“We all screw up a lot,” I tried to assure him. It was the truth.

“It seems like I do more than anyone else does.”

“That’s not true. I’m still alive.”

His laugh was watery. His face was still partially covered as he shook his head and sniffed. “Oh, Luna, I really am sorry I never told you the truth. I thought about it a hundred times. Maybe even a thousand. Every time you would bring me my coffee. Every time you tried to break up one of my arguments with Ripley… I thought, I should tell her. And I was too ashamed to.” He exhaled. “I didn’t want one more person being disappointed in me, especially not you. I know it’s selfish, but I couldn’t bear it if you were.”

I had been disappointed in him for not being upfront with me.

I’d been disappointed to think that he hadn’t cared about me or valued our relationship enough to tell me that he had a son.

A son I worked with.

I had been a little hurt he’d looked into my background, but thinking on it, I understood. I’d been a seventeen-year-old girl who magically appeared.

But this wasn’t all about me, and I was no one to talk about keeping things to myself so that I wouldn’t disappoint others. This was about him and whatever was going through his brain. Whatever had gone through his heart in the time before we had met.

I didn’t want to lie and tell him that I wasn’t disappointed he had kept something this massive a secret, so I told him what I could. I told him my own truths that I had kept. “I never told you that my dad dealt drugs, or that my uncle made them, that my cousins sold them, or that I left the day my dad held a gun to me and told me he wished I had never been born.” I started to smile but stopped because… because I didn’t have one in me. “I never told you I had an older brother who up and left one day. I didn’t want you to know where I had come from so that you wouldn’t expect the worst out of me like everyone else had while I’d grown up. I’m sorry I made you find out another way, Mr. C. I should have just told you the truth, but I was too ashamed of it.”

He sucked in a breath and shook his head, those eyes bubbling over until one tear streamed down his weathered cheek. I wasn’t surprised when his hand reached over and took mine, his voice a little shaky as he sniffed, “You are the best girl I have ever met, Luna Allen. I couldn’t think that. I wouldn’t think that. Not ever. The devil could’ve been your daddy and you would still be the same girl.”

It was my turn to sniff, to hold my breath.

“I hope you can forgive me for not being upfront with you all these years, if we’re going to talk about holding secrets.” The back of my hand came up to my face to wipe across my cheek. “I’ve screwed up a lot, Mr. C. We all do things that we can’t explain or don’t want to. There’s a bunch of little things I haven’t told you lately either.”

Mr. Cooper gulped and nodded.

But I figured it was time to at least ask this one thing before I lost my nerve. “Is Rip really your son?”

He nodded, but it felt… I wasn’t sure exactly how it felt. It felt like a weight off my chest, but it had only moved to my shoulders. Maybe I had accepted that they’d both had their reasons for keeping it between them, but I was struggling with it. Just a little.

“As you can see, we don’t have the best relationship,” he chuffed, trying to make it sound like a joke but failing at it.

“Not that this helps, but I don’t have that great of a relationship with my parents either.” Then I thought about it. “I don’t have the greatest relationship with Thea or Kyra right now either, if that makes you feel better, and I don’t really want to talk about it yet, if it’s all right.”

His laugh was another watery sound that didn’t sound like a happy thing at all. “But I bet your sisters don’t hate you.”

He thought Rip hated him. But what could I do? Deny it?

Instead, all I could get out was, “I’m sorry, Mr. C.”

“Don’t be sorry for me,” he replied quickly. “I deserve it.”

Hell. “Was his mom your first wife?”

He nodded, his hand coming back up to cover most of his face. “I messed up so much with him… Nothing I do will ever be enough.” He paused and made a choking sound that broke my heart a little more. “I can’t bring his mother back, but if I could trade our lives, I would. I would do it in a heartbeat,” he said in a gutted voice that broke my heart all over again.

I knew what it was like to live with regrets, and from the tone of his voice, this wasn’t just a regret. It was so much more.

It was an amputation that no prosthesis in the world could replace.

And the poor man kept talking in that cracked and hurting voice. “I didn’t see him for twenty years. The only reason I knew he was alive was because I’d pay a private investigator every year to find him.”

I couldn’t help but tense up. Not that I was one to talk, but twenty years? That was a lifetime.

Sure, I couldn’t say anything because I had left my house for almost ten. The only difference was: I knew no one gave a crap about me. Whether I lived, whether I died, whether I had somewhere warm to sleep or food to eat. Nobody I had left behind gave a single shit.

The longing I had seen on Mr. Cooper’s face when he looked at Rip suddenly made so much sense.

“By the time you came around the shop, everyone who had known Ripley as a boy had quit or moved on, so I stopped talking about him at the shop when there was no one around to ask for an update. The years… rolled by, one after the other, and before I knew it, I hadn’t mentioned him to any of you until he came back,” he explained.

I swallowed for him. For the way his voice wobbled as he told me this story.

“He showed up out of the blue one day, Luna, and said he wanted to buy into the shop… I didn’t mean to lie. Not talking about him… snowballed out of control until if I did tell you all the truth, it wouldn’t seem so innocent anymore.”

“I get it,” I told him, quietly. Because I did get it. I really did.

His sigh was sorrowful. “I don’t know how to get myself out of this mess.”

“I haven’t told anyone anything,” I let him know. “And I wouldn’t. Not ever. It’s your story and his, not anyone else’s. There isn’t a reason why anyone else should know either.”

The older man choked, rubbing his hand over his face as a couple tears escaped through his fingers. “He doesn’t want anyone to know I’m his father. He hasn’t in decades; that isn’t going to change any time soon. I could die tomorrow, and he would be perfectly fine with it,” he choked out, his chest hiccupping with emotion and maybe even a dozen other emotions I would never understand.

“I would care,” I told him. “I know I’m not a replacement for him, and I would never try to be, but you’re just about the only father figure I’ve ever had. And I would care a lot if you were gone. I would miss you for the rest of my life.”

The hand he had over his face shifted, and he peeked a glassy, red-rimmed eye at me.

So I kept going. “And I think Rip would care too. I was there while we waited for the ambulance, and I was there most of the time while we waited to hear what happened to you. He was worried, Mr. C. I don’t know if that will ever mean anything, but if he really hated you, he wouldn’t have sat there for hours to hear from your doctor.”

“He was probably making sure I really died.”

“Or you have a relationship with him that no one will ever understand.” I sighed. “Mr. C, I can tell you that if my dad had a heart attack, I would not have waited around at the hospital to hear how he was doing. I wouldn’t go visit period. And when the day comes and he passes away, I won’t be at his funeral. They could offer me a million dollars to go, and it wouldn’t be enough. Maybe Rip isn’t your biggest fan, and he doesn’t know how to forgive you for whatever it was that he blames you for, but it could be worse between the two of you. If things were that bad, he wouldn’t have come back, and he wouldn’t be able to look at you every day.”