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Zander shook his head. “It’s a shitty spot to be in.”
“No kidding.”
He stared down at the photos again, then shut the folder.
“I’ve spent two years trying to give Bella something normal,” he said. “Routine. Stability. A house where nobody’s screaming. Nobody’s drunk. Nobody’s disappearing for days.”
Shit he grew up with.
Did he have his mother through it all? Yep. He did.
But his mother went through the same nightmare as him.
“You’re not that person,” Zander said.
“I don’t want to be the guy who screws that up though.”
Dave watched him carefully. “You’re not your father. You don’t need anyone to tell you that.”
He didn’t answer. Because every kid who grew up like he did swore the same thing.
And some of them still ended up exactly the same.
It was fucking hard work not to take the easy way out.
He never would. Which made this whole thing even harder.
Because the easy way was to ignore it and hope Holly went away on her own. Even though he was positive she wouldn’t.
“What does Marly think?” Zander asked, breaking the silence of his thoughts.
He ran a hand through his hair.
“She says Bella deserves the truth,” he said. “Not protection through lies. And she’s not wrong.”
“That sounds like Marly,” Dave said with a faint smile.
“Yeah. She says she’ll be there when I tell Bella. I don’t want to bring this into her life.”
“Don’t do that to my daughter,” Dave said. “You’re better than that, because she’s tougher than that.”
He looked toward the window for a second, his jaw tight.
He knew those things but they still took up residence in his brain anyway.
“I just keep thinking that if Bella ever looked at me the way I used to look at him…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.
The idea alone was enough to make his chest feel like it was being squeezed in a vise.
Dave spoke first after the silence. “You know the difference between you and your father, Colson?”
He looked back at him. “There isn’t enough daylight for me to say it all,” he said dryly.
“That’s right. But the most important one is, you’re sitting here losing sleep over doing the right thing for that girl.” Dave gave a small shrug. “Your father never would have done that.”
Nor would his father have given him the “fatherly” talk he’d just gotten from Dave.
