My rib cage tightened around my lungs. I could feel his pain like a living, breathing monster between us. But the invisible kind. The kind you couldn’t see to fight off but left bloodied wreckage in its wake.
“Dad turned for a split second. Just long enough to tell us to quit it. But that was all it took. Jacob shouted. There was a damn deer in the middle of the road. Dad tried to swerve, but it was icy. We went over an embankment and hit a tree. I came to, and all I could hear was pain.”
I wanted to touch Cope so badly, to soothe him somehow. But I knew if my skin grazed his, this story would stop, and something told me Cope needed to get this off his chest more than anything.
“I listened as my dad and brother died, but I couldn’t get to them. Couldn’t help. They needed me, and I wasn’t fucking there. Pinned in the back seat next to my unconscious sister, not knowing if she was dead or alive, just knowing it was all my fault.”
Tears streamed down Cope’s cheeks and dripped off his jaw and chin, forming darker spots on the floor around us. “I killed them. Fal doesn’t remember because she had a head injury. That whole night is just gone for her. But I remember it. I live with it every single day—the knowledge that I tore my family apart.”
I moved then, unable to hold back any longer. It didn’t matter that Cope was covered in sweat from his run or that he didn’t think he deserved this. I wrapped my arms around his waist, pressed my face to his chest, and held on with everything I had.
“How can you bear to touch me?” he croaked.
“Cope,” I rasped. “You are a good man.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re a good man, and it wasn’t your fault.”
“It’s onme,” he growled.
I pulled back, my hands lifting to grab his face. “You were a thirteen-year-old kid who was bickering with his sister. If you think that condemns you to a lifetime of misery, then every single human with a sibling would suffer that fate.”
The remnants of tears swirled in his shadowy blues. “They died because of me. And I’ve never told a single soul.”
“They didn’t. There is no reason for their deaths. That’s why it’s called an accident. Because no one is at fault. Certainly notyou.”
It killed a piece of my soul that Cope had been carrying this around for the past seventeen years. That he’d held this kind of pain and guilt without tellinganyone. It made so many things make sense, though.
Why he held himself apart from his family yet would do anything for them. Why he didn’t typically spend much time in Sparrow Falls, as if he could hide from the memories. Why he went after anyone who hurt one of his teammates on the ice as if he could protect them the way he hadn’t with his brother and father. And why he was holding himself back from me now as if that would keep him from being hurt again.
Fear and atonement.
It was a lethal mixture. One that could destroy Cope’s life. It was more toxic than even the drugs that had pulled Roman under.
Cope’s chest rose and fell with his ragged pants as he recovered from his punishing run and letting loose that story. I kept a hold of his face. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Sutton,” he croaked.
“It wasn’t your fault.” I’d say the words over and over until he had no choice but to hear me.
“You don’t know?—”
“I do,” I said, cutting him off. “You think I haven’t gotten to know your family over this past year? That I don’t know how they’d react to knowing you’ve been shouldering this burden for seventeen years? They’d be heartbroken. Not because they think you’re responsiblebut because you’ve been carrying all this weight without letting them help.”
I knew that with every piece of my soul. Because that’s who the Colsons were. They met you wherever you were and surrounded you with love and acceptance. It killed me that Cope thought he’d get anything different.
Cope stared down at me, his chest still rising and falling with those rough breaths. His eyes searched mine, but I couldn’t pin down what he was looking for. “I’m reckless. And it wasn’t just that night. I snapped on the ice and got Teddy injured. Snapped at practice and nearly got suspended. Could’ve really hurt a teammate who, while an ass, wouldn’t have deserved it. And all of it came around to bring Teddy here. Because he was checking in on my mess of a self. If he hadn’t, he’d still be alive.”
That was a knife to the chest. “Cope.”
“But even worse, I guilted you into going to a funeral that exposed you to people you’re hiding from because they broke your goddamned body and left you for dead.” His chest heaved with his labored breaths that had nothing to do with recovering from his run.
But I kept a hold of his face and didn’t let go. “First, you’re human. You went after a player who messed with one of your friends. From what I’ve learned about hockey, that’s pretty typical.”
“Sutton—”
“I’m talking,” I clipped, anger pressing to the surface, not at Cope but at the game of torture his mind was playing on him.
