Chapter Thirty-Two
Parker
H eather and I prepare the room for lunch service together. I pull the chairs from their upside-down positions on the tabletops and place them on the floor while she wipes each one down with a towel. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Audrey and Jake as we work.
“What’s the story there?” I finally ask Heather.
She looks up from her task and follows my gaze to Audrey as she throws her head back, laughing at something Jake said.
“Jake and Audrey? They have some history,” Heather answers.
“History? What kind of history?”
She shrugs. “He has a thing for her.”
“Does she have a thing for him?” I ask.
“Sure. I mean, who wouldn’t? Look at the guy. He’s good-looking and rich. What’s not to like?” she says.
“So, they what, get together when he’s in town, visiting Brew?”
She stops what she’s doing and places a hand on her hip. “If you want to know whether she and Jake sleep together, you’ll need to ask her yourself. I won’t disclose my friend’s personal business, and you should know better than to ask me,” she scolds me.
“Sorry,” I mumble as I move to the next table.
She huffs out a breath and rolls her eyes. “God, men are clueless sometimes. She would have run off to California years ago if he had any real chance. He’s just someone easy. They’ve hooked up a few times, but there’s no chance of them getting too serious with him living across the country,” she says.
I purse my lips and nod.
Heather laughs under her breath. “You’d better up your game, Parker Alston. This lingering around and staring down every guy who hits on her game isn’t going to get you anywhere.”
“I’m not playing any games.”
She clicks her tongue. “Aren’t you?”
“No. I’ve been very straight with her.”
“You’ve allowed her to define whatever you have going on as just a friendship.”
“What am I supposed to do? I can’t force her into a relationship, Heather,” I snap.
“Do you really think giving her an expiration date was a good idea?”
“A what?” I ask, confused.
“You told her that you could be friends, but come December, you’d walk away. How do you think that made her feel?”
“No, I said that if she would give being friends a try, I’d walk away in December if she wanted me to,” I correct.
She glares at me as if that will make me suddenly understand her point.
“How do you think that sounded to her? The girl you’d abandoned when things weren’t picture-perfect?”
I’m still having trouble understanding what she’s trying to say.
“She wants you to fight for her. She needs assurance that if she lets you back in, you will be there for her, no matter what happens. Even if she makes things extremely difficult, she wants to know you’re not going anywhere,” she says. “It might not be fair to expect that from you, but it’s what she needs to hear.”
Fuck me. I thought giving her an out was the right thing to do, but I was wrong. It’s the thing that she fears most.
“Now, he gets it,” she murmurs.
I take her hand and give it a gentle squeeze. “Thank you,” I whisper, and she smiles back at me. “I need to talk to someone. Can you let Brew know I’ll see him tonight?”
“Sure thing.”
“Rand.”
I knew I had a fifty-fifty chance of finding Audrey’s father in his shop. When I arrive, I find him working on a mid-sized fishing boat on a lift, tinkering with the engine. He looks up from his workbench at the sound of my greeting, his expression stern.
“Come in, Parker. I’ve been expecting you.”
He has?
“Sebby mentioned that you might stop by one day if you ever gathered the courage, and I promised him I’d hear you out if you did.”
“I should have come much sooner,” I say. He grunts as he continues to tinker with the motor, so I proceed. “I owe you an apology for everything that happened back then. I’m sorry. I know I broke your trust.”
He tosses a wrench, and it lands in the toolbox with a loud clank. Then, he grabs a towel and wipes his grease-covered hands.
“You think I care about that? You broke her, son. Losing the baby hurt, but you leaving without a word broke her.”
“I know it did. I was stupid and scared, and I ran like a coward.”
“Why?”
“I thought you hated me, and I couldn’t face you. I was embarrassed because when we left the hospital, I felt relieved. I was even happy. I believed the miscarriage was nature’s way of righting the wrong I had done. But when I looked at her during the ride home, I saw how devastated she was, and I felt something was wrong with me for not feeling the same way. How could I comfort her?”
He lets out a breath. “I didn’t hate you, Parker. I know I was strict, but that was because I didn’t want you two to end up in the situation you did,” he says. “It was natural for you to feel relieved. You two weren’t ready to be parents. That doesn’t mean she didn’t love it. She had been carrying that baby for four months. According to my wife, a mother starts bonding emotionally with her child the moment she sees that positive pregnancy test. So, she was mourning. There was nothing wrong with how she felt, and there was nothing wrong with how you felt. What was wrong was you taking off. A father doesn’t leave.”
His words hit me like physical blows. “A father doesn’t leave.”
He stares me right in the eye as he delivers the next punch.
“And that’s what you were, son. The moment you got her pregnant, you were a father as much as she was a mother. And you abandoned the mother of your child when she needed you most.”
Just like your father.
He doesn’t say the words, but I hear them loud and clear, and it guts me. I became exactly what I had been trying like hell not to be.
I swallow the tears that threaten to fall. “I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t thinking.”
He tosses the towel aside. “I know you didn’t, son,” he says as he grasps the back of my head and pulls me into his chest.
I let the tears fall—tears of mourning, tears of regret, tears of disappointment.
After I let it all out, he sits with me, and I share my experiences in California and Hawaii, my work with Sebby, and my future plans. He doesn’t exactly give me his blessing, but he offers me advice, and he gives me his forgiveness. And that’s a start.