“I’m sorry too, Dad,” he said.
“I know.”
“No. I need to say it right.”
His voice caught. He kept going.
“I saw what was happening. I knew Chelsea was disrespectful to you. And I kept telling myself it wasn’t serious, because I didn’t want to deal with it. And when you needed me to say something, I looked down at my drink.”
My eyes stung.
“That’s the part I remember,” I said.
“I know.”
“I didn’t need you to choose me over your wife, son.”
“I understand.”
“I needed you to choose what was right.”
“I should have.”
“Yes,” I said.
The simple answer hurt him more than anger would’ve.
I sat down across from them.
For a few minutes, we weren’t a father and son and daughter-in-law surrounded by legal documents.
We were just three people trying to talk honestly after years of avoiding what honesty costs.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about the money?” Logan asked.
“Because I wanted you to build your own life. Without measuring every decision against what I might give you.”
“You could’ve told me the collateral was temporary.”
“I did. At the bank.”
He looked down. “Yeah. You did.”
“It wasn’t a test,” I said. “I wasn’t waiting for you to fail. I thought you were a grown man making a grown man’s decision.”
“I was acting like a kid.”
“You were acting like somebody who’d gotten used to being rescued.”
He didn’t argue.
I looked at Chelsea.
“You weren’t wrong to feel uncomfortable about my help. I should’ve made the arrangements clearer. I shouldn’t have let either of you believe my support had no limits.”
“I thought you were judging us,” she said.
“Sometimes I was disappointed.”
She flinched.
“But I never thought you were bad people,” I said. “I thought you were scared people making expensive choices.”
Chelsea gave a small, pained smile.
“That might be worse.”
“It’s more accurate.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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