He told me one last story. He used his aged, ruined voice like an old man's hands to pick the lock on his past.
My father was once the man I looked up to. The man I could tell almost everything too.
But things changed when mum died.
Mum was killed by one of his closest friends, Nina Meyers, The woman whom he had an affair with. My sister, Kim, was the one trying to keep our family together. I was only sixteen at the time and I wasn't sure of what was happening around me.
I remember coming home from school and finding dad sobbing uncontrollably and Kim hiding in her room. That's when I worked out mum was gone and not coming back ever.
After Kim moved out into Gary's house, babysitting their daughter, dad lost it. He sold the house and moved us into a small apartment.
Once Kim started working at CTU 18 months later dad went off when she tried to do field work. Kim got mad and then after the crisis was averted, she moved away with chase.
Dad felt as if he was on his own. I tried to help him, being the other daughter and the youngest, but he couldn't be consoled. That was when I decided that I would go and work at CTU, just to get a reaction from him, all it did was piss him off even more.
It wasn't until I was taken hostage, locked in a freezer and set on fire that dad actually showed emotion towards me other than the façade he was showing to everyone. He told me that he felt if he showed any sort of emotion towards me, I would leave him too.
Dad never told anyone any of this, not until yesterday. The day he died.
An anonymous shooter and two bullets later and he fell. He wasn't wearing his flak jacket. He didn't die straight away; he thought it was rather poetic that he didn't. After all the crisis's he's averted and on a totally normal day, no red alert or anything, was the day he was to die.
He finally admitted everything he ever felt, it may have been the pain causing him to become delusional or something but it gave me some solace.
Cause in the end,
It always comes to family.