Beautifully Knight (Jordan Knight Fanfic, Liadan #5)

Family Dinners and Fuel

-TONY-

Sweat blanketed my palms and every inch of me from my toes to my jaw tensed as I pulled my eyes away from the swinging kitchen door left in the wake of my wife's departure and over to see my father glowering.

This was supposed to be simple.

That's what all the "experts" said, anyway. 

That if you wanted a quick, oft-forgotten panacea to rescue marriages and family relationships, then all you needed to do was take a page from old family sitcom reruns and gather everybody around a table. 

Like magic, every family could have a smiling Grandma and Grandpa, a sweet Ma, a loving Pa, and a million chattering John Boys and Jim Bobs and Erins and Elizabeths and little John Curtises to share a lively supper before heading off to shared bedrooms where everybody wished everybody else a goodnight by name before falling asleep.

That phenomenon didn't only exist on TV though, I'd seen it work in real life for my in-laws too. Hardly a week passed by without them gathering all their children and grandchildren and furry relatives in their home to share a meal and catch up on the ongoings of everybody's lives. Stories about courthouses, recording studios, restaurants, radio stations, schools, auto shops, corporate boardrooms, therapy clinics, architect firms, skating rinks, motorcycles, soccer, and baseball games, cheer competitions, Girl Scout troops, farmhouses, penthouses, mansions, and any and everything in between were all passed back and forth along with potatoes and dinner rolls. 

It kept the family close and connected and gave my three girls the same familial ties their mother cherished so much; the familial ties I'd longed for as a kid. I'd desperately wanted a family where my mother didn't lock herself in her bedroom and pretend I couldn't hear her crying hysterically for hours nonstop. One where my father didn't suck the air out of every room he entered. Or make every person within earshot of his voice nervous about what he might say or do at the slightest suggestion of his displeasure. I just wanted something simple and in the Knight household, family dinner was simple.

It wasn't always organized and picky eaters sometimes ate something different than everybody else, but the atmosphere was light and easy and fun and normal.

So normal that I'd gotten used to it and for a moment, just a moment, I'd let myself believe that after thirty-something years of heartache and discord, I could have that same experience with my parents. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally invite my father into my home before it was too late and he was gone.

It was admittedly a shift. I'd excluded Antonio from my daughters' lives since they'd been born and over the past decade, I'd also completely blocked him out of my world without so much as a second thought. I didn't do it to be malicious or mean. It wasn't even a premeditated, conscientious plan to escape his narcissistic behaviors. It was just a natural response to his brutal reaction to Grace's birth and subsequent refusal to ever apologize for the hurtful things he'd said. I wasn't going to risk welcoming him into my daughters' lives just to have him turn around and verbalize that same vile language to them in person. 

Thus, for a long time, I'd decided to play it safe and keep him far away from them. They were blessed to have three loving grandparents in my mom, Jordan, and Lia and that was more than enough as far as I was concerned. I'd made up my mind and set the right boundaries and I'd intended for things to stay that way forever, but then I discovered that Antonio was trying to hire my son-in-law and undoubtedly use him to get to Grace behind my back. It was a sneaky move, but I couldn't say that I shouldn't have seen it coming.

For the first time in over ten years since I'd rescued my father from seriously injuring himself on his office balcony, we'd recently crossed paths at a conference for tech executives in the Silicon Valley. I hadn't wanted to go to the conference in the first place, but my best friend, Colton Hampton, who also served as the president of GFH, Inc. insisted that we had to go. According to him, everybody on the executive team had come to him at one point or another begging for him to buy tickets because there was a 'brilliant surprise guest' scheduled to speak.