We didn't hug.
Didn't move toward each other with open arms and reconciliation music swelling in the background like some Hallmark bullshit where time healed all wounds and love conquered all.
Just stood there in the morning sun, separated by maybe twenty feet of perfectly manicured grass and too much unspoken shit to ever fully cross, too much damage to ever fully repair.
The distance between us felt permanent.
Micah's voice cut through the silence, gentle and knowing, like he'd witnessed this exact scene before. "I'll leave you to talk."
He walked away without waiting for acknowledgment, footsteps fading back toward the house, leaving me alone with a man I'd buried in my head years ago, a man I'd mourned and resented and tried to forget.
The only thing I could get out of my mouth was: "How?"
One word. That's all I had. That's all my brain could produce from the wreckage of shock.
My father nodded slowly, like he'd expected exactly that question, like he'd been preparing for it for years.
And there was sadness in his eyes—deep, bone-level sadness that I felt echo in my own chest like a tuning fork struck in sympathy, like grief recognizing itself across the divide.
Because that's what this was. Not anger yet. Not rage or betrayal or any of the hot emotions I'd expected.
Just deep, deep sadness.
Like I was looking at what could've been, knowing it never was. Knowing it never would be. No matter what explanation came next, no amount of words could give me back the missing years. No story could return what had been stolen.
"Sit," he said quietly, gesturing to another chair positioned near his, angled toward the water.
I sat. Not because I wanted to. Because my legs wouldn't hold me anymore, because shock was doing strange things to my equilibrium, making the ground feel unstable beneath my boots.
The story that followed ... I couldn't believe it.
Even as I heard it. Even as the words landed one by one like blows. My brain kept rejecting it like a bad organ transplant, kept trying to push it out, label it foreign, impossible.
He started slow, measured, like he'd rehearsed this speech in his head a thousand times. Talking about being part of a pseudo-government organization, something that existed in the shadows between official agencies and complete deniability, funded by black budgets and operated by people whose names never appeared in congressional hearings.
Said the names didn't matter right now, that he'd tell me later if I wanted to know, if I could handle more information stacked on top of what was already crushing me.
"What matters," he said, his voice rougher than I remembered, aged by whatever he'd been doing for sixteen years, "is that I loved your mother very much. More than anything. More than this, more than the mission, more than myown life. And I left to keep you safe. You and your brothers. That was the only reason I ever left."
"Safe how?" I managed, my throat tight, the words scraping out.
He grimaced like he didn't want to tell this part, like it physically hurt to drag it into daylight, to make it real by speaking it aloud.
I braced for impact, shoulders tensing, jaw clenching.
"This is going to sound like science fiction," he warned, meeting my eyes for the first time since I'd sat down.
He wasn't wrong.
He told me about Project Trueborn. About the government—or factions within it, shadow groups with too much money and not enough oversight—wanting to make super soldiers. Captain America shit without the serum, without the comic book morality, without the clean origin story.
About experiments that failed. Over and over. Genetic manipulation that produced nothing viable. Enhanced training protocols that broke people instead of building them, that created monsters instead of heroes.
Until someone figured out the problem.
Until my father figured out the problem.
"They couldn't just breed heroes in a test tube," he said, staring out at the water like he couldn't look at me while saying it, like shame made eye contact impossible. "They had to make them the natural way. Or mostly natural. They had to be raised with love, with lessons, with parents who actually cared. Real childhoods. Real families. Real emotional bonds. That was the variable they'd been missing. The thing all their science couldn't replicate."
