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“Cole, would you like any—”
“No,” I bark at Ellen as I march through the kitchen.
“When was the last time you ate?” she calls out to me as I continue through the house.
I have no idea. The only things that have passed my lips the last few days are alcohol and weed. Exactly as it should be in my quest to forget.
The sun has long set, and I’m beyond drunk when there’s a knock at my bedroom door.
I don’t respond, but that doesn't mean I expect whoever it is to get the message and leave. That’s not how we do things. I don’t, however, expect to see the head that appears when my lack of response is ignored.
“What do you want?” I bark at James when he invites himself inside and sits in the chair at the other side of the room.
“I think it’s time we talked, don’t you?”
“No,” I say bluntly, keeping my eyes anywhere but on him.
“Cole, I know everything came as a bit of a shock.”
“A shock?” I ask. “I thought you were just our uncle who didn’t care about us. Then suddenly I’m meant to just accept that you’re not our uncle, but our fucking father?”
“I know. I know. But you have to trust me when I say that I’d have done everything so differently if I had the chance.”
“Trust you?” I balk. “Fuck off. You could have done something. You could have taken us away any time you wanted, but no, you left us there. You left me there to be…” I trail off, not wanting to go down that road on top of everything else.
“I couldn’t go behind your mother’s back.”
“Why? You didn’t care about going behind Charlie’s all those years before.”
“Cole,” he growls. I ignore his warning. If he wants to come in here and talk, then we can fucking talk. But then he says five little words that make my blood turn to ice.
“I know what you did.”
I shake my head, thinking that I must have misheard. “What?”
“I know about Charlie.”
My chin drops. That can’t be possible. “How?”
“How do you think it got covered up so easily? Donny certainly wasn’t going to help keep your name clean.”
“But—”
“I saw you leave the house that night, Cole. Deny it all you like, but we both know the truth, don’t we?”
I shake my head, because he can’t know the truth.
He can’t.
“You know nothing,” I say.
“That’s what you’d like to think, but it’s simply not true.”
“Whatever. I’m done with this conversation.”
I swing my legs from the bed, and my fingers are wrapped around the door handle when he speaks next.
“Go and see Hadley, Cole. Stop punishing yourself for something you couldn’t have stopped.”
