“Obviously, I’m not going to continue to have him as my doctor. And I’m not planning to go talk with him. Yes, I’d like some closure on it, but really, I got closure. He ended the relationship. I wasn’t the one who initiated the breakup in the first place. So I’m sorry, but I think you wasted your time riding over here. I mean, can you give me one good reason why I should go talk to him about this?”
“He deserves it,” Ben said quietly. “He deserves someone like you. I don’t even know you that well, but I can tell that you’re a good person, and you’re hot as hell—if you don’t mind me saying—and the two of you make a great pair. And if anyone deserves to be with someone like you, it’s Cole.”
“Is that so,” I said. “And would you care to let me know why he’s so deserving of this? I mean, I get that he’s successful and good-looking, but so what? Plenty of people are, and that doesn’t mean that they’re somehow more deserving than someone else to be in a relationship.”
“It’s not that,” Ben said.
“Then what is it?”
He paused. “I don’t... I don’t know if I should tell you.”
I looked at him closely. “Well now you have to tell me. You can’t just say that and now not tell me.”
The two of us stood there for several moments of silence. I could see him wrestling with whatever it was that he wanted to say but felt like he couldn’t. What the hell was going on?
“Let’s just say that Cole has done some things in his life that most people never would do.”
“Right,” I said. “I’m not going to even begin to tell you how ambiguous that is. You’re going to have to be more specific.”
Ben bit his lip. “Okay,” he said. “But what I’m about to tell you needs to stay between us, okay? I have never told anyone this before, never spoken of it, and the only reason I’m doing so now is because I trust that you’re going to do the right thing with what I’m about to tell you. And that is not say anything.”
“I am so confused about everything at this point, I highly doubt there’s anything you could tell me that would make things worse.”
He paused again, and I tried to conjure up whatever it was he was going to tell me. Cole had a terminal illness? He was really a woman? (except I knew he wasn’t.) Those were the only two things I could come up with: that Cole was either dying of cancer or he’d had a sex change operation. I held my hands up.
“Just tell me,” I said.
“Declan’s not his son,” Ben said.
“What? What are you talking about? Of course he is.”
But Ben was shaking his head. “No, he’s not. Well, not biologically. Declan is technically Cole’s... nephew. Declan’s mother is Cole’s sister, Marissa.”
“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 raisi
ng 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.