For years, the three of us never talked about this. It was one of those things we kept buried under the unspoken agreement that some memories were better left alone.
Richard’s word had been enough.
We’d taken his explanation at face value because doing anything else would’ve meant tearing open a wound none of us had the stomach to face.
Still, the timing had always beentoo perfect.Noelle didn’t return to campus until after Christmas. From then to the pregnancy announcement to the birth, the math lined up better if she’d got pregnant before the holiday.
Callum and I had never said it out loud, but there was an understanding there.
A quiet, mutual suspicion we both pretended didn’t exist.
Whenever her name came up, there’d be a pause, a subtle shift in tone and a glance that lasted a heartbeat too long.
We were both thinking the same thing, but neither of us were ever brave enough to voice it.
Could Noelle have been lying about that one-night stand?
Could she have been protecting one of us by keeping Eli’s paternity a secret?
It’s plausible.
Hell, it made a kind of painful sense.
If anyone would’ve figured that out aside from me, it’d be Callum.
The man’s mind never stops turning, analyzing, and calculating.
He’s probably turned that question over in his head as many times as I have.
Probably more.
But even with that knowledge gnawing at the edges of our conversations for years, we’d both done nothing.
We’d let time dull it, hoping the distance would erase the possibility altogether. Because deep down, we were both cowards.
Neither of us wanted to find out the truth.
If we were right—if Eli reallywasone of ours—then we’d have to face the consequences. We’d have to look our best friend in the eye and admit we’d crossed a line that should never have been crossed.
That the daughter he trusted us with, the one we’d sworn to protect, had ended up in our beds and that the fallout from that would be an earned consequence.
But if we were wrong…
If Eli wasn’t one of ours, if he was truly the child of some nameless guy she met at college, then we’d lose even the smallest piece of hope that what we shared with her had meant something.
That there hadn’t been any permanence in the chaos.
As fucked up as that sounded, that was how my heart felt.
“Did you get a good look at him?” Callum asks suddenly, his voice breaking through my thoughts. “Her son, I mean. He look like one of us?”
I grip the steering wheel tighter, my knuckles whitening.
I think back to the glimpse I caught through the shop window.
A little boy playing on the floor, pushing toy cars across the carpet, his curls catching the light from the Christmas tree next to him.
“Not really,” I say after a long pause. “Didn’t see him up close enough.”
