Before he could get a word out, I jumped in to say, “Hey, I’m going to take off.”
“Ada—”
I smiled aggressively at him to prove I was fine, and everything was fine, and we were fine.Cool Girl Mode activated.“I’m just really tired,” I explained unnecessarily. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to get going—”
“Ada.” This time it wasn’t a question. He said my name like a command.
I lost it a little bit. “Charlie, what?”
He flinched at my tone. “I didn’t mean to upset you earlier.”
“You didn’t.”
The apology on his face turned to smug stone. “It’s okay to get upset, Ada. You don’t have to pretend nothing bothers you.”
“God, Charlie, what is this? I’m not paying you for therapy, so back off.”
He softened again, just like that. His moods were as volatile as the... the... honestly, I couldn’t think of a fair comparison. He was just so back and forth. Angry, then sympathetic; demanding, then aggressively compassionate.
And what was worse was that I could handle the hard edges and tough demands. Iwantedto fight. It was the empathy that nearly killed me. It was his stupid compassion that immediately crumbled all my hard-built walls.
“Ada.” This time, it was a whisper, a plea. “What’s going on?”
I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have kept my problems to myself. But it was the way he didn’t accuse me of always being like this. It was how he didn’t bring up my list of crimes and bad attitudes and how I was constantly on his case about everything. He saw that something was wrong now, and he wanted to know what it was.
The tears were back. And I blamed him so I could keep hating him.
Still, I said, “My dad texted me a couple of days ago. He’s back in town and wants to see Adleigh and me.” I waited for Charlie’s inquisitive nature to explode out of him. He wasn’t shy when he didn’t understand something. He asked a million questions until he understood every single angle. But tonight, with nobody else in the building and a million things unsaid between us, he just waited. He just held my gaze and waited for me to feel comfortable enough to share.
So I did. “He left when I was seven. Adleigh was a baby, so she doesn’t remember him at all. But I do. I remember a lot. He didn’t like being a dad, though. My mom said he never felt grown up enough to be the grown-up. So one day, he just left.” My throat felt raw with the effort to hold back the floodgate of tears. “I never heard from him again. He never tried to contact us or see us. My mom tried to get child support for a while, but it was like he disappeared off the face of the planet. Eventually, she gave up because it would have hurt more than it helped. And, I don’t know, I think she wanted to prove we didn’t need anything from him. But then Adleigh was in the local paper a month ago, and he saw her name... and reached out to her. They’ve been chatting for a while. He wants to meet her. And he asked for my number.”
“What an asshole,” Charlie murmured.
I nodded, pressing my lips together so I wouldn’t yell. “Anyway, that’s why I’m all over the place lately. I don’t know what to make of him showing back up in my life when I finally don’t need him anymore.” A shaky laugh trembled out of me. “Maybe that’s why I’m so desperate to stay in my place. Moving out feels stupidly like losing. And I want to prove to him that I’m not a loser.”
“You’re not,” Charlie assured me quickly. “You don’t need to prove it to him. Not even a little bit. You’re not a loser, Ada. You’re amazing.”
My lips lifted in a smile, even if my brain didn’t feel it yet. “Thanks, Charlie.”
He lunged forward until he could grab my hands in his. “Ada, I’m serious. You’re the hardest-working person I’ve ever known. And you’re always right. You’re right so much I find you utterly intolerable.” I surprised us both with a laugh. “You’re quick and witty and hilarious. You’re scary smart. And perfectly intuitive. You worked your way into this job, and you’ve proven over and over and over what an incredible manager you are. And, by the way, you’re so fucking gorgeous it hurts to look at you.” He stepped closer to me, holding our grasped hands against his chest. “And if your dad can’t see that, he’s not worthy enough to be in your life.”
My smile wobbled, my eyes watered, and the little girl inside me wept. How had he dismantled decades of defenses in one—well-crafted—paragraph?
“I don’t want to care,” I confessed. Too many unmanageable truths spiraled through me. The truth was unavoidable. “I don’t want to care about his opinion of me or my life for even a second. Why can’t I convince my brain to give up caring?”
He took one last step toward me and wrapped me in a tight hug. I collapsed against his chest and shivered at the strength and gentleness he held me with.
“Because this isn’t supposed to happen, Ade. Dads aren’t supposed to leave their little girls because they’re too broken to know how to love them. Dads aren’t supposed to hide from their responsibilities and hurt the people who love them.” His hand trailed up my back and tangled in my hair. His palm cradled the back of my head, and it was the most comforting feeling in the world. “There’s nothing wrong with you, Ada. You turned out amazing despite the shitty hand you were dealt. I’m sorry he made you feel like what happened was your fault. It wasn’t. It didn’t have anything to do with you. Even though you should have been every reason to stay.”
I hiccupped a surprised sob against his shirt. I hadn’t expected him to say any of that. I hadn’t expected him to see straight through my heavy, bulletproof armor and get straight to the heart of things.
“Dammit, Charlie.” I winced against his chest. “This isn’t fair.”
He held me tighter, crushing me against the sheer force of his compassion. “I had a shitty dad too,” he confessed. “He didn’t leave, but sometimes I wonder if we would have been better off if he had. He stayed around, but he hurt us. And he kept hurting us. And... what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think there’s a right answer, but there are a million fucking wrong ones. And we spend so much of our life wondering what we could have done differently as little kids to rewrite our hard, ugly stories. We think the craziest thoughts and put all the blame on ourselves, when how could we have known how damaged our parents were? How could we have known that we weren’t the reason they were so battle-scarred and weary?”
We stayed like that for a few minutes as I cried into his shirt, staining it with my mascara, and he just held me close, absorbing tears I’d been bottling up for too long.
When I could finally pull myself together and wipe away some of the wetness off my cheeks, I tried to pull back. With so much of the poison poured out on the ground around me, I was suddenly embarrassed to have used him as a human tissue.
