Page 49 of You, Only You

"You're scared," he continued. "Good. Stay scared. The day you stop being scared is the day you should worry."

"That's not exactly comforting, Dad."

"It's not supposed to be comforting. It's supposed to be true." He attempted a smile. It came out crooked and sad and human. "Comfort is what I gave your mother for twenty-four years. 'Everything's fine, Katherine. Don't worry about the money, Katherine. I've got it handled.' Comfort was a lie. I'm done with those."

Something cracked open in my chest. Not the careful, analytical crack of finding a discrepancy in a spreadsheet. A messier crack. The kind that comes with tears and snot and thehumiliating loss of composure in a room full of plastic chairs and bad lighting.

"I don't know how to forgive you," I heard myself say. "For what you did to us. To Mom. To all those people."

He nodded, accepting it. "I don't know how to forgive myself either."

"But I think..." I stopped, swallowed. "I think I'm tired of being angry. I think the anger was protecting me from something, and I don't need that protection anymore."

His hand was still there, on the table between us. Weathered. Older than I remembered. The bare ring finger. The thumbnail he'd bitten down to nothing, a habit he'd never had before prison.

I reached out and covered it with mine.

He inhaled sharply, his eyes widening. For a moment, he just stared at our hands, his beneath mine, my fingers curling around his. When he looked up, tears were tracking down his face. He didn't wipe them. He just let them fall, and the fact that he let them fall, that he didn't perform composure or pretend to be fine, told me something about how much he'd changed. My father, the old version, never would have let anyone see him cry.

"Lindsey..."

"I'm not saying everything's okay." My voice was wet and thick and I didn't care. "I'm not saying I forgive you completely. But I'm saying... I see you. The real version. Not the headline. And I don't want to spend the rest of my life running from your shadow."

He turned his hand over and squeezed mine, his grip surprisingly strong.

"I love you," he said, the words rough with emotion. "I know I don't have the right to say that anymore. But I do. I always have."

"I know, Dad." I squeezed back. "I know."

We sat like that for a while. Not talking. Just holding hands across a prison table, which was not a sentence I ever thought I'd use to describe a turning point in my life, but there it was. The fluorescent lights buzzed. A guard coughed in the corner. Somewhere, another inmate's child was crying, and the sound was small and far away and perfectly ordinary.

When I finally let go, my father wiped his face with the back of his hand and tried to smile.

"Tell me about him," he said. "Not the case stuff. The other stuff. What's he like?"

"Impossible. Controlling. He makes omelets that should be illegal."

"Controlling how?"

"He installed a tracking app on my phone."

My father's expression went dark. "Lindsey..."

"He deleted it. I found it, I called him out, he deleted it. And then he called his sister and sat in the dark for two hours learning how to feel afraid without doing anything about it."

Dad processed that for a moment. "So he's trying."

"He's trying. He's bad at it. But he's trying."

"Is that enough?"

"I don't know. I'll let you know."

"You sound like me. Before everything went wrong." He held up a hand before I could respond. "I don't mean that as a warning. I mean... you sound like someone who's in love and doesn't know what to do about it. That's not a bad thing, Linds. That's just a scary thing."

I didn't confirm or deny. I didn't need to. He could see it on my face the way everyone could apparently see it on my face, which was another thing I was going to have to reckon with eventually.

"Be honest with him," my father said. "That's the only thing I know for sure. If you're scared, say so. If you have doubts, say so.The lies are what poison it." He looked at our hands, no longer touching, on opposite sides of the table. "I built a marriage on secrets and it killed everything I loved. Don't do what I did. Even the kind lies. Even the ones that feel like they're protecting someone. Especially those."