I already had enough on my plate with Lucas, the baby, and the restaurant.
That was all that mattered to me now.
That was all that mattered in the end, too.
21
JIYA
Iwatched the way Cole had mingled with my family over the past few months, and every time I did, I found myself thinking back to that conversation when he had revealed that he had a brother.
The look on his face that day was something I wouldn’t forget. There had been sadness there, but also regret. It told me more than his words ever could. It told me how much he missed having family around. I was sure his brother would forgive him if he knew the truth.
Living alone in that big, empty house could not have been easy for Cole. The silence in it must have been unbearable at times. His memories probably haunted him day and night, circling back when the evenings got too quiet, and there was no one to distract him from the loss.
“You know I still haven’t visited their graves,” he said to me one night during dinner.
His voice had gone quieter, heavier, and when I looked up at him, I could see the sadness sitting behind his eyes.
“It’s been too long, and I don’t think I can.”
I placed my hand on his. The gesture came naturally, instinctively, because I wanted to comfort him in whatever small way I could.
“You will when you’re ready. And you’ll know exactly when that is.”
I felt that he was afraid to face his late wife and daughter in that way. It was probably too daunting for him, too final, too painful. Guilt likely still lived in some hidden corner of his heart, refusing to leave completely.
Still, his therapy sessions seemed to be helping him a great deal, at least from everything he had shared with me. My family could only fill one part of the emptiness in his life, along with his photography work and his growing routine. But there was another part of that void that only his own family could fill.
Blood relations.
People who had known him long before the grief, long before the drinking, long before he had become a quieter, broken version of himself. He needed the people who had grown up with him. He needed his family.
That thought stayed with me until I headed to the restaurant one afternoon to meet Jack. After we spent a few minutes gushing over Emma and going through the week’s restaurant budgets, we sat in the office with glasses of iced tea in our hands. The numbers and work reports blurred into the background as the real reason I had come there kept pressing at me.
“I have something I would like to ask you,” I said.
“Sure, what’s up?” Jack asked, leaning back slightly in his chair.
“Do you know anything about Cole’s brother, Liam?”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Yes... Why?”
I hesitated for only a second before saying it out loud. “I was thinking of getting in touch with him to let him know about Cole.”
“Have you asked Cole if that is what he wants?”
His question made me pause, but I had already thought about that. Or at least, I had tried to. I told Jack about the conversation Cole and I had shared, about the sorrow in his voice when he mentioned Liam, about the loneliness I kept sensing in him, no matter how much he tried to move forward.
“Cole has tried from his side,” I said. “But Liam doesn’t know what his brother has been struggling with for the past two years. That could make him change his mind. Don’t you think?”
Jack let out a slow sigh. “It could.”
That tiny possibility, that small percentage of hope in Jack’s answer, was all it took for me to move forward. Once I had decided on something in my heart, it was hard for me to let it go.
Jack gave me Liam’s number, and I called his office. My nerves were already alive beneath my skin as I spoke to his secretary and set up an appointment.
The next day, after leaving Emma with Geeta and dropping Lucas off at school, I headed into the city to meet Liam.
