He’d known too. For who knows how long, maybe from the beginning, he had known.

And he’d never said a word.

I could understand keeping his first wife a secret. Maybe, I could even understand him keeping Rip a secret if I really wanted to be logical. But he’d known about my background and never said anything? Not in nine years?

“Is that good enough? Will you go now and give me a fucking break, or do I need to spell it out for you? Leave me alone.”

Leave me alone, my sister had projected at me wordlessly countless times.

Leave me alone, my dad had hissed at me countless more.

Leave me alone.

I could have held a whole lot of anger in my heart. When people like Thea or Kyra made me upset, there were a million things I could have thought of to hurt them, but I never would. Because I would never want anyone I loved to hurt because of me. I would go out of my way to make sure that didn’t happen.

Yet…

I froze. I blinked, and I swallowed as I said, almost woodenly, attempting to ignore the familiarity of what had come out of his mouth, “I’m only trying to be your friend.”

“Does it look like I give a fuck about that right now?”

I had gotten real good at getting crapped on by people. By being taken advantage of.

But not from people who I thought I could trust. Who had made me believe that I could. Yet here I was.

You can’t make anyone love you or care about you. I knew that better than anyone.

The hairs on my arms stood up, my back prickled, and I just went… numb as I stood there, looking down at the man I had cared for, for years. The one who had started to make me feel that I wasn’t a nuisance, that it was okay to ask him for things. That had made me feel safe. Understood.

And I realized the burn in me was actually a freezer burn.

Leave me alone, Lucas Ripley had just said to me.

I didn’t have much pride, but I had enough.

Maybe Rip couldn’t put things together enough, but I had left the people who hadn’t wanted me around and never looked back. Enough was enough. I was over it—those words, getting shoved aside by all these people I cared about, being made to feel dispensable—that all of this felt like acid on my soul.

He wanted me to leave him alone too? He didn’t want to be my friend? He wanted to keep things from me like everyone freaking else?

Biting the inside of my cheek, I kept my gaze steady on him as that freezer burn pain spread through me. I could feel it in the pores of my face, along my mouth, in my eyes.

I should have let it go, I knew. I should have avoided this conversation, but I hadn’t. I had walked right into this, and this pain was all my own freaking fault. I had nobody else to blame but myself.

Then again, he could have said just about anything else to me, too, that wouldn’t hurt half as bad.

But the funny things was: he hadn’t. I was fed up. I was so damn tired I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt more exhausted. And all of a sudden, so lonely I couldn’t bear it.

This was what I got for hoping. For forgetting.

Everyone deserves love, but there are people that don’t want it, no matter how desperately and truly you might give it to them.

I took a step back and then another, giving him one single nod as I said with a calmness he didn’t deserve, “You’re right, Mr. Ripley. You knew better than me that you could hurt my feelings, but you did it anyway.” I bit the inside of my cheek and squeezed the hell out of my soul. “I’m sorry for stepping over the line. I’m sorry for pushing you. I won’t ever do it again.”

I didn’t shed one single tear as I turned around and walked out of the waiting room. I didn’t shed a tear as I made it to the cafeteria and got myself coffee. And when I carried it back with me to the same waiting room where I’d left the last person to ever break my heart, I was proud of myself.

Just because he didn’t even want my support didn’t mean that I was going to run and hide, not when someone I cared about and someone who cared about me right back was undergoing surgery. Lucas Ripley might have kicked me in the chest just now, but he wasn’t going to make me forget why I was there.

This was for Mr. Cooper. The man who wouldn’t have kicked me out of the room. The one who had been there for me time and time again.

Maybe he had known where I had come from, and that hurt me that he would keep so much from me, but I’d deal with that later. Deal with it when I knew he was fine. I wouldn’t hold any bad feelings toward him when I wasn’t sure if he was even going to be okay.

Thanks to the clear glass that was used as walls for the room, I could see it was still empty except for the one dark-haired man I was not going to look at.

I kept my chin up high as I took the same seat I’d been in before instead of taking one further away from my boss.

Then I sat back, put my eyes on the television screen, and didn’t look at Ripley again until thirty minutes later when a doctor came in, asking for relatives of Mr. Cooper’s. I eavesdropped long enough in the conversation to hear that he had made it through surgery successfully but would be in intensive care for the time being, which could be hours or days. Until then, only family.

And that was one thing I wasn’t. Any of their family.

Maybe I didn’t have the best basis for what a family was supposed to be like, but I was fed up with being lied to. Fed up with being kicked aside, over and over and over again. Even I knew that wasn’t what family was supposed to be like.

Leave me alone.

I was fucking sick of it. Sick of those words. Sick of even myself.

I picked up my phone, dialed Lydia’s number, and waited for her to answer. When she finally did, apologizing for being with a client, I told her what happened. Then I listened to her wail of shock and her promise to be there as soon as possible.

Only at that point did I get up and leave; as much as my heart might tell me otherwise, I wasn’t family.

My family consisted of a dad who had threatened to kill me, a brother who had walked out on us, a cousin who had tried to beat me up, two lying sisters, and the one and only person who loved me as much as I loved her.

I loved myself enough to know what I deserved.

And this… shit… that had just happened, was not one of those things.

There weren’t enough donuts or homemade lunches in the world to make this worth it. That was for freaking sure.

Chapter 26

The news that Mr. Cooper, our beloved boss, had suffered a heart attack had shaken up everyone at the shop. It hadn’t been a major one, but it had been severe enough that his doctors had insisted that he take his time coming back. That he rested. That he manage his stress levels better.

Lydia had been kind enough to call me soon after I’d left the hospital—in the process asking why I hadn’t waited for her—and then kept me up to date on how he was doing. The next day, I went to visit him again just as Grandpa Gus was leaving the hospital.

“You saved me, honey,” my boss had whispered when I’d made it over to his bed the day after his heart attack.

I had reached out to take his hand, giving it a gentle squeeze as I smiled down at the lined, still too pale face, trying not to think about what could have happened to him if it hadn’t been a minor attack. I’d made the mistake of reading that heart disease was the leading cause of deaths in the country. “All I did was give you an aspirin,” I told him, trying my best to ignore the sting of pain when I thought about the things he had kept from me for so long.

“You told me to buy a new bottle of aspirin when the last one had expired, do you remember? You insisted I get aspirin, ‘just in case, Mr. C,’” he tried to argue in his weaker-than-usual voice, giving my hand another squeeze.

I had been thinking about him specifically when I’d insisted he buy more aspirin. When he first told me he had high blood pressure, I had done a little research, not that I ever brought that up. But he mattered to me, and I wanted to make sure to take care of him any way I could so that he wouldn’t get worse. Because that was what you did when you cared about people. “Well, I’m glad you listened,” I told him.

The smile he gave me in return, as he laid in the hospital bed, was weak. “I don’t know when I’ll get back to the shop.”