I hadn’t seen my father in nearly a year, so I could only imagine how surprised he was when I showed up on his doorstep. If I had to guess, it would probably be about as shocked as I was to be standing there.

“Is everything okay?”

“No,” I said. “I’m here to tell you how not okay things are and why you’re the reason for it.”

His brows rose. “That may take a while. You want to come inside?”

I walked past him for two reasons: it was cold and I didn’t drive all the way out here just to leave. My eyes scanned everything as I followed him to the kitchen. He’d moved into this house with Mariah and the half-brother I had but hadn’t met. My brother had. Of course, he’d met him. He’d also forgiven my father for being an awful, no-good man and welcomed his new wife and son with open arms. Sam was a better man than I was and his cancer diagnosis had made him re-evaluate everything in his life. He’d said that to me once and while I understood it, I couldn’t imagine myself doing the same if I was in his position.

The kitchen was homey, with kitchen towels that said things like “Chop it like it’s hot” and “Don’t go bacon my heart.” Shit, my dad never would have allowed those in my mother’s kitchen. He sat on a stool. I stood. I wasn’t about to make myself comfortable.

Hell, I wanted him to be as uncomfortable as I felt, but that didn’t look as if it were going to happen.

“I just found out that I have a son,” I said, cutting through the bullshit. He leaned forward and rubbed his jaw. “And of all the emotions that are supposed to come with that knowledge, the one I keep going back to is uncertainty. My entire life I have told myself I wouldn’t become you and it took me this long to realize that maybe I already have. All I do is work and think about the company. I haven’t taken a vacation or a sick day in five years, and even though I was completely blindsided by the knowledge of a son, I haven’t once in the last twenty-four hours made an effort to go see him.”

“How old is he?” Dad asked. He seemed to be having trouble getting the words out.

“A little over three.”

He glanced away momentarily, when his blue eyes met mine again, they looked wary. “I don’t know what you want me to tell you, Rowan. I can apologize, like I did with Sam, but I have a feeling that I can sit here and apologize until I’m blue in the face, and you’d still hate me.”

“You never once hugged us,” I said. “You never once told us you loved us or that you were proud of us.”

“And for that, I’m sorry. I’m not sure if you’ve been paying attention, but I didn’t grow up with an incredible father either.”

I swallowed. “That’s my fear. You didn’t break the cycle. How can I be sure I will?”

“You can’t be sure.” He shrugged. “What does your mother say?”

“I haven’t told her.”

“Does Sam know?”

“He knew before I did.”

Realization flickered in his eyes. “Tessa’s boy.”

Tessa’s boy. Why did my heart skip a beat when he said that? I nodded once but kept quiet because I knew when Dad wasn’t done talking and for once, I wanted to hear what he had to say.

“I haven’t met him,” he said. “Sam talks about him often and I keep in touch with the Montes. They’re crazy about their grandson.” He smiled as he said that but then sobered. “I’m assuming Camryn doesn’t know.”

I tensed. This was it. I’d given him the perfect opportunity to get back at me for all the awful things I’d said to him. For every time I’d thrown his extramarital affair and illegitimate son in his face. I waited, the anxiety bunching between my shoulder blades.

“Why don’t you take a seat?” he asked instead. I swallowed past the lump that seemed to have become a permanent fixture in my throat and dropped onto the seat across from him.

“My life is different,” he said with a chuckle, waving a hand. “I know you can see the difference, but I don’t just mean this. I mean everything has changed. I’ve changed and I’m sorry that you and your brother got the short end of the stick and grew up while I still had a lot of growing up to do myself. You have to understand that I did the best that I could. It’s all we can do.”

“I don’t know the first thing about being a father.” I clenched my jaw to get a hold of my emotions.

Dad smiled. “Neither do I and here I am, doing it for a third time.”

I tore my gaze from his. My eyes landed on a picture of him, Mariah, and a little boy all smiling at the camera. It was his smile that nearly broke my heart in two. It looked genuine. Dad looked older than he did in family pictures when I was a kid and ten times happier. He was actually smiling. Really smiling, eyes crinkling with amusement. The three of them looked so . . . happy.

