“The one who died?”
“Yes. And Declan’s father was her boyfriend, this guy Sam, who Cole’s parents hated. With good reason, seeing as he was the one who got her into the drugs and shit.”
I frowned, trying to process everything that he was telling me. Declan wasn’t Cole’s son?
“I’m not going to get into all the details,” Ben said. “In part because I don’t know them all. But that’s basically why Cole moved out here, so he wouldn’t run into anyone that we’d grown up with, who might later say something to Declan. So when I say that he deserves this, when I say that he should be with someone who makes him as happy as you do, I really mean it. Because I can’t say that I’d be able to step up and raise someone else’s kid the way he has, even if that kid was related to me. I’d like to think I could, but I just don’t know.”
“I had no idea,” I said softly, shaking my head.
“You wouldn’t,” Ben said. “And that’s what is so awesome about this whole thing. No one would ever guess because Cole has always treated Declan like he’s his own son.”
It was, in a way, a stunning revelation, yet at the same time, there was a part of me that wasn’t surprised at all. That was just the sort of person Cole was. He would step up and do the right thing, even in a situation where some other people might not.
“Thank you for telling me,” I said to Ben.
He nodded. “Yeah, no problem,” he replied. “I thought you should know.”
After Ben left, I went and sat on the couch. I didn’t know what to do with the information he just told me, and I found myself thinking about various times I’d seen Cole interact with Declan, how natural it had been between the two of them, how no one would ever guess the truth. I certainly wouldn’t have. And in a way, I was still having a hard time believing it. Yet it made sense, too. Cole never talked about Declan’s mother, and I had always assumed it was because it had been a bad breakup, a contentious relationship.
So all these years he had been raising someone else’s son, a secret he had kept, along with the other secret that his sister’s death had not been an accident, but a suicide. I couldn’t imagine carrying that around with me. Granted, I didn’t have any siblings, so maybe I would feel differently if I did, but it still seemed like so much for one person.
I wasn’t sure how long I stayed on the couch, but it was a while. When I finally got up, I had decided that I would talk to Cole. Not today, but soon. And it wouldn’t be to ask him to get back together, but just to let him know that I knew, and that I loved him anyway, and that even if he didn’t want to be with me, that wouldn’t change the way I felt about him. If he told me to fuck off, if he told me he never wanted to see me after that, then I’d accept it, and I’d do the best I could to get over it and move on. But I had felt like we didn’t really have closure, and I at least needed to that if I was supposed to move past this whole thing.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Cole
“You keep coming back to that point,” I said to Lisa. It was therapy appointment number two, and as I sat there, I was thinking that it would probably be my last, that it had been a mistake to even make a second appointment. This wasn’t actually helping at all.
Especially because Lisa seemed to be harping on the fact that I had broken up with someone who I had been in love with.
“Well, we both keep coming back to it,” she said. “And that’s why you’re here to begin with, isn’t it?”
“I’m here because... because I thought I might need some help sorting out some of my feelings. You know, have a neutral party to talk to, not someone who’s personally involved.”
“And I’m also not here to give you a directive either way,” Lisa said. “I’m not trying to tell you to do something, or to not do something. Any conclusions that you might be drawing are really all on your own.”
“It just seems as though you keep trying to emphasize the point that I’m still in love with Allie.”
“Does it seem that way to you?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.”
Was she trying to be coy? Was she trying to get me to make some sort of obvious connection that she had made and I had not?
“Listen,” I said, “I think it’s clear from everything that’s been said so far that you think I made a mistake.”
“It doesn’t actually matter what I think.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Is that so? You’re the professional here; I’d think it should matter a whole heck of a lot what you think.”
“In some instances, it might. But in this particular situation, not so much. What really matters is what you think, and whether or not the decisions you have made are the ones that you can live with.”
“Well, you kind of have to live with the decisions you make, don’t you?”
“Of course, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do things to try to change them if you feel like you made the wrong choices.”