His Father
935 Words
He is unreachable for two hours after the hearing.
I do not push. I go back to the building, I go to the project room, I spread my materials across the table and I work, or I do the thing that looks like working while most of my attention is on the door.
At six o’clock he comes in.
He does not look like himself. He looks like himself with something underneath disrupted, like a structure that is still standing but is no longer certain of its foundations. He sits down across from me and he looks at the table for a moment and then he looks at me.
I say: “Do you want coffee?”
He says: “No.”
I close the blueprint in front of me. I fold my hands on the table. I wait.
He says: “She had no right to use that in a council chamber.”
“No,” I say. “She did not.”
“She has known about my father for twelve years. She knew because she was close enough to this family at one point to have been trusted with things that were not public.” He pauses. “That trust was misplaced apparently.”
I say: “Tell me about your father.”
He looks at me.
I say: “Not the version you give people when they ask. The real one.”
He is quiet for a long moment. He looks at the table. He looks at his hands. Then he says: “My father was the most capable man I have ever known. He built this company from three employees and a leased office. He built the eastern territory’s pack structure into something that held. He was the kind of Alpha other Alphas measured themselves against.”
He stops.
I say: “What happened to him?”
He says: “He had a mate. His true bonded mate. And she was killed.”
The room is quiet.
He says: “Not an accident. It was deliberate. Enemies of the pack who understood that you do not destroy an Alpha by killing him. You destroy him by taking the bond. My father survived the attack. He was physically unharmed. But the bond broke when she died and what happened after that was not grief. Grief would have been something he could have moved through.” He pauses. “What happened was structural. Like watching a building lose the wall it was built around. He did not collapse. He listed. Slowly, over four years, further and further, until there was nothing left of him that resembled the man who built everything.”
I say: “How old were you?”
“Nine when it started,” he says. “Nineteen when it finished.”
“And your mother?”
He says: “She was not his bonded mate. He had been bonded before her, before she came into his life, and she knew that and she chose him anyway because she loved him. And she watched what happened to him and she tried to hold what remained together and the trying cost her everything she had. She spent three years trying to repair something that could not be repaired and when she could not she had nothing left underneath.” He looks at the table. “I was twenty when I stood at the second grave.”
I do not say anything. I let him finish.
He says: “I understood what the bond was after that. Not a gift. A liability. A structural weakness built into the architecture of anyone who lets it fully form. I decided, standing in the rain at twenty years old, that I was not going to be someone who could be hollowed out the way my father was hollowed out. So I made arrangements. Eight years of them.”
The room is very quiet.
I look at him across the table, this man who watched two people be destroyed by the same thing and spent eight years building pharmaceutical walls against it and met me in a conference room and felt those walls begin to crack in the first week.
I say: “You did not build the suppressant because you were afraid of love. You built it because you watched love become the weapon someone used to destroy your family.”
He says nothing.
I say: “That is not the same thing as being broken, Damien. That is a man who understood exactly what happened and made the only decision that made sense with what he knew.”
He looks at me.
I say: “The information changed though.”
He says: “What?”
I say: “You said you made the decision with the information you had. The information changed. So the decision changed. That is not weakness. That is just being someone who updates when the facts update.”
He is very still.
I say: “When did the information change?”
He says: “The moment you walked into that conference room.”
I hold his gaze. I say: “You are not your father. And I am not going anywhere.”
He has no answer for that. He just looks at me and the fault line in his expression opens all the way, wider than I have ever seen it, and what comes through it is not grief and is not the controlled careful man I have been watching for months.
It is something I have not seen on him before.
It looks, for the first time, like relief.
- Writer
