“You wanna tell me why my son showed up looking like he just got dragged by a stag?”Dad asks quietly, eyes on his mug.“Or do I have to guess?”
I try to laugh it off.It dies in my throat.
“I messed up,” I say.
“Big or small?”
“Big.”
He nods, like he expected that.“With the team?”
“With Tessa.”
Her name feels like a bruise on my tongue.
Dad doesn’t push.He just takes a slow sip of coffee, waiting me out the way he always did when I came home from school with a chip on my shoulder and some half-truth ready on my lips.
“I hurt her,” I force out.
He raises his eyes to mine.There’s no judgment there.Just that steady Carson calm that used to piss me off as a teenager and now feels like the only thing keeping me from coming apart.
“How?”he asks simply.
The word is a doorway, one I used to turn away from.But I can't keep doing that.
So, I step through it.I tell him about the PR push.About the way the team saw Tessa as a solution before I ever understood the cost.About the folder.The branding strategies.Phrases like "stabilizing image" and "alternate options."
I tell him how I didn’t tell her.How I kept swallowing the truth because I was afraid that if I said it out loud, I’d lose her.How I let the team mould our relationship into something glossy and marketable while she was just loving me, blind to the fact that there was a boardroom somewhere discussing how best to use her.
How I showed up at her house drunk and desperate and turned mean when she wouldn’t give me what I wanted.
How I used her past like a weapon.How I saw the way her face changed, the way her eyes shuttered...
I tell him everything.
Every ugly thing.
By the time I finish, my hands are shaking around the mug, and I feel hollowed out and exposed.
My dad’s jaw is tight, a muscle ticking near his ear.
“That’s not you,” he says softly.
“Feels like it is,” I say, voice cracking.“Feels like I’ve been turning into this guy for years and just pretended not to see it until she held up a mirror.”
He’s quiet for a long moment.
“Maybe,” he says.“Or maybe you got so used to being who everyone else needed that you forgot the difference.”
I blink.“What does that even mean?”
He leans back in his chair, eyes on mine, the way he did when I was seventeen and telling him I was leaving for juniors.
“You remember what you were like out here?”he asks.“Before the calls.Before the drafts.Before a whole city decided they owned a piece of you?”
“Dad...”
“Humour an old man,” he says, holding up a hand.“You were stubborn as hell.Cocky, sure.But you loved it out here.You’d skate on that pond until your toes went numb, then come in and muck stalls with Eli without being asked.You’d throw hay, ride fence lines, and help your mom in the garden.You loved the game.But it wasn’t all you were.You also loved this life.”
