His father was seventy-eight, ill, and still the same man who had never once said the thing his son needed to hear. He had spent two decades waiting for an apology that wasn't coming.
The work wasn't about getting the apology. It was about him saying, clearly, out loud, in his own kitchen first and then in his father's, the sentence he had been swallowing since he was nine.
His father cried. His father didn't apologise. Both things happened, and somehow it was enough. He left his father's house lighter than he had been in his life.
Composite story. Details have been changed to protect identities and do not refer to any single individual.