“I didn’t know it was that bad,” the older man claimed in a wobbly voice, his face flushing.

“Me telling you wasn’t enough?” Rip returned. “Her telling you wasn’t enough?”

Shit, shit, shit. “No, it’s my fault. Mr. Cooper, I should have insisted—”

Ripley’s hand came up and he waved me off. “No. I told him.” He pointed one thick, long finger in Mr. Cooper’s direction. “I told you, and her fucking cousin could have had a gun on him. He could’ve had a bat on him, a tire iron. She could’ve gotten her brains bashed in because you always think you know what’s right!”

I could have not been there or within ten miles based on how intense the stare down they were having with each other was.

And suddenly, I had a feeling that this conversation had just taken a sudden turn to This Has Nothing To Do With Me.

I would have been right.

“I had no idea—”

“You never have an idea,” Ripley said, loudly.

“This is nobody’s fault but my own,” I tried to tell them, trying to make eye contact with one of them, but they were both staring too hard at each other. It was like I wasn’t even in the same universe. “It was my cousin. My family. And I don’t know if he paid Jason to open the gate and let him in or what, but it’s my fault,” I tried to say… but they weren’t listening. They weren’t even close to listening.

“That’s unfair, Ripley,” the older man said, completely focused on him.

“You think?”

Mr. Cooper swept another hand over his head. “I know it is. I told you I didn’t know.”

“You don’t think that excuse is getting old after all these years?”

“Son, give me a break,“ Mr. Cooper almost croaked, rubbing his hand over his chest, his face reddish pink.

But the man in the chair decided he wasn’t going to give anyone a break, not his business partner, not the man who had been so kind to me for so long. “Don’t fucking ‘son’ me. You always think you know better than anyone else, but you don’t.”

Okay. All right. I needed to calm this down. “Hey, Rip. Don’t put this on Mr. C. It’s on me. I should have said something from the beginning—”

They were still ignoring me as their voices got louder.

“I didn’t know!” Mr. Cooper shot back as Rip stood up. “It’s not fair for you to keep bringing up things from twenty years ago.”

How had they known each other twenty years ago?

“Hey, you two, can we agree it’s nobody else’s fault but Jason’s?” I piped up, getting to my feet to hopefully remind them they weren’t in here alone.

I was invisible though because nothing changed.

Nothing changed because Rip jabbed his finger in Mr. Cooper’s direction and hurled,

“Twenty-two years ago, not twenty, and it could be another forty and I still wouldn’t forget what you did to Mom—”

Wait.

Wait.

Mom?

Mom?

Mr. Cooper wheezing had me snapping my eyes toward him just as he reached up and slapped another hand over the center of his chest.

“Mr. Cooper?” I asked, taking a step toward his desk as Ripley’s voice seemed to trail off.

Mr. Cooper sucked in another gasp as his fingers curled over the shirt he had on. “I… I…”

“Call 911!”

Chapter 25

“I’m going to get some tea or coffee from the cafeteria. Do you want anything?”

I asked as I got to my feet, ignoring the way my knees popped from how long I’d been sitting in the waiting room at the hospital.

At the hospital.

At the hospital after following the ambulance carrying Mr. Cooper.

Mr. Cooper who I was 99 percent sure, had suffered a heart attack.

Two hours in the waiting room had given me enough time to nurse a pounding headache, a knot in my chest that would have felt like a malignant tumor if those felt like something, and knees that cracked as I stood up. After the paramedics had shown up, I had followed behind, wanting to throw up and pray at the same time, but I hadn’t prayed for anything in so long, I wasn’t sure I knew how to do it anymore.

And behind me, in Mr. Cooper’s car, had been Ripley in his truck.

Rip who hadn’t said more than a handful of words to me since he’d first shouted for someone to call an ambulance. Who had stood there to the side while the EMTs had loaded Mr. C up. Who hadn’t made a move to leave, which was why I had taken his car since mine was at home.

Rip and I had sat there, three chairs apart, in silence the entire time. I wasn’t sure what he had been thinking, or what he’d felt. And I sure hadn’t known what to say.

I didn’t know what to think, if I was going to be honest with myself.

Mom.

Twenty-two years.

All that anger…

It wasn’t the time to think about it, but it was hard not to let my mind wander to those words and what they possibly meant.

I wasn’t stupid.

I’d had my heart in my throat for the last two hours. My stomach felt off and tight and hot, and I genuinely felt sick with worry over a man I loved and cared for. It didn’t help that I had been blowing up Lydia’s phone and she hadn’t answered. I’d left her voice mails on her cell and their home phone telling her to call me, but she still hadn’t.

Was it normal for whatever they were doing to him to take so long? I wondered. I wasn’t sure. I had tried looking up things on the internet, but the information was so broad, all it did was make me sicker.

Which was why I knew I needed to get up and move around for a little while, even if it was just a short trip to the cafeteria. Being helpless was one of the crappiest things in the world.

Rip stared straight ahead at the television playing an episode of Law and Order as he answered in a voice I had never heard before. “No.”

He had barely moved in the hours we’d been sitting there. Was he worried too? Did he feel guilty for getting into an argument with Mr. Cooper—his maybe-possibly-I-think-Dad—right before? I couldn’t blame him if he did.

I felt guilty for not doing more. For not stopping them. For not opening my mouth and complaining about that little jerk when Mr. C had first stuck him with me.

A small part of me, that honestly wasn’t so small, felt dumb for not putting the dots together.

Another small part of me felt a little betrayed that, if it was true that they were related, that neither one of them had ever said a word.

Especially not Mr. Cooper, who had been a better father figure to me than my own dad had been. This man that I genuinely loved hadn’t even hinted at the fact that the forty-one-year-old man I saw five days a week, if not six days a week, might be his son.

If I thought about it… if I really thought about it… they both had the same tall, broad builds. Wide shoulders, big chests, they were tank-like. Ripley didn’t have his eyes, but he did have his chin. And if I hadn’t met Mr. Cooper after he’d gone completely gray, they might have the same hair color too. They liked their coffee the same way, had a couple of the same tics….

If they were related, then their hostility toward one another made so much sense it was annoying.

If anyone knew what it was like to be resentful toward a relative, it was me.

And I hadn’t known.

I hadn’t even had a clue after nine years of knowing the older man.

Maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe I had misunderstood, but I seriously, seriously doubted it. Why else would Rip use the “mom” word around Mr. Cooper? If they were related by any other means, I bet it would have been brought up by that point. And the years made sense. Hadn’t Rip said he was eighteen when his mom had died? Hadn’t Mr. C remarried a year later and been with Lydia twenty-two years?

They were related.

They had to be.

And they had kept it a secret.

Secrets, secrets are no fun. Secrets hurt someone.

It wasn’t the time to focus on that, I tried to tell myself. It was time to worry about Mr. Cooper. This had nothing to do with me.

Sometimes, it was a lot easier to accept things when you realized that at the end of the day, you were just an innocent casualty in a train wreck that had been caused by something that had slowly rusted and fallen apart over decades.