Page 124 of Promised to the Cowboy

“No. You don’t.”

“I do now.”

I laugh once, but there is no humor in it. “It took me dying?”

“Yes.”

His bluntness steals my breath.

Dad leans forward. “It took seeing you on the ground and knowing I had wasted every chance I’d been given. It took hearing Evie beg you to stay. It took looking at your hand on her stomach and realizing you had built more of a family in a few months than I managed in thirty years.”

Silence stretches between us.

Then his face eases into a smile. “Evie threatened to remove one of the paramedics from the ambulance with her bare hands.”

“That sounds right.”

“She loves you.”

“I know.” The certainty of it still feels new. Beautifully new.

Dad studies me.

“I loved you too.”

Loved.Past tense. The old wound opens before I can stop it.

He sees.

“Love,” he corrects immediately. “I love you, Gabriel.”

I’ve imagined those words before. As a boy. After surgeries. At graduations. At Daniel’s wedding, watching Dad hold his oldest son by the back of the neck and tell him he was proud.

Eventually I stopped imagining them because wanting something impossible is a slow way to destroy yourself.

Now he says them in a hospital room while my heart beats beneath bruised skin and I don’t know what to do with them.

Dad’s eyes redden. “You don’t have to say anything.”

“Good.”

He lets out a broken breath that might be a laugh. “I don’t expect forgiveness.”

“Also good.”

“I expect to spend however long I have left proving I mean it.”

That reaches somewhere the apology can’t.

I look at his bandaged hand. “You hurt yourself.”

“Your ribs did most of the damage.”

“You break any?”

“Possibly.”

“Mine or yours?”