I stared at him, an odd feeling simmering inside me.
“You must know, it pains me you’re looking at me like that,” he stated tersely. “In the world you built around yourself, Alexandra, did you convince yourself I showed you no love?”
I was unprepared for the attack.
“Dad—”
“Do you not understand why I chose this room to have this talk?”
And now he sounded hurt.
The Degas.
My hands were on my lap, but they went to the armrests to hold on.
Dad didn’t miss it.
“You don’t,” he whispered.
“Because I was in here a lot, and you know it’s my favorite place in the house.”
“Yes, because of that, and because of that desk over there.”
I looked across the room at the writing desk.
The writing desk that had not, when I was much younger, been there.
The writing desk that Dad had purchased at auction at Sotheby’s. It had some important lineage, like George Washington or Ben Franklin used it at some point. It was gorgeous and worked perfectly in the room. And around the time I started spending a lot of it in that room with my books, that desk showed up.
And sometimes, not often, but sometimes, when I was sitting right where I was right now reading, Dad would come in and work at that desk.
Not in his study that was just across the hall.
At that desk.
In the library.
With me.
Oh my God.
“This is our room, Alexandra.”
I felt them trembling at the edge of my eyes when I turned my attention from the desk to him.
“By the time I lost you,” he said in a voice that was nearly a whisper, “I didn’t know how to reach you. So I settled for being close to you.”
I struggled with holding back a sob.
Dad cleared his throat.
“I shouldn’t have said what I said yesterday,” he announced. “I’m a grown man. I was wounded by your words, regardless that I deserved them, and because of that, I behaved like a child.”
He shifted in his seat uncomfortably, cleared his throat again.
And then continued.
“I was also feeling vulnerable. Your defense of me was unexpected. Welcome, my darling. But unexpected. It has not escaped me that we all have felt cast adrift in our own ways in this family, me included. However, it was my responsibility to reel each of us in. I failed in that. But I had always thought that you and I…”
He trailed off, but instead of finishing, caught another thread.
“Your sister does have her charms. She doesn’t allow them to be seen very often, but they’re there. But I was close with my mother. You were close with her. We shared that. We had a bond. You were like her. A quieter version of her, but very like her. I loved her. And I love you.”
“Dad,” I whispered.
He held my gaze.
And even lower, he kept talking.
“When you were a little girl, you were mine. Your mother hated it. Detested it. She had no interest in you or your sister, but she didn’t like I had interest in you. The both of you. I got lost in the disintegration of my marriage. Your grandfather got ill, and more responsibility fell to me. He died, and then all of it fell to me. And I lost you in the meantime. It wasn’t that we were inseparable, but you’d wake up and your nanny knew to bring you directly to me. You crawled in my lap and sat there while I had breakfast. I read to you before you fell asleep. That stopped because you got older. It stopped because I wasn’t around for us to allow that to shift naturally to something else. And it stopped because you pulled away from me.”
“Dad, I’m so sorry. I don’t remember any of that from when I was young. I just remember you not being around very much,” I told him, saw something unhappy shift in his eyes, and quickly went on, “But I didn’t…I can’t imagine it was conscious that I—”
His head bobbed as he cut me off.
“Your mother and I fought, and it was ugly. Of course you’d find places to be where you felt safe, because that was not safe. I was dealing with other things. I lost both my girls in all of that, Alex. I don’t blame you. You were not the adult in that situation. You were not parent to my child. I was your father. It was up to me. But that said, I missed you.”
“I…I…Dad, this means a lot. So much. But I don’t know what to say.”
“I don’t mean for you to say anything. I’m not defending myself, but explaining. I don’t know why it is. You’d left home, went so far away. All the mischief your sister’s been up to. I don’t know why this wedding has shaken something in me. Perhaps it’s that she’s marrying a man so completely unworthy of anybody.”