Chapter 7 Grant
GRANT
Snow crunches beneath my boots as I step out of Noel’s Winter Wonders, the soft chime of the door fading behind me.
The air outside is sharp enough to sting my lungs.
I tug my jacket tighter, collar high against the wind, and make my way toward the truck parked a few storefronts down.
My breath ghosts in front of me in pale clouds that vanish just as quickly as they form.
Noelle’s face—those wide hazel eyes, the little furrow between her brows, the way her smile faltered the second she saw me—keeps looping in my mind like a record that won’t stop skipping. She’d looked…startled. Spooked, even.
Like seeing me was something she hadn’t prepared for, something she never wanted to happen.
My chest tightens at that thought.
I shove my hands into my coat pockets and lower my head against the wind, boots thudding against the sidewalk.
The streets are quiet, the kind of small-town stillness I’d forgotten I missed, but my thoughts are too loud for the calm to matter.
Does she regret that weekend?
That thought’s been needling at me since I left, gnawing its way through everything else that had been stressing me out since traveling here for Richard’s birthday.
Six years is a long damn time.
Maybe she’s had plenty of time to tuck it all away in some dark corner of her memory, chalk up what happened between us as some mistake, a bad judgment call after too much wine and too many unspoken emotions left unchecked.
But god, I hope she doesn’t because I sure as hell never have.
That weekend—those few stolen nights the four of us shared—weren’t just a lapse in judgement for me.
They were a crack in the armor I’d spent most of my life building. With her, everything I usually kept locked down just came loose.
The walls, the discipline, the need to keep everyone at arm’s length all came undone the second she looked at me the way she did.
Like she saw through me and didn’t care about the years between us, or the rules, or the risk.
I can still feel it if I let myself: the heat of her skin under my palms, the way her breath trembled when I sunk into her nice and slowly.
The quiet after when she’d fallen asleep against me, trusting me enough to drift off against my chest.
That memory’s lived rent-free in my head ever since.
Running into her now, the older, sharper, more confident version of her running a whole shop on her own…I’d been blown away.
Christ, when she said she owned the place, I almost laughed out loud from pure surprise.
Not because it was impossible to picture her doing something like that.
Never that.
Noelle’s always had that kind of drive. Once she set her mind to something, she didn’t stop.
Still, something about her seemed…off.
Not just the initial shock of seeing me again. It was more than that. It was the way her eyes flicked just slightly away whenever I asked a question.
Guarded, sure, but there was something else beneath it. Something heavier she was hiding behind that polite warmth she’s so damn good at putting on.
I climb into my truck, slamming the door harder than I mean to.
The cab is freezing, the leather stiff from the cold. The engine rumbles to life beneath me, a low, steady growl that fills the silence.
I sit there for a long moment, hands gripping the steering wheel, watching the faint plume of my breath rise in front of me.
My thoughts snag on Eli, her boy.
Richard’s mentioned him a handful of times over the years when we’ve talked on the phone, always proud as hell about being a granddad. I’d never pushed too hard for details, but every now and then, I’d ask.
How old is he now?
How’s Noelle holding up?
And every time, Richard would answer the same way he always did.
I’ve always wondered, though. Quietly—privately—if Eli could be one of ours.
The math has never worked cleanly in my head from the timeline Richard’s told me, but it’s not impossible. I’d never said it out loud to the others.
Hell, I never even said it to myself until recently.
But the thought’s been there, tucked away in the back of my mind, surfacing every time Richard mentioned his grandson.
Said Eli came from a one-night stand Noelle had in college right after she went back to campus.
He’d told me with such a detached tone that I believed him.
Or maybe I wanted to believe him.
Because the alternative would mean that we all did something worse than just crossing a physical line that weekend.
And yet, something in Richard’s voice never sat quite right. He never spoke with the disgust or disapproval you’d expect from a father knowing his best friends slept with her.
Hell, he wouldn’t be returning our calls in general if he really knew.
We more than likely would’ve found him banging on our doorstep, demanding us to come out and fight him man-to-man.
I can imagine her fear if Richard ever found out.
He might be the most even-keeled man I know, but no father could hear something like that about his daughter and come out the other side unchanged.
The thought of his face, the betrayal that would flicker across it if he ever learned the truth makes my stomach clench.
But still…she could’ve come to us.
We would’ve found a way, kept it quiet, handled it between the four of us without letting it turn into a scandal that ripped everything apart.
She wouldn’t have had to carry the weight of the pregnancy alone or the thousand tiny decisions that shape a kid’s life.
We could’ve helped.
Even if it meant doing it in the shadows, she wouldn’t have been alone.
