He’d never, ever been a talker, was the opposite of a sharer, but now, as the pressure inside of him built, he was compelled to let some of it out, desperate to get it out into the light, so to speak, to sort through it, try to find some kind of relief. Any relief.

“I don’t know…” he started, his voice full of gravel and grief. “I’m not a good son. She might not know I love her.”

“Ohh, Cole, she knows. Moms know.”

“I haven’t told her for years. Haven’t showed her.” Anytime he stepped foot into her house, the house where they’d all grown up, he set his defenses sky-high, determined not to let anyone in.

“I’ve never met her, but I still bet she knows,” Sierra said, her voice like a soothing balm in the middle of a walk through shards of glass.

That didn’t mean he believed her.

Cole buried his face in his hands, and the images he normally blocked out filtered into his mind against his will. His dad, back when Cole was a teenager and a thorn in the old man’s side. Harry North had been a good man, a hardworking man, involved in his sons’ lives to the nth degree, from baseball games to grade reports to girlfriends, as much as they would let him. Cole had done his best not to let him, had argued with his dad over pretty much everything. Argued to the end.

The regret that lived in every single cell in his body, no matter how hard he worked to push it down, roared to life, flooded his system as if it sensed his weakened state and was moving in for the kill.

“I…” He swallowed hard, again feeling the burning need to spill the bad shit out, as unfamiliar as that was to him. “I told you my dad died when I was seventeen,” he managed, and he felt Sierra nod against his shoulder. “The last time I talked to him, we had an argument.” He pushed air out of his lungs. “The last words I said to him were hateful. I stormed out, and the very next day, he got broadsided on his way home from work. Died at the scene. I never got to make peace with him,” he forced out.

He’d never told anyone that secret. Had held it close for all these years, fifteen years, so close that on most days it was buried too deep even for him to think about it. But it was always there, that awful truth. And now Sierra knew.

“God, that sucks,” she said, and he braced himself for whatever she would say next, needing it to be something other than the loathing he deserved. “That must have made his death so much harder to come to terms with.”