“Your mother doesn’t know I’m here,” he admitted quietly.
I nodded, not surprised.
“She’s still angry,” he continued, staring into his coffee. “But… I’ve been thinking.”
I waited, heart beating a little faster. My father rarely said anything that hinted at disagreement with my mother.
He cleared his throat. “I was angry at first,” he said. “But then I started seeing it from your perspective. We did put you in an impossible position.”
The words were simple. They weren’t a full apology, not really. But they were the closest thing I’d ever heard from him to an admission that I mattered.
I felt my eyes sting. I blinked it away, not wanting to turn it into something dramatic.
We talked for nearly two hours. We talked about boundaries, about expectations, about the different ways they’d treated Vanessa and me. He didn’t promise to change everything. I didn’t ask him to. I’d learned not to build my hopes on other people’s transformations.
