Anger washed through Cole but he wasn’t going to pick an argument with a sick man. “Go on.”
“I thought if I treated you with the same hard hand as soon as you started getting out of control, I’d reel you back in. Instead you rebelled harder. That only pissed me off and made me more determined to get through to you on my terms.”
Cole opened his mouth but Jed continued to speak. “They were the only terms I knew. If they worked on me, I didn’t see how it wouldn’t work on you.”
Cole shook his head in disbelief. “You didn’t hate me.” Shit, he’d said that out loud. Cole ran a hand through his hair.
“No, I saw myself reflected in you, and didn’t like what I saw.”
Cole forced himself to breathe before he got dizzy and managed to pull himself together. He hadn’t expected a heart-to-heart with his old man—now or ever. And he wasn’t sure what to do with the information Jed was giving him now. Cole supposed it provided understanding. Forgiveness wouldn’t come overnight, though. The emotional scars Jed had embedded were too deep. How his father treated him equaled how he felt about him, at least in Cole’s mind. And that had permeated every aspect of his life, including his time with Erin.
“I’m sorry I disappointed you,” Cole finally said.
Jed sighed out loud. “It wasn’t that. I just didn’t know how to adapt when things didn’t work. And then your mother and me and all that constant arguing, it wore on me.”
Cole set his jaw. “It wore on her too.”
“Which was why she left, but by that time, I couldn’t see it. I could only blame you.”
He shook his head. “Well, you did a damn fine job of that,” Cole muttered.
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry,” Jed spat.
Cole jerked in his seat. Jed was sorry. He hadn’t said it nicely, but he’d said it. And Cole knew better than to make a production out of it either.
“What happened when I grew up? You couldn’t let it go then?” Cole couldn’t help but ask.
“Your mother left and almost immediately fell for someone else. You idolized that son of a bitch she married. That soft, good guy. And he turned you around. I resented that too.” His father stared at the ceiling, his voice harsher, lower, and his obvious exhaustion leaching the color from his face.
“Dad, get some rest. We can pick this up tomorrow.”
“Finishing it now. Then I don’t want to talk about it again.”
Cole raised an eyebrow. “What made you discuss it in the first place?” He couldn’t contain his curiosity.
“Erin.”
Her name caught him off guard. “How does Erin have anything to do with this?”
For the first time, Jed turned his head and met Cole’s gaze. Cole stared into his father’s dark eyes, eyes that looked so much like his own, unsure of what he was really thinking. Another thing he vowed to do differently: Let his child know there was someone who cared looking back at him.
“She’s a good woman,” Jed said of Erin.
“That she is.”
“And she sees something good and decent in you. Hell, she’d kick my ass if I wasn’t already kicking it myself. Anyway, if someone like her can look at you the way she does, and face off against me on your behalf . . . oh, hell. Between Erin, the things you said to me after surgery, and lying in this bed facing my own mortality, I had to take a long look at myself.” Jed drew a tired breath. “At us.”
Cole didn’t know what to say or how to react. He didn’t even know what this all meant, other than that Jed had had some self-awareness lessons.
“I’m willing to meet you halfway.” Cole put himself out there not for Jed, but for the child Erin was carrying.
Jed’s expression softened. Just a little. “I’m too old to change completely.”
Cole raised an eyebrow. That wasn’t enough for him. But he waited Jed out.
“But I want to try. And I want to know that baby.”
Cole inclined his head, letting out a slow breath of air. “Then you will.” With Cole there watching and making sure that kid was protected from the way Cole had grown up.