“The best,” he said softly before aiming that gaze, which I just realized was so much like Ripley’s, at me. “Luna… I’m sorry, honey. I’ve gotta tell you, it’s been eating me up inside.”
It was me who swallowed. “You have nothing to be sorry about,” I told him because it was the truth.
The older man shook his head, the face that had aged overnight from his heart attack, showing every inch of the ten years it seemed like he’d lost. “No, I do. I really do.”
He knew that I knew, or at least assumed that I had an idea or a guess that, he had kept something from me. “I understand that things are complicated sometimes, Mr. C. I’m sure you had your reasons,” I said as gently as possible. I had tried my best not to think about him and Rip, I really had.
I saw his hand going up toward his face before I saw the way tears had beaded up in his eyes and made them shiny. “None of them seem that good when I look back on it,” he admitted, his closed fist coming to rest over one eye. “I’ve screwed up a lot over the years, little moon, and I don’t have any good excuse why.”
“We all screw up a lot,” I tried to assure him. It was the truth.
“It seems like I do more than anyone else does.”
“That’s not true. I’m still alive.”
His laugh was watery. His face was still partially covered as he shook his head and sniffed. “Oh, Luna, I really am sorry I never told you the truth. I thought about it a hundred times. Maybe even a thousand. Every time you would bring me my coffee. Every time you tried to break up one of my arguments with Ripley… I thought,I should tell her. And I was too ashamed to.” He exhaled. “I didn’t want one more person being disappointed in me, especially not you. I know it’s selfish, but I couldn’t bear it if you were.”
I had been disappointed in him for not being upfront with me.
I’d been disappointed to think that he hadn’t cared about me or valued our relationship enough to tell me that he had a son.
A son I worked with.
I had been a little hurt he’d looked into my background, but thinking on it, I understood. I’d been a seventeen-year-old girl who magically appeared.
But this wasn’t all about me, and I was no one to talk about keeping things to myself so that I wouldn’t disappoint others. This was about him and whatever was going through his brain. Whatever had gone through his heart in the time before we had met.
I didn’t want to lie and tell him that I wasn’t disappointed he had kept something this massive a secret, so I told him what I could. I told him my own truths that I had kept. “I never told you that my dad dealt drugs, or that my uncle made them, that my cousins sold them, or that I left the day my dad held a gun to me and told me he wished I had never been born.” I started to smile but stopped because… because I didn’t have one in me. “I never told you I had an older brother who up and left one day. I didn’t want you to know where I had come from so that you wouldn’t expect the worst out of me like everyone else had while I’d grown up. I’m sorry I made you find out another way, Mr. C. I should have just told you the truth, but I was too ashamed of it.”
He sucked in a breath and shook his head, those eyes bubbling over until one tear streamed down his weathered cheek. I wasn’t surprised when his hand reached over and took mine, his voice a little shaky as he sniffed, “You are the best girl I have ever met, Luna Allen. I couldn’t think that. I wouldn’t think that. Not ever. The devil could’ve been your daddy and you would still be the same girl.”
It was my turn to sniff, to hold my breath.
“I hope you can forgive me for not being upfront with you all these years, if we’re going to talk about holding secrets.” The back of my hand came up to my face to wipe across my cheek. “I’ve screwed up a lot, Mr. C. We all do things that we can’t explain or don’t want to. There’s a bunch of little things I haven’t told you lately either.”
Mr. Cooper gulped and nodded.
But I figured it was time to at least ask this one thing before I lost my nerve. “Is Rip really your son?”
He nodded, but it felt… I wasn’t sure exactly how it felt. It felt like a weight off my chest, but it had only moved to my shoulders. Maybe I had accepted that they’d both had their reasons for keeping it between them, but I was struggling with it. Just a little.
“As you can see, we don’t have the best relationship,” he chuffed, trying to make it sound like a joke but failing at it.
“Not that this helps, but I don’t have that great of a relationship with my parents either.” Then I thought about it. “I don’t have the greatest relationship with Thea or Kyra right now either, if that makes you feel better, and I don’t really want to talk about it yet, if it’s all right.”
His laugh was another watery sound that didn’t sound like a happy thing at all. “But I bet your sisters don’t hate you.”
He thought Rip hated him. But what could I do? Deny it?
Instead, all I could get out was, “I’m sorry, Mr. C.”
“Don’t be sorry for me,” he replied quickly. “I deserve it.”
Hell. “Was his mom your first wife?”
He nodded, his hand coming back up to cover most of his face. “I messed up so much with him… Nothing I do will ever be enough.” He paused and made a choking sound that broke my heart a little more. “I can’t bring his mother back, but if I could trade our lives, I would. I would do it in a heartbeat,” he said in a gutted voice that broke my heart all over again.
I knew what it was like to live with regrets, and from the tone of his voice, this wasn’t just a regret. It was so much more.
