If I Fix You. Abigail Johnson

was meant to have and it’s suffacating me. I’m sorry if this hurts you, but I can’t stay without hurting myself more. I hope we can find a way to forgive each other.

      And she’d signed it Katheryn. Not Mom.

      * * *

      I wiped tears with my palms, hating that she could make either of us cry after all these months, and felt my voice strengthen. “She left us.” Dad didn’t try to correct me that time. “I don’t understand how you can defend her.”

      Dad raised his hand again, but I stepped back, tears pooling in my eyes. He lowered it with a resignation that infuriated me almost as much as what he said next.

      “I wasn’t a perfect husband. I know it’s easy to look at what she’s done and think it was all her, but it wasn’t.”

      “You,” I said, “didn’t leave. You would never do what she did.” I shook, struggling not to scream. “Never.”

      Why did he look as if I was the one making things harder? As if I was the one who didn’t get it?

      “It’s not that simple.”

      “It’s exactly that simple.” I pointed toward the front door. “She’s the one who quit. She’s the one who didn’t want us.”

      “You can’t think that way.” Dad’s eyes were glassy and I knew I would die if he started crying. “I didn’t love her the way I should have. That’s on me. But your mom—”

      “She didn’t love you at all! If you only knew—” I clenched my jaw so tight I thought I heard the bone crack. “Stop making excuses for her!”

      “I’m not justifying what she did.” And then he gave me a look that would haunt me. It was like he was trying to tell me something and not tell me something at the same time. “Not then and not now.” And just as quickly the moment was gone. He swallowed. “I’m talking about your mom, here, not my wife. I don’t want you to write her off because she doesn’t want to be married to me anymore.”

      Love for one parent and hate for the other fought a vicious battle inside me. How could she not love him when even now he was trying to salvage any affection I still had for her? The outcome cloaked my voice in bitterness. “Wife. Mother. It’s the same person. I can’t separate the two. I can’t.”

      “Okay, okay.” Dad saw fresh tears fill my eyes. “I’m not telling you that you have to. Not right now. But I am saying that it’s okay for you to still love your mom. I’m okay with you loving her.”

      I wasn’t. Through her words and actions, she’d shown that she despised the most important person in my life. There was no fixing that. Had I ever thought there was?

      I was getting what I wanted. A conversation. Something. Anything. Only, looking at Dad made me want to stitch my mouth shut. “She’s not going away, is she?”

      Dad wouldn’t look at me, but eventually he shook his head.

      My hands were empty, otherwise I would have thrown something just to hear it break. Hate was such an ugly, infectious thing. It burrowed deep inside and consumed. My hate hadn’t begun that way, not even after Sean. It had started out as an ice cube lodged in my throat, an obstruction I couldn’t move no matter how many times I swallowed. Then it melted, and the cold had trickled through my insides, numbing me.