We sat in silence for a while, two broken men holding onto each other while the waterfall sang its endless song and the wind carried scents that might have been memory or might have been something more.
“I need to know what really happened to her,” I said eventually, because pretending ignorance wasn't an option anymore. “Not the sanitized version you gave me when I was little. The truth. All of it.”
Dad went very still beside me, and I felt the subtle shift in his posture that meant he was retreating into Alpha mode, weighing the cost of honesty against the price of continued deception.
“Evan...”
“No.” I pulled away, turning to face him fully. “No more protecting me from uncomfortable truths. No more assuming I can't handle it. I'm not twelve years old anymore, and people are dying because I don't know enough about our family's history to see threats coming.”
Dad was quiet for a minute.
“She was cursed.” He said quietly, the words falling between us like stones into still water.
The simple statement reframed everything I thought I knew about Mom's death, turned months of watching her waste away into something darker and more deliberate. Someone had murdered her slowly, piece by piece, while I threw tantrums about not being allowed to play in the forest.
“Cursed by who?” My voice came out steadier than I felt, seventeen years of suppressed grief crystallizing into something harder and more focused.
“Isolde Duvall,” Dad said, and the name tasted like poison on his tongue. “A witch who lived on the edges of our territory back then. She'd been causing problems for years, cursing pack members with nightmares and illness, testing the boundaries of our patience.”
“And you killed her for it.”
“We did what we had to do to protect the pack.” Dad's jaw tightened, Alpha authority bleeding through his grief. “By the time we figured out she was responsible for your mother's condition, Claire was already dying. The curse had eaten too deep, done too much damage. Stopping Isolde couldn't save her.”
I absorbed this information slowly, turning it over in my mind like a puzzle piece that didn't quite fit the picture I'd been carrying all these years.
“But you're not sure it was her,” I said, reading the doubt in his expression. “You killed someone based on suspicion, not proof.”
Dad flinched like I'd hit him. “We found evidence. Ritual components in her cabin. Your mother's hair woven into curse dolls. It was enough.”
“Enough to justify murder, but not enough to save Mom.”
“Enough to make sure no one else suffered the way she did.” Dad's voice hardened, Alpha steel creeping in to armor him against accusations he'd been making against himself for years. “I'd do it again, Evan. I'd burn down half the county if it meant keeping our family safe.”
The fierce protectiveness in his voice was exactly what I'd expected, but underneath it I caught something else. Uncertainty.
“You think you killed the wrong person,” I said, and watched him crumble.
“I don't know.” The admission came out broken, scraped raw by seventeen years of second-guessing and sleepless nights. “Fuck, I don't know. Isolde died cursing our bloodline, swearing revenge on the Callahan name. But the forest still feels wrong, still carries echoes of something dark and patient and hungry for pain.”
Dad's tears came then, silent and devastating. This was what command cost, I realized. The weight of decisions that couldn't be undone, the responsibility for lives lost and saved and forever altered by choices made in darkness and desperation.
“I failed her,” he whispered, voice breaking on the words. “I failed your mother, and I failed you, and I've spent every day since wondering if things would have been different if I'd been stronger or smarter or quicker to act.”
“Dad...” I reached for him, but he shook his head, lost in the spiral of guilt and regret that had been eating him alive from the inside.
“You stopped talking because of what you said to her, but I knew it was more than that. I knew you were blaming yourself for not being able to save her, and I couldn't find the words to tell you it wasn't your fault when I was drowning in the same guilt.”
We'd been two broken people trying to heal each other while bleeding from identical wounds, too proud or too afraid to admit that neither of us knew how to stop the pain.
“I should have told you the truth sooner,” Dad continued, tears falling freely now. “But I was so afraid of losing you too, so terrified that knowing about curses and witches would send you running toward dangers I couldn't protect you from.”
“Like it did anyway,” I said softly, thinking about Nate and the supernatural war that had already claimed too many innocent lives.
“Like it did anyway,” Dad agreed, laughing bitterly. “Turns out trying to keep you safe from our world just made you more vulnerable when it finally came for you.”
We sat in silence again, father and son united in grief and guilt and the slow, painful process of rebuilding trust that had been fractured by seventeen years of careful omissions and protective lies.
“I'm glad you found Nate,” Dad said eventually, voice rough but steady. “Your mother would have loved him, you know. Would have seen the same thing in him that brought you back from wherever you went after she died.”
