Today is your twenty-first birthday. It’s been just over a year since I saw you last. Since we argued. I knew the moment the words came from my mouth that I regretted them. I do understand that you’re hurting and I’m sorry for that. I wish I could, as your father, have protected you better. Done better. I hope that I can in the future.

Love,

Your father

He hadn’t read this one out loud, half fearful of what Blake might have written, and he respected that Lily hadn’t peered or pried, but he passed her the letter to read anyway as he looked out at the sloping vineyards, now dusted in darkness.

His exhale was shaken by the convulsions gripping and releasing his heart in waves. His father’s voice, as if speaking the words, echoing in his mind. He ached. For the loss of his father’s hope for the future, the regret of his own actions and words that night, the pain that neither had been able to say the words of reconciliation to each other.

‘Can I ask why Blake sent you away? What you argued about?’ Lily said into the night.

‘He never told you?’ Henry had assumed that the entire town knew.

‘No. I knew that he regretted it, but that he couldn’t seem to find a way through it. He’d always insisted that it was his fault, that he’d said things he shouldn’t have.’

‘Really?’ He was surprised that Blake had said as much to Lily. But then again, Henry was still getting used to the fact that his father had felt as much regret over his departure from Hawke’s Cove as he did. ‘I guess we both said things we shouldn’t have.’

Henry knew that if he told Lily he didn’t want to talk about it, she would honour that, but strangely he found that he did. He wanted her to know.

‘After Claudia … after the accident, I went off the rails.’ He shrugged, knowing it was the barest description of the hurt and self-destruction he’d felt at the time. ‘I’m not proud of it. It certainly wasn’t my best moment,’ he said, looking into his hands as if they held answers he’d not found before now. ‘I wasn’t sleeping well at the time and began drinking too much. I started missing classes at uni, and eventually they decided it was better for me not to return. Only … I didn’t tell Dad.’