Pushing the Limits (Secrets Kept 2)

“Thank you. I appreciate it.”

I didn’t call Lane. I didn’t want to worry him until I knew what Dad wanted. He was with Kylie today. He’d told her about us, and the two of them had stayed friends.

An anchor held my stomach down the whole drive out. Even though I hadn’t been in years, I knew my way through the cemetery by heart. I saw my dad ahead, sitting on the ground in front of my mom’s headstone. He had his back to me, but I could tell he was talking to her.

I stumbled a bit but pushed myself to keep going. Dad turned and looked toward me. The sun shined off his gray hair.

“I still miss her,” Dad said, looking at the headstone.

I sighed and sat down beside him. “I still miss her too.”

“It’s hard sometimes, to come to terms with it. I love Helena with all my heart, but I will always love Leslie too. I’ve…I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, how much capacity we have for love. How much our hearts can hold, so many people we can love in so many different ways. How I can be in love with Helena, but a part of my heart will always belong to Leslie. The way I never thought I’d be able to feel that way again about someone until I met her. How love can grow and change. It’s really quite amazing, isn’t it?” He was still looking toward my mom’s headstone and not at me.

“Yeah, Dad, it is.”

He was quiet for a moment, then asked, “I wasn’t always there for you, was I?”

My chest seized. “What? No. You’re a great dad. I’ve always known you love me.”

“Maybe you have, but I wasn’t always there for you. It’s okay. You can tell me. When your mother passed away, I lost myself. And while that’s okay in some ways, it’s not in others, because I was the adult. I was your father, and I got so buried in my own pain, I let you drown in yours, didn’t I?” He looked at me then, tears brimming in his eyes, which pleaded for the truth.

“Yes. But I understood.”

“You were a kid. You shouldn’t have had to.”

“You loved her.”

“I loved you too, and I should have been better at showing it. I shouldn’t have let you feel alone…and you did, didn’t you? Until Lane.”

It was my turn to look down. I wrung my hands together in my lap. “Yes.”

“You were always different with him.”

“I was always at home with him,” I answered honestly. “He knows when to push me and when not to—and he does it. He doesn’t let me get away with anything. He doesn’t expect me to always have it together, to be perfect. He used to ask me about her…talk to me about her when I missed her so much, I could hardly breathe.”

“And I didn’t. I’m so damn sorry for that, son.”

“I know.” And I did. Life wasn’t easy, not for any of us. We all screwed up, we all hurt people we loved, and we were all a little selfish sometimes. We were only human, after all.

“It’s funny… I’ve been thinking a lot lately, about love and the heart, and then I got a delivery, and it was Lane’s painting.”

My gaze snapped to him. “Lane’s painting?”

“He didn’t show you?”

My heart banged against my chest. “No.”

Dad pulled out his phone, found what he was looking for, and handed it over. It was a picture he’d taken of Lane’s painting. I had to zoom in to see the details. It was clear it was of me. He’d painted me so you could see me stitched together at my seams. You could see inside me, and all that was there was a large heart, one too big for my body. It was trying to burst out of my chest, stretching out the stitching holding me together.

There were different versions of me on the same canvas, progressing so that in each one I was a little more filled in, but my heart was still there, still too big to fit inside me, trying to break me open. One after another after another…until the last one, where I was whole. Flesh and blood and bone. My heart was cut in half, my threading tight instead of stretched, and there was Lane, with his hand out to me, the other half of my heart in his chest.

My eyes blurred until I couldn’t see anything other than the water swimming in my gaze. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Fucking Lane. How did I ever get so lucky to deserve him?

“There’s nothing stronger than a heart. It has the power to break us, but to build us up too. Lane’s right, ya know? You’ve always had such a big heart, Isaac. Bigger than you needed, big enough that you could share it with others. Like I said, I was thinking about our capacity for love and how I never thought I’d love again, or that I’d never love anyone but Leslie, until Helena changed that, and I think…I think Lane did that for you. I think you always knew how better than me, but he made it possible for you to share your heart because you knew you could trust him with it. And we can love people in so many ways. While he’s always been one thing to me, he was always something different for you. The same goes for you and Helena…and you were something different for Lane.