you kids. We made you miserable. And I made it all far worse than it ever needed to be with what I did to your mom.”
She flinched, still not meeting my gaze.
“That’s the only thing that matters now,” I went on. “That we both messed up, especially me, and we hurt you and your siblings. And I am so, so sorry for that.”
She stared at nothing for a moment before finally turning to me again, eyes simultaneously cold and full of hurt. “Even if you’d never cheated on Mom, how was it good for us to live in a house where our parents hated each other?”
The question pushed all the air out of my lungs. “We didn’t hate—” I stopped when her expression darkened. Showing my palms, I tried again. “We thought we were keeping it out of sight. We were—we honestly thought we could pretend everything was fine.”
“Did you really think we were that stupid?” she snapped.
“No,” I whispered. “Not at all. We just didn’t realize how obvious we were being. We were the stupid ones.”
She glared at me, but said nothing.
I took a sip of coffee just to wet my mouth. “Can I tell you why we did it? I’m not excusing it. I’m not justifying it. I just want to tell you where our minds were. That’s all.”
Her jaw tightened. “Because our grandparents were divorced?”
“That’s part of it, yes. But it’s a little more complicated than that. If you’re willing to hear it.”
She was quiet for a moment, but she finally gave a subtle nod.
I inhaled deeply. “Your mom’s parents ended up living in different cities.
She’d see her dad on holidays and over the summers, but even that started tapering off.
By the time she was in her teens, he barely talked to her on the phone, never mind saw her in person.
Turned out that after he remarried and had kids with his new wife, he just…
didn’t want as much to do with his old family anymore. ”
Ally’s eyebrows flicked up. “Grandpa… abandoned her?”
“Not entirely. But he didn’t prioritize her anymore.” I shifted in my seat, rotating my coffee cup between my fingers. “The first time she and I talked about separating, she told me she was afraid of you kids drifting away from one of us.”
Ally drummed her nails on the table, the sound echoing in the mostly silent kitchen. “But Grandpa abandoned her. That’s not drifting away.”
“No, but she hadn’t realized at that time that that’s what he’d done.
She thought being apart as much as they were had caused their relationship to fade away.
” I exhaled. “She didn’t put the pieces together about his other family until a few years ago.
And by then, the damage to our family was done. ”
“So she should’ve started seeing a therapist earlier.” It wasn’t an accusation or a question. Just a sad statement of fact.
I nodded. “I should’ve too.”
That caught her off-guard. “You… see a therapist?”
Another nod. “I saw one for quite a while after the divorce. It’s…
It was something I should’ve done years ago.
Something Mom and I should’ve done together.
I thought I needed help navigating being estranged from my kids.
” I winced. “Turned out I needed help sorting out all the reasons my kids justifiably wanted nothing to do with me, and I should’ve started going long before we got to this point. ”
Ally pushed out a ragged breath, staring at the table between us for long, painful seconds. When she finally spoke again, her voice was threadbare and unsteady. “What about you? How did Grandma and Grandpa’s divorce mess you up?”
I thought about that for a moment, gathering the truth into the right words.
“Their marriage was messy and the divorce made things worse. They fought a lot. It never got violent, but it wasn’t pretty.
And after they split, it just became clear they hated each other.
They never missed a chance to take a potshot at the other, or to talk about how horrible they were, and…
” I waved a hand, the gesture heavy with the fatigue of this miserable subject.
“I think, on some level, Mom and I thought we could and should tough it out because we could be civil with each other. We could live together. We could co-parent. We just… didn’t want to be married.
” I exhaled hard and ran a hand through my hair.
“Our parents’ divorces were tough on us, and neither of us wanted to put our kids through it.
We were wrong, but we thought that since our marriage wasn’t that terrible or volatile, then keeping our family together was better than splitting it up. ”
Ally’s expression was unreadable. Her features were taut and her eyes were full of too many emotions to parse. “You cheated on Mom. Why?”
I lowered my gaze into my coffee cup. “I was miserable, too, and instead of talking to her or getting counseling or—literally anything productive, I let the resentment get to me.” I ran a hand through my hair and exhaled as shame pushed down on my shoulders.
“I was angry. I was miserable. And I was so damn selfish.” I chanced a look at her, meeting a hard, closed off expression.
“I have a lot of regrets in my life, and that one is definitely at the top of the list.”
She watched me silently for a moment. “So you did it because you were miserable and you resented Mom.”