Page 89 of The Hero + Vegas = No Regrets

“Oh god, Sophia. I hope one day someone can sit in judgement of the life you’ve lived. This wasn’t some plan to annoy you. Life happens.”

“Annoy me? Is that what you think I am? Annoyed?”

“Well, aren’t you?”

“It’s not the adjective I would have started with. I probably would have started withheartbroken. Then I might have moved on todevastated.Cheatedthat my father wasn’t actually the wonderful, loving father I thought he was—the hardworking man who sacrificed time with the family he loved in order to provide us with a better life. That was the way you and Mom always framed it. You traveled because you loved us so much. But the opposite was actually true, wasn’t it? You traveled so much, because you didn’t love us enough to stay faithful to your wife and family.”

The betrayal hits me again, like a knife to the chest. It’s so hard and sharp that my breath catches, and I cough into the frigid air.

“It’s worse that you don’t see it,” I say in a whisper. “That you’re trying to justify what you did.” I sigh as I talk into the silence. “But then, why wouldn’t you? If you had to confront the man you truly are, you’d be as horrified as I am.”

I’ve never spoken so directly to my father. It never occurred to me that I ever would. This isn’t the man I kept on a pedestal my whole life. This man is weak. Pathetic. Someone who tricked me into loving him.

“I don’t want to fight with you,” he says. “I just want you to see my side.”

“What side is that, Dad?”

Silence tightens between us and I’ve never felt so… untethered as I do right now. He was always my port in the storm. Even though I was closer to Mom in lots of ways, Dad was the one who’d come back and blanket us in a feeling that everything was always going to be okay, so long as he was there.

He was never the man I thought he was.

“I was young,” he says.

I can’t decide if he’s trying a different tack, now that he knows I’m not going to be brought down by the “you were fine” argument, or the “you don’t know what you’re talking about” strategy.

“I found out about this less than a month ago. You haven’t been young for a while.”

I think back to Worth at fourteen, making dinner for his sisters, doing the laundry, signing permission slips. Worth was more of a man at fourteen than my dad is at sixty.

“The die has been cast for a long time,” he says. “I was doing the best I could with the cards I was dealt.”

“Wasdealt?” I say, frustrated that he’s not taking any responsibility whatsoever. “I think you dealt those cards to yourself.”

“You’re trying to trip me up with semantics.”

It’s my turn to be exasperated. “It’s my fault, all this, is it?”

“I’m saying I was young when things happened and Rita got pregnant. I’ve been dealing with the consequences the best way I can. None of you have ever wanted for anything.”

“Don’t say that,” I say through gritted teeth. “You have no idea how much I’ve lost. Noah and Oliver too. Finding out this kind of thing about our father? Do you have any idea how this rocks all our foundations? And your other kids—our half-siblings. You’ve taken something from all of us.”

He puts his gloved hands up in surrender. “Look, I’m not saying I got everything right. I didn’t. But don’t make me out to be a monster. I didn’t do a bad job, considering the circumstances.”

I feel like I’m talking to the sidewalk. He doesn’t seem to be seeing this from our perspective at all. He just has his guard up, trying to defend himself—like anything he’s done is defensible.

“I think Mom did the bestshecould, considering the circumstances,” I say, but not to him. I’m rehashing things in my mind.

“Well, that’s something we can agree on,” he says. “She’s a good woman. Has been a very good mother.”

She sacrificed everything for Oliver, Noah, and me. I respect that and I’m thankful. I just wish she hadn’t had to do it.

“I’m going to go now, Dad,” I say.

I glance across at him as he slides his palm over his hair.

“I do love you, you know. That’s why?—”

“Don’t do that. Don’t dress up your betrayal in love. You had a whole other family. You didn’t do that because you loved us.”

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