Page 79 of Burning Love
“She was. No one would argue that. But I know my son. You feel guilty that she died thinking you hated her.”
His shoulders dropped and he looked up at the sky. “I shouldn’t have said that to her.”
“It’s neither here nor there. You said it and you were feeling it at the moment. She understood that. She told me. Once I came back and spent some time with your mother while you were in school.”
“You did?” he asked.
He’d met his father the one day after he’d returned home from walking around town for an hour.
“Yes. I wanted to know everything I could about you. Your life, your personality. Everything I missed. I wanted to know why she did what she had and then where we could go from there. I also gave her the chance to atone for her guilt to me.”
“I’ll never get that.”
His father was right. It was eating at him.
But he couldn’t go back in time. And if he could, he was positive he would have reacted and said the same words he had.
You don’t know what you don’t know and at seventeen, he’d have no idea what this would have done to his mindset.
How he thought of women, treated them, or even his lack of trust.
If the one woman he trusted in his life lied to him, how could he possibly think another woman wouldn’t?
“You won’t. But you can start by not holding onto it. By opening yourself up to other people in your life.”
“I opened myself up to you,” he argued. “Some might say they’d never be able to do that.”
“You did it because you were afraid of being alone,” his father said. “I know that. I also knew that you were like me in personality because your mother told me. Which meant that giving you space and letting you make decisions on your own with options presented would work the best.”
“I don’t know how Mom could think we were so much alike when she only knew you for a month.”
He wasn’t buying this.
His father was a class act and pretty laid back in most instances, but this was a far reach for even him.
“We were close in that month. I can’t explain it to you, but we were. We had a connection.”
“One you easily let walk away, so it couldn’t be that deep.”
His father pursed his lips. “I was twenty-one. Can you tell me that you made the best decisions in your life at twenty-one? At twenty-five? Even at thirty?”
“No.”
“There you go. I’m only telling you what I know, what I felt, and my personal advice. It’s your decision to take it or leave it.”
“This has to do with Kelsey meeting Talia, doesn’t it?”
It’d been two weeks since that happened. Just four days since he’d met Elias Carlisle.
That visit wasn’t nearly as bad as Talia made it out to be.
Sure, Elias got some licks in about the age difference, but he’d expected that.
More of the comments came from Aileen.
He couldn’t fault the woman for caring. His mother might have done the same thing.
Which could be why he was struggling the past few days more than normal around his mother’s birthday.
