Once you learn that the person closest to you for twelve years was a performance, a small poison enters everything: if I could be that wrong about him, what else am I wrong about, whom else am I misjudging, is anyone what they appear?
It hollows out the ground under every other relationship you have.
And what my father gave me back, with his grease-scarred hand on my shoulder and four plain words, was the antidote to exactly that — the proof, standing right there in the kitchen, that not everyone was a performance, that some love was precisely what it looked like, that my instincts were not hopeless because they had been right about him, about my father, all along.
Damian had spent twelve years teaching me I couldn’t trust my own eyes.
My father spent one sentence, and the twelve years behind it, teaching me I could.
I needed both lessons, it turned out, to become who I am now.
But only one of them was given in love.
“How long did you know, Dad?” I asked, when I could talk.
“I had a bad feeling before the wedding,” he admitted.
“Watched him twelve years and could never prove a thing.
It was only these last two months I finally got what I needed.”
Chapter 18 — Why He Didn’t Tell Me
He told me the rest of it standing there in the kitchen, both of us wrung out, the rain still going on the windows.
He told me how the next-door neighbor, an insomniac widower, had been quietly writing down the dates and times of Damian’s odd late-night visits for weeks — visits Damian had never mentioned to me, to a house I thought he barely tolerated.