“He’s a good kid. Reminds me a lot of you,” he said and my throat closed up because it was the first nice thing about me that he’d ever said. “He tries so hard to please me and you know what? He does, just like you did when you were his age.”

He gestured toward the pictures hanging on his wall, and I nod, spotting the few he had of Sam and me.

“I speak to him about you. Sam comes around often enough, but Harrison is always asking about you. It’s as if he relates to you even though he’s only ever seen photographs of you.” I could hear the smile in his voice, but I didn’t acknowledge it because I wasn’t sure that I could without bleeding emotions all over the damn place.

I didn’t bleed.

But I did crack.

“Maybe I can meet him sometime.” The words left my mouth before I had a chance to stop them.

“I’d like that.” He paused momentarily. “How’s the company? Did your grandparents sign the contract?”

“It’s been with their lawyer for weeks, but they’ll sign it. I’m offering more than the company’s worth.” I didn’t have to since I owned a higher percentage than they did at the moment. After I took over as CEO, I made it so that they couldn’t really see the entirety of our profit, so they didn’t know that I was paying them less than they were worth. It was sneaky, yes, but that was the way they liked to play, and I wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of this.

“You’ll get it,” he said. “What’s going on with the contract? Is Camryn ready to get out?”

I scoffed. “She’s refusing to sign the papers.”

“Does she think you have a chance at a real family?”

“She already moved out. Not entirely by choice, but it isn’t like we ever acted like a real couple,” I said. Dad raised his eyebrows in response. “She just wants control.”

“Maybe she knows something’s up.”

“She wouldn’t.” I shook my head. The last thing I needed was for her to find out about Miles and make this more difficult than it already was.

“You need to be careful. I’m assuming if Tessa didn’t tell you about him it was for a reason.”

“She saw a picture of Camryn at a party or somewhere and there was cocaine in the picture,” I said by way of explanation. I’d never condoned drug usage. I’d always been far too involved in my health and fitness to want to put a substance like that into my body, but to someone like Camryn cocaine was like having a social cigarette. I said this to my father, but he looked doubtful.

“I wouldn’t want my son around that either,” he said finally.

“Like I said, Camryn moved out months ago, and even before then she’d been carrying on an affair with some guy in the city. She was barely home.” I closed my eyes. It didn’t matter what I said or how I justified any of it, I’d lost three years with my son and couldn’t blame anyone but myself for it. “I need to find a way to fix all of this. I guess I can figure out the how to be a father thing later.”

Dad leaned back in his seat. “Do you remember how you felt about me when you were little?”

My first thought was to say I hated him, but that wasn’t quite right. I truly hadn’t started holding a grudge against him until I found out about the affair and the kid he had. Before then, I’d looked up to him, despite it all.

“I wanted to be just like you.”

“Kids don’t see parents as good or bad. You can be the worst person in the world and your children won’t realize it until they’re faced with the same situation and it suddenly clicks that maybe their father wasn’t right to tell his child that he didn’t bleed,” he said, a sense of sorrow in his eyes.

“Maybe I wasn’t right to push you the way I did or take my own unhappiness out on you. Maybe I should’ve let you sleep in and go to the baseball field with your brother. I made so many mistakes, Rowan. Sometimes I sit and look at the pictures of you and your brother and wish I could go back and fix it all. I’d try to be more loving and show you how important you are. I’d treat you the way you deserve to be treated. I’d hug you and thank you for saving me, because you did, you saved me every damn Saturday because having you in my passenger seat ensured that I wouldn’t drive off a cliff. You can judge me all you want. You have every right to. But you can’t know the pain that lived inside me, a pain you had nothing to do with even if I made you feel that way sometimes. I can’t go back and right my wrongs, son, but I can apologize today and try to be a better father going forward.”

He stood and came around the table. I sat with a clenched stomach, unsure of what was happening, and then he wrapped his arms around me and gave me a hug. I was bigger than my father, taller, more muscular, but in that moment, I felt small. In that moment, I felt like a needy six-year-old.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a hoarse voice against my hair. “I’ll try to be a better man.”

Something inside me shattered. Tears rolled down my face without preamble. I heard him exhale onto me, but his arms never let up, and I realized that this was what I’d been waiting for my entire life, and the only thing I managed to do was hope that I could provide the same for someone else.