The idea makes my stomach twist. Because if Eli is one of ours—if he’s mine—then she’s been raising him all these years without me.
Without any of us.
And not because she had to, but because she chose to.
I rub a hand over my face, groaning into my palm.
It’s stupid to think about.
Even stupider to hope, but I can’t shake it.
The what-ifs have me in a chokehold.
I pully out my phone and pull up Callum’s contact. I hesitate for half a heartbeat before hitting call. The line rings twice before he answers.
“You find anything good?” he asks over a backdrop of faint holiday music and what sounds like a cash register. “I’m striking out at this craft store. Why the hell is shopping for a birthday so damn difficult? I should’ve just gotten him a bottle of scotch and called it a day.”
I grunt, leaning back against the seat, eyes still fixed on the shop’s frosted windows through my windshield. “Just saw Noelle.”
There’s a beat of silence. It’s brief, but heavy enough that I can almost hear the way his posture changes on the other end. When he speaks again, his tone’s different. Quieter. “Yeah? How’s she doing? Been a while.”
“Don’t know,” I admit. “She didn’t talk much.”
He hums, that thoughtful noise he makes when he’s chewing over something. “She look alright?”
I hesitate, the next part catching in my throat before I can stop it. “Yeah. But something felt…off.”
“Off how?”
“Just,” I trail off, dragging a hand through my hair until it tugs at the roots. The silence between us hums faintly, filled only by the soft static of the car’s heater. “I’m overthinking this. If her son was one of ours, she would’ve told us, right?”
He sighs. “You’d think so. Noelle never struck me as the type that liked to play games. But…six years is a long time. People change.”
“Yeah,” I mutter, staring out at the snow drifting across the windshield in lazy spirals.
Each flake melts the instant it hits the glass, disappearing as quickly as it lands.
For a while, neither of us says anything.
For years, the three of us never talked about this. It was one of those things we kept buried under the unspoken agreement that some memories were better left alone.
Richard’s word had been enough.
We’d taken his explanation at face value because doing anything else would’ve meant tearing open a wound none of us had the stomach to face.
Still, the timing had always been too perfect. Noelle didn’t return to campus until after Christmas. From then to the pregnancy announcement to the birth, the math lined up better if she’d got pregnant before the holiday.
Callum and I had never said it out loud, but there was an understanding there.
A quiet, mutual suspicion we both pretended didn’t exist.
Whenever her name came up, there’d be a pause, a subtle shift in tone and a glance that lasted a heartbeat too long.
We were both thinking the same thing, but neither of us were ever brave enough to voice it.
Could Noelle have been lying about that one-night stand?
Could she have been protecting one of us by keeping Eli’s paternity a secret?
It’s plausible.
Hell, it made a kind of painful sense.
If anyone would’ve figured that out aside from me, it’d be Callum.
The man’s mind never stops turning, analyzing, and calculating.
He’s probably turned that question over in his head as many times as I have.
Probably more.
But even with that knowledge gnawing at the edges of our conversations for years, we’d both done nothing.
We’d let time dull it, hoping the distance would erase the possibility altogether. Because deep down, we were both cowards.
Neither of us wanted to find out the truth.
If we were right—if Eli really was one of ours—then we’d have to face the consequences. We’d have to look our best friend in the eye and admit we’d crossed a line that should never have been crossed.
That the daughter he trusted us with, the one we’d sworn to protect, had ended up in our beds and that the fallout from that would be an earned consequence.
But if we were wrong…
If Eli wasn’t one of ours, if he was truly the child of some nameless guy she met at college, then we’d lose even the smallest piece of hope that what we shared with her had meant something.
That there hadn’t been any permanence in the chaos.
As fucked up as that sounded, that was how my heart felt.
“Did you get a good look at him?” Callum asks suddenly, his voice breaking through my thoughts. “Her son, I mean. He look like one of us?”
I grip the steering wheel tighter, my knuckles whitening.
I think back to the glimpse I caught through the shop window.
A little boy playing on the floor, pushing toy cars across the carpet, his curls catching the light from the Christmas tree next to him.
“Not really,” I say after a long pause. “Didn’t see him up close enough.”
There’s a low hum from the other end of the line. “Guess we’ll have to see when we all get together, then. She’s still going to be there right? For the birthday party?”
“As far as I’m aware. She still lives with Richard. I can’t see her suddenly moving out in the next few days just to avoid us. Or staying at a friend’s place without it looking suspicious.”
Callum huffs softly. “Well, if she does that, then we have our answer, don’t we?”
True.
Still, the last thing I want is for things to be awkward between us.
“I’ll head over tomorrow to check things out. See if I can get her to talk to me instead,” Cal says.
“Alright. Let me know what you find out.”