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“Thank you for coming,” he began. “The first thing I want you to know Chloe is that I didn’t leave because I didn’t love you. I loved you very much.”

He turned his intense gaze towards me, and I shivered. “And I loved your mother. So much.”

He returned his gaze to Chloe.

“I don’t know if your mother told you much about how we ended up married? We’d been very careful about protection, but apparently you were bound and determined to come into our lives anyway.”

Chloe gave a half-hearted laugh, and I squeezed her hand under the table.

“Even though we didn’t plan for you, we both loved you so much. But we were impossibly young, only eighteen and fresh out of high school. Both of our parents pushed us to get married and we gave into the pressure. We thought it was what we were supposed to do. But we had no idea what we were doing. We didn’t know how to be adults, let alone parents. We were kids ourselves.”

“That would be hard,” Chloe responded sympathetically.

“This isn’t an excuse, but it’s an explanation. I was an idiot boy. You probably know that male brains continue to develop until their early twenties. Once we were married, well, things were hard. Your mom and I were working all the time, trying to make ends meet in unskilled jobs since we didn’t have a college degree. Babies are a ton of work. After a while, I just felt like I was drowning. I felt trapped and miserable and didn’t know what to do. I even considered killing myself. I had it all planned out.”

I suppressed a gasp. I’d never had a clue that he was that depressed.

“I wasn’t man enough to talk to your mom, or talk to anyone, about how I was feeling. Instead, I plotted my escape. I convinced myself that all of us would be better off if I wasn’t around. That you didn’t need a father who was depressed and miserable. But I knew I needed to meet my responsibilities for supporting you. So, I squirreled away some money, had a lawyer draw up divorce and custody papers, and when the time was right, I got a job on an oil rig in Texas and left.”

He leaned forward, his face earnest. “When I think of myself at twenty, I want to go back in time and kick my own ass. I would give anything to have handled things differently, but I can’t change the past. I can only tell you, tell you both, that I’m so very sorry for how I handled things. Leaving you like that is my biggest regret.”

The waitress came with our food, and we all paused until she was gone. As we dug into our breakfast, Chloe spoke up.

“If you regretted it Dad, why did we never hear from you until now?”

Griff winced slightly.

“The longer I was gone, the more I convinced myself that you were both better off without me. I figured if I stopped in for a visit and then went back to whatever job I was working at, it would just be disruptive to you. At first you were too little to understand anyway, and when you were older, I told myself you both hated me anyway so I should leave you alone. I decided not to rock the boat, no matter how much I wanted to see you again. And I did want to see you again. I thought of you both almost every day.”

“You could have given us a phone number, an email address, something, and let us decide whether to contact you or not,” I told him.

Griff nodded as he took a bite of his eggs. “You’re right. And I wish I had. I was wrong.”

That was another thing that had changed about Griffin. He’d been much more stubborn when we were younger, and never able to admit when he was wrong.

“You moved to Texas but now you’re in Phoenix?” Chloe asked.

“Kind of. I moved to Texas and then I moved up and down the west coast...Oregon, Alaska, Washington, California. I’ve been all over, but recently I was in Phoenix. That brings me to why I decided to come here. My father died.”

“My grandpa died?”

“Yes. Did you know him?”

He looked between us curiously and I shook my head.

“Your parents told me in no uncertain terms that they believed I was responsible for you leaving, and asked me to never contact them,” I explained. “Chloe didn’t just lose her father, she lost her paternal grandparents too.”

He winced but didn’t respond. At least my own parents had been around most of Chloe’s childhood, although they were both gone now.

“I heard your mom died, and that your dad moved away,” I told Griff, “but that’s all I ever knew about them.”

“Sounds about right,” he said. “You know my parents were always assholes.”

I nodded. This was true. His parents had always been shitty to me, thinking I wasn’t good enough for their precious son. The only good thing about Griff leaving was that he’d cut them off too. Of course they deserved it. Chloe didn’t.

Suddenly Griff reached across the table, trying to steal a slice of my bacon. The move was reminiscent of almost every meal we’d ever had. He’d always had a bigger appetite and had helped himself to my leftovers the minute he thought I was done eating. I waved my fork at him.

“Do it and I stab you with my fork. You should know better than to get between me and my bacon.”