Good.
“You disappeared. No word. No trace. Not a damn thing.” He rose from the couch then, quiet, measured, but full of a storm that had been building for years. “I grieved my father while he was still breathing, Theo. He died before I ever got answers. And now you’re standing here, what—looking for peace?” His voice didn’t rise, but it didn’t need to. Every word cut clean. “I don’t know what you’re looking for. But you don’t get to walk in and unload it like it’s a debt paid.”
Theo’s mouth parted slightly, as if he might argue, but Bennett shook his head.
“I’m not saying this for you,” he said. “I’m saying it because I need to. Because this—” he waved his hand between them “—this has lived inside me a long time. And I’m done letting it take up space.”
He turned away from Theo, not in surrender, just to step toward the woman anchoring him in the now.
But then he frowned and turned back as he remembered his cousin’s earlier words. “You mentioned a kid.”
Theo’s chin lifted and shoulders straightened. “My daughter. She was born five months after everything blew up.”
Bennett’s breath locked. Betrayal, anger, sorrow, they all combined to form a hell of a sucker punch to his gut. His father went to prison for Theo. Theo disappeared. Theo had a kid.
It explained a few things. Hell, it explained a lot.
Bennett stared at his cousin, his pulse pounding like a war drum in his ears.
“You had a kid on the way,” he said, his voice flat but razor-edged. “That’s why he did it. That’s why my father took the fall.”
Theo’s throat worked around the words. “I didn’t know he went to prison,” he said, his voice tight. “Not at first. Not until after she was born.”
Bennett frowned. “What are you talking about?”
Theo inhaled a slow breath. “He didn’t tell me he was going to prison. He told me to take Lexi and leave. Said to get out of town, get my shit together, raise my kid somewhere better than that mess. I thought he was just helping me cover my tracks, buying me time to fix it on my own.” His voice cracked. “I didn’t know until I came back.”
Bennett’s chest tightened. “Came back when?”
“Six months after my daughter was born,” Theo replied, thrusting a hand through his hair. “The guilt was eating me alive. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. About everything I left behind. I came back to apologize. To come clean.” He looked up, gaze haunted. “That’s when I found out he was gone. That he’d been convicted. That he’d died in prison the month before I got there.”
The world went quiet in Bennett’s head. He stared at Theo, not moving, not blinking, just trying to breathe through the crushing pressure behind his ribs.
Across the room, Laurel sucked in a breath, quiet but sharp enough to cut through the silence. Her arms curled around herself like the ache in Theo’s words had reached across the floor and wrapped around her too.
Her gaze found Bennett’s, full of sorrow and something else…empathy. Depth.
She looked at Theo then back to him, her voice soft but steady. “I’m sorry you both went through this. And that you both had to carry it alone.”
Her words landed like a balm and a blade all at once.
Bennett’s throat tightened. The room still felt too small, the air too thin, but Laurel’s voice anchored him. The softness. The truth. The way she saw them both. Him and Theo. Not just for what they’d done, but for what they’d carried.
And damn if that didn’t unravel something deep inside him. He held her gaze, and her support and affection spoke volumes. She wasn’t just here for him. She understood him. And for the first time since his father’s arrest, he didn’t feel like he was standing in it alone.
But he still needed answers. Long overdue ones.
“Why, Theo?” he finally asked. “Why the hell did you take the money in the first place? Why would you steal from a fund my father was responsible for?”
This was something he could never understand.
Sorrow and pain tightened Theo’s features. “For Lexi. To buy her freedom from a biker gang in Cheyenne.”
Laurel’s indrawn breath echoed around them.
Bennett glanced at her just long enough to see the stunned look in her eyes, the way her hand pressed lightly to her chest.
Then his gaze locked back on Theo. “A biker gang,” he repeated, trying to get his mind around the confession. “You stole from an account my father helped oversee—to pay off some gang?”
