Page 47 of A Winter Wish

He grimaced. “I jumped to conclusions I shouldn’t have. I should have known that families are always more complicated than they seem—that you may have been processing things differently or had your own reasons for leaving.”

“Yeah,” she murmured quietly. “Maybe you should have.” But it helped, to understand why he’d disliked her so much at the beginning. To realize it hadn’t really been about her, but some perception of her—the idea that she didn’t love her father, the way she was starting to realize Theo must have loved him. Maybe she should have allowed for that a little more than she had done. She probably hadn’t helped all that much by snapping back all the time.

She hesitated, then said, “I think he tried to tell me. That he was ill. But I wouldn’t let him.”

“Yeah, maybe. Doesn’t put you in the wrong, though.”

“Maybe I should have tried harder to be around.” She felt like she could say it now, out loud.

Theo opened his mouth, closed it, then shook his head. “Look, I don’t know the ins and outs. But I do know what it’s like to have a complicated relationship with your parents. And if he wasn’t around for you, at the time when you needed him the most, if you didn’t think you could rely on him…That’s a lot. I don’t think you can be expected to just turn around and magically move on from that. And looking back, I don’t think he expected that, either. He used to hammer home to me that we couldn’t change our past—but we could try to do better in the future. I thought he was talking about me, because I’d never stuck with anything before I found the company, but I reckon now he must have been thinking about you. I think in the end, he was just sad, and he knew time was up, and he was full of regret.”

To her alarm, Lexie found herself blinking back tears. At the thought of her dad, knowing he was going to die. At the thought of him sitting in the office—the office she now worked in—regretting the past, and feeling sad and alone, because he wouldn’t fully confide in anyone. He’d made her feel sad and alone a fair amount over the years, even if her mum had always been there to pick up the pieces. But still, it hurt to think about.

“Shit,” Theo said, shifting, and raising a hand like he wanted to touch her but wasn’t sure where. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said all that. Crap. Please don’t cry.”

She’d thought she was doing a good job of hiding that, what with her eyes behind her sunglasses, but apparently not good enough.

“It’s just…” Lexie’s voice was thick. “He’s gone. He’s…He’s dead.” She said the word out loud, and her chest cracked. “And it feels like…He hasn’t been my dad properly, in so many ways, since he left. I’ve been so mad about it. But I still remember stuff from before—and stuff from after he left, when he’d show up and he’d be my dad again, you know? And I’m still sad, about losing that dad.”

She took a shuddering breath. “When I was twenty-one, I had this big party planned. I felt weird about it for some reason—turning twenty-one. Like I should be this adult, but I didn’t really feel it, you know?”

Theo just nodded, staying quiet so she could talk.

“Anyway, I’d invited him along. And he’d seemed so happy. I was renting a room at the local pub, and he said he’d bring the cake along—he wanted a job. He was going to pick me and my friend up from my house on the way—my mum had wanted to go early to decorate, and I let her because I thought she might feel weird, being in the same car. It felt like that sometimes, like I had to limit her exposure to him, even if she never said anything. A divorced parents thing, I think. Anyway, he didn’t show. I waited thirty minutes after we were supposed to leave and then called Mum. He messaged to apologize the next day but…well.”

She hugged her knees to her chest. “It’s silly,” she continued quietly. “We made the party. We didn’t have cake, but we made the party. But I was late and flustered, and I ended up crying in the bathroom with Fran that night. And I just decided enough was enough.” She looked down at the grass because it was easier than looking at Theo. “But now, I think I’m realizing that I always assumed there would be another chance. Even though that was years ago, I thought maybe there would be a day when I was ready, and then maybe I’d be able to talk to him without feeling angry. So I miss the person he was to me, before he left, before he let me down—but I also…” She swallowed, and it was painful. “I also feel guilty, for not letting him tell me he was ill, for not giving him a chance—us a chance, to…” But she didn’t know how to finish that sentence. And her voice, which had been steady the whole time, was now breaking.

“He could have tried harder to tell you,” Theo said gently. “If you didn’t know, that’s not on you. It’s because he didn’t really want you to know.”

The tears were still coming despite her best efforts, silently streaking down her face.

She felt Theo shift, then his arm came around her, a heavy, comforting weight.

“Why are you being nice to me?” she mumbled, her voice hitching on a sob. She felt his arm tighten briefly around her.

“Because there was never a reason not to be. It just took me far too long to realize that.”

For some reason, that was enough to break the last hold on herself. She let out another sob and he pulled her toward him, so that she was pressed against his side. She let her head drop onto his shoulder, let his sandalwood scent wrap around her. There were people all around her, enjoying the festivities, and still she could not stop crying.

“I’m sorry,” she said between sobs. “I don’t know how to…”

“You don’t have to.” His voice was calm, and his hand ran up her side and back down again, soothing.

And there, with Theo’s arm around her, Lexie let herself cry for the first time since her dad’s funeral. She cried for the man she’d known as a kid, for the loss of that man when he’d left. And she cried for the man who had died in December, for the man she’d now never get the chance to know.

Theo didn’t offer any words of comfort—like he knew, somehow, that there would be no right thing to say. Instead he sat there with his arm around her, letting her sob it all out—no judgment, just the offer of silent companionship.

Chapter Nineteen

Slowly, Lexie managed to stem the sobs. And when she did, she became distinctly aware of the fact that she was curled up against Theo, his arm still around her, his T-shirt wet from her tears. She pulled away, and he dropped his arm. She slipped off her sunglasses and brushed away the remaining tears. She didn’t want to look right at him, embarrassment at her outburst now curdling in her stomach, along with an awareness of how blotchy and tearstained she must look.

He leaned back onto his palms. “So, one of your wishes was to go to Madrid, huh?”

Lexie laughed, though the sound was a little watery. But it was, in that moment, the best thing he could have done. “Yes,” she said. She took a deep breath. Later. She’d figure out her feelings about her dad later. “It was the wish I made the Christmas after he’d taken Rachel here. I think I was more wishing that he hadn’t left,” she admitted. “Or that he hadn’t chosen to take them and not me, or that I wasn’t so easy to leave behind.” And they, too, were feelings she was still trying to face up to.

“I’m so sorry you had to feel that way,” Theo said quietly. “I should have realized there are always two sides to it. I knew your dad felt guilty, but because of what he’d done for me, I just assumed that the guilt was misplaced—or that he was overexaggerating or whatever.”

She hugged her knees to her chest. “What did he do for you?”