A Baby for the Boss(48)

Peggy spoke up then. “Instead of being there for each other, your dad and I pulled apart until we were each so far from the other, it was as if we were two strangers living in this house together.”

Jack lifted their joined hands and kissed her knuckles. “What’s important is that we found each other again before it was too late.”

“I don’t even know what to say,” Mike muttered. For twenty years, he and his father had sidestepped each other, neither of them willing to talk about the thing that had put a wedge between them.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

“Because you wouldn’t have believed me,” Jack said.

“I guess that’s true enough,” Mike admitted. So much time being angry, letting old pains rule his life, believing that no one could be trusted because he had looked at a situation he didn’t understand through the eyes of a wounded thirteen-year-old boy.

“The point is, honey,” Peggy said, “you’ve been using your father as an excuse to keep everyone at a distance. You’re protecting yourself from being hurt by not letting anything at all touch you.” She shook her head. “That’s no way to live, sweetie.”

She was right, Mike thought. He had been using his father’s betrayal as a way to keep everything and everyone else at a distance. And even with the walls he’d erected around his heart, Jenny had found a way in.

“You never should have been aware of that bump in our marriage,” Peggy said. “And it breaks my heart to see the two of you so far apart.”

Mike looked to his father and in the older man’s eyes, he saw the same sorrow, the same sense of loss that Mike had felt for years. Now he was forced to do some serious thinking. Sean’s words still echoed in his head as he thought back on all the years of sitting in a position of judgment, so sure he was right and everyone else was wrong. He had shut down emotionally. At the ripe old age of thirteen, not knowing anything at all about the world or what adults had to do to survive, he’d made a decision that had affected his entire life.

He had been a kid making a child’s decisions, and he had allowed those decisions to rule him. If he’d once come down off his throne of righteousness and actually talked to the people around him, maybe this tightness around his heart could have been eased years ago.

“What happened wasn’t your fault,” his father said carefully. “You were a boy and you reacted how you had to at the time.”

“Yeah,” Mike said, rubbing his eyes to ease the throbbing headache settled behind them. “But I never let go of that decision. An angry, scared, thirteen-year-old boy chose that day to believe that no one could be trusted.”

His father reached out and laid one hand on Mike’s shoulder, and the heavy, solid strength of that touch seemed to ease away the last of that long-ago boy’s resolve. He looked at his dad and said simply, “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be,” Jack told him. “Parents aren’t supposed to give their kids burdens to carry. And I did that to you. I hurt you, your mother, all of us. It’s something I’ll never forgive myself for.”

Peggy sniffled and swiped tears off her cheeks. “It’s been long enough, hasn’t it?” she asked. “Can we all let it go now and be the family we should be?”

Mike looked at his mother, still holding her husband’s hand as she watched her oldest son with worry and hope at war in her eyes. The old hurts and fears and convictions dropped away, slipping into the past where they belonged, and Mike let them go. He felt as if a weight had been lifted from him and it surprised him to realize just how heavy that burden had been.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling first at his mother and then at his father. “I’d like that.”

Jack grinned, slapped Mike’s shoulder again and then looked at his wife. Peggy gave him a watery smile in return then reached for her son’s hand and held it tightly. “Good. This is good.”

She was right about that. It was good, to get past pain and anger and betrayal. But his father wasn’t the only one he’d judged. Mike thought back to that night in Phoenix when he’d spotted a beautiful blonde in a conference hotel bar. He remembered the rush, the pull toward her, and he remembered the next morning when he’d become judge, jury and executioner without once giving her a chance to explain.

Then those memories morphed into his last image of Jenny, at her house when he accused her of trying to trap him into marriage. He’d done the same damn thing to her all over again.

“Sean’s right,” he muttered. “I am an idiot.”