This Cruel Love

“You don’t think I suffer too? What, you think it’s easy being me? Not knowing what version of myself I’ll wake up to? Will it be a day I can cope with, or will my fucked up brain keep me a prisoner in my own mind? You think feeling worthless and empty is fun for me? How I feel, it isn’t a choice. It just is what it is.”

I could see the visceral pain reflected in his eyes. I knew the struggles he’d been through in his life, battling demons he carried with him wherever he went. The dark clouds and the black dog he talked about. I’d read up on it, tried to help him, but how can you fight someone else’s battles when they don’t know how to fight themselves? Sure, we’d all badgered him to get counselling, but he was stubborn as shit and always thought he knew better. He thought he had it all under control.

“Harry, you do what you gotta do. I’m not trying to take your place as Ryley and Travis’s father. I just want a chance to love Nina, to be with her.”

“But Nina isn’t a single woman, Rob. She’s a mum, and a damn good one. This isn’t about you and her anymore.”

I knew from the darkened glaze that fell over his eyes that he knew where I was coming from. He thought it’d all be so simple. Nina would leave me, Ryley would come too and they’d all live happily ever after. He needed to take off the rose-tinted glasses and see this for what it was.

“I won’t give her up, Harry.”

“Neither will I.”

Present day…

“Then I left. I left his office and got back in my car. I swear to God, I didn’t hear the gun go off. If I’d have known that’s what he was gonna do I would’ve stayed, talked him down.”

He was crying now, his face full of remorse, guilt, and overwhelming loss. The way Harry described it, the emotions, the tension, all of it felt real. And for the first time in seventeen long, painful as fuck years, I felt the tension in my shoulders begin to ease up slightly. The weight of guilt that I’d carried around with me like a millstone around my neck was lightening too. I believed him. I believed Harry.

My father was a complex man, with a lot of pent-up dark and dangerous emotions. It made sense to me that he felt the burden of breaking up a family. Taking children away from their home, their father. As Harry went on to explain how the guilt of stealing Nina and Ryley away must’ve eaten him up, I agreed.

My protective walls were crumbling one brick at a time, letting the emotions I’d had on lockdown for so long come through. My father took his own life because he couldn’t handle being in his life. He couldn’t deal with the consequences of what he’d done. Yes, he took the coward’s way out, but that’s how it would appear to outsiders. To the ones that knew him, really knew him, he was ill. He needed help and he didn’t get it. His death was a tragic fucking mistake that he made and we all lived with. But he couldn’t help it, he wasn’t well.

“We’re so sorry that you had such a shitty life, Jackson. We never wanted that for you,” Nina sobbed. “You deserved better.”

I wasn’t in the mood to rip off another band aid and spill the whole sorry saga about my fucked up aunt. Her snorting, injecting, and drinking my dad’s inheritance away wasn’t a story for today. I doubt I’d be able to tell that story ever again. What was the point? It was over now. It was shit at the time, but I got through it. Now I have money, money I’d made myself off my own back. Not always by legal means, but who gives a fuck? I did what I had to do to survive.

“There’s one more thing we think you should know.” Nina looked across at Harry as she spoke and he nodded solemnly before pouring that glass of whiskey he’d denied himself before, and knocking it back in one go.

“This isn’t something we’ve talked about with anyone else, but if you decide you want to change that after today, we will be open to that.”

I had no fucking clue what she was on about.

“Just spit it out, Nina. I think we’ve had enough riddles for one day.” Harry sighed.

Nina cleared her throat and stood from the sofa. She walked over to where I sat and placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Rob, your father and I…” Her eyes met Harry’s across the desk before looking back down at mine, “…we were going to have a baby.” She held her breath, waiting for my response.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” I didn’t know what else to say. What do you say to a woman about her miscarriage or whatever had happened back then?

“What do you mean?” She wrinkled her brow in confusion.

“You lost a baby. I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t lose a baby, Jackson. I had a beautiful, healthy baby boy. Your brother… and he’s sitting right down the hall in our kitchen, talking to his other brother and sister.”

I felt sick. I couldn’t believe what she was telling me. This was fucked up. I had a brother? Ryley’s brother was my brother? Jesus, this was too much.

“Does he know? Do any of them know?” I was shaking with fear. I couldn’t lose her over this. Something like this could blow her world apart. She’d been through enough.

“No. Like I said, we haven’t spoken about this to anyone else. The only people who know the truth are sitting in this room.”

I looked across at Harry who was breaking all over again. His son wasn’t his.

“You raised him as your own? You’ve never told him?”

He lifted his head and the hurt I saw almost killed me. He was bracing himself, ready to lose a child, just like he had that day in my father’s office.