If anyone should have suffered physical and emotional pain, it should have been me. I’d always been the tough one, the strong one. Not that Cooper wasn’t, f**k, he was the strongest man I knew, but he’d never had any need to be. He had a good life, grew up in a kind household. An amazing mother and two dads I respected the hell out of. Me…I’d been training my whole life to deal with pain and fight back against despair. I was used to it, being dealt the worst hands in a deck and dealing with it. Going all in even when the odds were against me. I could go to hell and come back laughing. Cooper…he was too good for that s**t. He’d gone to hell, that was for damn sure, I just wasn’t sure if he’d ever come back.
I followed him out of the hotel and across the street to the diner. His shattered l
