him, still weeping. “Please, Cole.”
He whirled to face her in the hallway in front of their room. “Daria, what do you want me to do? What do you want me to do?” he shouted again, his face ruddy with rage. He softened a little when he looked into her eyes. “I’m sorry, Daria, but this isn’t exactly a decision I can make for you!”
“Cole, I’m not asking you to make any decision. I just—” What did she want from him? She wanted him to make everything go back the way it had been before this ordeal began. But no! That wasn’t true. Nate was alive, and she couldn’t possibly wish him dead again.
She slumped to the floor and leaned her back against the cool surface of the wall. The blood pounded at her temples while she watched, helpless, as Cole went into their room, dragged a large suitcase down from the shelf in their walk-in closet and started dumping his dresser drawers into it. He was leaving, and there wasn’t one word she could say to stop him.
Through tears, she watched him finish packing. When he brushed past her without so much as a glance in her direction, the anger finally rose in her. She followed him out to the kitchen and then to the back porch.
“Colson Hunter, don’t you dare leave like this! Please! We can’t get through this if we can’t talk about it!”
He set the suitcase down on the floor of the mud room and turned to face her. “I love you, Cole,” she squeaked. Then, abruptly he wrapped his arms around her, as though he were committing the sensation to memory. Finally he held her away from himself and looked into her eyes.
When he spoke, his voice was steady and serene. “Daria, I love you with everything that is in me. The life we’ve had together has been the greatest blessing of my life. I will never, never stop loving you—or Natalie. I wish to God that everything could go on exactly as it was yesterday, before this…nightmare began. But that isn’t going to happen. You have a decision to make that I can’t even imagine making myself. But I can’t be the one to help you make it. The only thing I can do to help now is to get out of the way so you can decide what you want to do.”
She began to cry, but though he appeared to be moved by her emotion, he stepped away from her. “Daria,” he said, his voice wavering, “I will be praying for you every minute. I don’t know that I can pray without bias, but that will be my goal. I do know I can’t stay here. Surely you can see that.”
He leaned forward again as if he meant to kiss her, but instead he turned on his heel, picked up his bag, and went out into the night.
Twenty-Five
It was the darkest night Daria could remember—blacker even than that night in Timoné when she’d first accepted that Nathan was dead. How strange that his being alive was now the reason for a night of even deeper anguish. She lay in their bed upstairs, Cole’s absence from the bed feeling like a huge lump that threatened and crowded her instead of the vacant space it was in reality. Her mind reeled with questions. How would she ever know what was the right thing to do? How could they ever disentangle themselves from this knot of family ties that had a stranglehold on them all? She tried to imagine where they would be a year from now, and no picture would form.
More immediately, how would she explain to her daughter why Cole was gone? She and Cole had just begun giving Nattie little hints of her story, referring to her “other” daddy and telling her that Grandma and Grandpa Camfield were the parents of her “Daddy-Nate,” who had died before she was born. When they had thought Nathan dead, they had struggled with just how to present the particulars to her, but now those details that had once seemed so fraught with confusion seemed simple by comparison. This new truth was so bizarre that Daria couldn’t imagine how it would ever unravel itself, let alone how they would explain it to a child—or to anyone, for that matter. She took in a sharp breath as it dawned on her that there was no “they” anymore. She was alone in this labyrinth of impossible choices. Hers would be