What Charlie saw made him sick.
Not at first. At first it was fine. Nothing he didn’t already know.
Inside the hamper, floating over the clothes, were emails back and forth between his father and the woman that Charlie had met at the grand opening of Charlie’s. Susan McAllister. She seemed like a nice lady, and as he flipped back through the emails, they were sweet, sometimes heartbreaking. Some were about how much Charlie’s dad missed his wife, which felt like a weird thing to tell this new lady, but she was kind and tender and caring toward his father, which made Charlie like her even more. His bad feelings melted away. But as he kept flipping back through the messages, a strange thing happened. They didn’t stop in the months right after his mom had died. They didn’t stop when she was failing but still alive, near the end. They didn’t stop in the year before, while she’d been sick and suffering. How far back did they go? Charlie felt ill. He didn’t want to keep reading, but he did. He imagined his mom in her bed, desperate, in pain, while his father was out messing around. Charlie felt a rage beginning to boil in his blood. He kept flipping back. He knew these dates by heart. The surgery. The diagnosis. The tests. The symptoms. And before? Before. They went back even before. His fists were balled up. He thought of all the times he’d been there for his mom, his dad supposedly overwhelmed, supposedly hiding at work. Grieving. Torn up. Except he hadn’t been at work, had he? He’d been out, out with her, fucking while Charlie was drowning, while Mom was dying. He felt a pulse ripple through what he had supposed was the reality of his life. He kept reading, going back in time, in inverse proportion to his fury. It was a lie, a lie, all of it. The sanctity of his parents’ marriage. The dividing line of her diagnosis, between good and bad, before and after, paradise and hell. In his mind, his family had been sacrosanct, loving, well-kept, his life, his foundation—until that horrible disease ruined everything. But what now? Now that it had always been ruined? Always been a lie? Never pure, never sacred, never the basis of his being, of right and wrong? Had she known, like some politician’s wife standing weakly behind her apologizing husband? Had she known all those years she told him, Listen to your father. Obey. Emulate. And yet his dad was not just a feeble, weak man cowed by a terrible disease, but a fraud, a liar, a selfish bastard?
The voices were roaring behind him now, so much so that he couldn’t think, he wanted to scream at them, but he was more blinded by rage at the moment and turned inward, deeper within himself, until the words appeared in front of him, the same ones he’d seen before, so simple, so black-and-white.
Do you love your dad? Y/N?
He swiped the words away and ran downstairs, past the figures in his way. He had to know, had to look into his father’s eyes and find out, because it could be fake, it could all just be words on a screen, total fabrications. His dad was downstairs still, sitting at the table, and he turned and Charlie blindsided him.
“Did you cheat on Mom?”
His dad looked at him, sputtered, and his face said it all. He tried to muster a lie, a denial, but Charlie already knew. It felt like bitter dirt in his mouth.
“Charlie,” his dad said, trying to stand up.
Charlie knocked past him, out the door, blinded with rage and betrayal. Peter was sitting in the car, oblivious that Charlie’s whole world had shattered, and again the words popped up in his vision: Do you love your dad? Y/N? All he could do was be honest, ride the wave of his fury toward the only true thing he could say, and he reached up into space, the Watchers watching, his dad fumbling behind him, and he pressed his finger forward, marking N.