Tyler's Apology
Chapter 10 - Tyler's Apology
Tyler found Mark at school a week later, approaching cautiously, stripped of the confidence that had once carried him through every hallway like he owned them.
"I need to say something," Tyler said, standing a careful distance away, hands shoved deep into his pockets. "I'm sorry. For what I said at the store. For every time I've said anything like it to anyone, not just you."
Mark studied him for a moment, the same calm, steady gaze that had unsettled Tyler so thoroughly in the showroom.
"Why are you apologizing now," Mark asked. "Because you found out I'm actually rich, or because you actually understand what you did was wrong regardless."
Tyler flinched at the directness of the question. "Both, honestly. I wish I could tell you it's only the second one. I think finding out I was wrong about everything, my dad, the store, all of it, forced me to look at myself in a way I hadn't before."
"That's honest," Mark said. "I appreciate the honesty more than the apology, actually."
"My dad's in a lot of trouble," Tyler said, voice dropping lower. "I know what he did to your family. The whole thing with your parents' marriage. I didn't know about any of it until the arrest. I want you to know that."
"I believe you," Mark said. "I don't think kids are responsible for what their parents do in secret. I spent ten years not knowing my own father existed as anything more than a name. Neither of us chose the lies we were raised inside."
Tyler's eyes filled with tears he clearly hadn't expected to shed in public. "I don't know who I actually am anymore. Everything I thought about my family, my place in the world, all of it was built on something my dad made up."
"Then you get to build something real instead," Mark said. "Starting now. That's actually considerably more interesting than inheriting something you didn't earn."
Tyler considered that, something in his posture shifting slightly, the first small sign of a boy beginning to rebuild himself on considerably more honest ground than whatever his father's lies had once provided.
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"Can we start over," Tyler asked. "Not as friends, necessarily. I haven't earned that. Just, not as enemies."
"We were never enemies," Mark said. "You were just wrong about me. That's fixable, if you actually want to fix it."
