And he definitely saw it as a certainty.
My heart jumped in my chest, and I searched my memory for my exact account.
But I hadn’t signed anything.
Not when he first brought me in the office, not when he showed me the paper from Nik, and not when I left to call him.
Nothing made sense, and I shook my head vehemently to say so.
“I didn’t sign anything, Nik.”
“Fuck!” he yelled, jumping back off the bed and startling my heart into a beat double the speed. He’d figured something out, but my brain was only moving at half of his speed.
I tried to sit up fast enough to follow him, tried to move as he moved away, fighting desperately to keep him close and touching.
“Nik—” I called as he turned, his walk a perfect display of anger and exploitation. The door slammed into the wall on his way out and my monitors started to go off in distress.
I tried to throw back the covers and climb from my bed, but though my legs had feeling, they were hardly fully functional, and the pain as a result of trying to force it was excruciating.
“Ahhhh,” I moaned in pain, gritting my teeth against it just as Shirley came running into the room.
“Sit back,” she told me, helping me settle back into the pillows and giving me a stern eye as she did.
I widened my own, nodding to the escalation outside. “You expect me not to try to figure out what’s going on?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, I heard Nik’s voice going higher and higher until my father’s joined in, each one of them scraping and challenging for dominance.
I panicked they’d get kicked out, but so far they hadn’t.
Nik’s eventually won the war, the sound of him asking, “What did you do?” ringing out so loudly the whole floor had to have heard it.
My palms turned clammy at the growing possibility of what I feared would be true.
“You owe us an explanation!” Nik’s voice boomed, sending a sharp knife right through my heart.
Because I knew what had to be. I didn’t know the details, but I knew the painfully heartbreaking gist.
My dad had set us both up like a couple of fools, and in a game where I had already lost, I just found out that I lost double.
Ushered by my mother and a lesser known, fuming version of Nik, my dad made his way back inside my room.
“Dad?” I asked simply, knowing he knew I was smart enough to put all of basic pieces of the situation together.
“I did it,” he admitted immediately, Nik’s jaw hardening to the point that I thought it might shatter in the background.
His eyes met mine.
I expected details and a reason, something greater than selfish priorities, but something far more disappointing is the only thing that came.
“I created a problem, and I fixed it.”
Rote and steady and comical in its simplicity, his voice held no emotion. No hesitation, no apology, and not one fucking ounce of regret.
“Nik!” I yelled watching him jump toward my dad in one smooth move. It cost him a lot, I could see it in the stormy flash of his eyes, but he stopped at the sound of my voice.
“God, Dad, how could you?!” Bitterness burned the lining of my throat and bile met it in the middle on its way up. Betrayed wholly by one of my most trusted allies.
“I did what I had to do to keep you from ruining my career,” he justified easily. Way too easily.
“And nearly ruined my life.”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic. It’s not like I intended to keep you apart forever—”
“No,” I interrupted, a single tear finally escaping my eye and floating down the line of my cheek. “Just long enough to make sure I didn’t mess up any of your carefully schemed plans.”
“The worst part is that you still don’t get it,” Nik cut in, unable to hold back his own emotion anymore. “You don’t get that life’s about more than achievements. It’s about understanding and love and a genuine fucking desire to make the people you supposedly care about happy.”
“I know you’re focused,” he added before my dad could speak up. “But I also know you’re not blind.” His words were pointed and cutting. “You could not have missed that your daughter was happy…and that you were the one taking it away.”
“Mom?” I asked, not wanting to know the answer.
She shook her head in despair. “I didn’t know.” Her eyes flashed to my father in disgusted disapproval. “Not until recently.”
“I want you to go,” I told my father, barely able to look at him, all of the years of his command-like-suggestions stacking up in the back of my mind. I’d never thought him to be calculating, but he was. He was from the beginning.
The one who had changed was me. I’d been a better puppet, an easier target, and an easily swayed vote.
Not anymore.
From naive to aware in the blink of one Olympic fall’s eye.
He didn’t realize what was happening, I could see it in his eyes, the denial of his consequences.
But I wasn’t deciding if I trusted him anymore or not.
It was already—
Done.
Family ties are usually for life. But when the binding breaks, it’s nearly impossible to put them back together again. Not without a whole hell of a lot of cooperation and glue.
After a thankfully short stint, therapy was finally over for Callie, and so was her relationship with her father.
Her back had healed beautifully, but her father’s scars were still just as ugly as ever. There’d been no reconciliation and no apology, and, when it came to the two of them, absolutely nothing resembling a happily ever after.
The harsh reality was that some people never learned their lessons.
Parents died.
Trusted loved ones turned out to be neither trusted nor unconditionally loving.
For Callie’s dad, their relationship came with strings. Big, thick, Olympic-sized ones.
Rationally, I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. He’d had to have known that eventually it would end. That she’d grow too old to compete, too tired to perform, and too burned out to care.
I guess he just always expected it to end on his terms.
She felt the sting of his loss every day, but I made sure to contain the burn. Loving and supporting her own decisions and desires with the same fervor that I invested in my own.
Step by step, I carried her burden, but it didn’t feel remotely like weight. Not when she did the same for me.
“Nik?” she called from the bathroom, the sound of it echoing and bouncing down the hall to my spot on the couch with uncertainty.
It was rare that I couldn’t get a read on what she was feeling anymore, but all mixed up and stirred together, I had to admit that on this one, I had no clue.
“What’s up, Cal?” I asked as I walked, not getting an answer.
I quickened my steps and deepened my frown, making up possibilities in my head and then taking them back just as fast.
Callie was different. More open to solutions and a fan of necessary change. She’d handled the upheaval of her injury surprisingly well, but there were moments when she didn’t.
It was my job to be there when she had them.
“They’re gone,” she said simply, as soon as I turned the corner.
Her eyes weren’t pained or sad necessarily. Just reflective.
My mind searched for what she could be talking about but ultimately came up empty.
“What’s gone?”
Instead of answering with words, she settled for a simple nod of her head.
I glanced down, following her line of sight exactly and landing on the palms of her hands.
Healed and whole, no ugly rips marred the surface and years worth of calluses had softened and pinked slightly. They looked normal to the layperson, and it took me hardly any time at all to figure out that was the problem.