Page 99 of Due Diligence

“Sometimes.”

I paused. I wasn’t actually expecting her to give me a response. In all honesty, I was ready for her to scoff and say no—like she usually did. But there was an earnestness in her expression, one I rarely saw.

“Would you forgive them?” I asked, carefully toeing the boundary.

“I don’t see how I could,” she replied. “It’s a huge mess. There’s hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt on the line, not to mention all these unresolved issues between us. It would take an international conflict resolution mediator to even get us started.”

“But you have to start somewhere,” I offered. “Right?”

“I don’t know what the payout would be,” she responded honestly. “That was six years ago, and I’ve built a life without them. It was hard. I probably wouldn’t pick it again if I had the chance. But I did it—and now I have a new life.”

“Forget about payout. For just a second, think about yourself and how you feel. It sounds like there’s something perpetually sitting on your shoulders. This fear of your mother calling you, this urge to pay back your father—those aren’t just reactions to them. Those are actual feelings that bite at you day after day. Wouldn’t it be worth it to resolve those feelings?”

Cass didn’t respond. She simply stared at me, one eyebrow raised.

“I’ve never told you why I started therapy when I was eight,” I continued, giving her something of myself in return. “But I started it because I was adopted out of foster care by a lesbian couple and they thought it would be good for me to talk tosomeone about the instability I experienced for the first eight years of my life—and they weren’t wrong.”

Her face tightened the way people’s faces always did when I told them about my own little Lifetime movie of a history. “Oh,” she murmured. “I’m sorry—”

“For what?” I questioned, shaking my head to reassure her. “Look, I’m fine. You don’t have to apologize because I’ve confronted all of this so it doesn’t weigh on me. My birth parents gave me up, I went into foster care, and I’m lucky to have two moms who love me so much it’s borderline co-dependent. I can’t be angry about any of that. But a big step for me to get to this point was to just forgive my birth parents.”

“Have you met them?” she inquired. “Are they still around?”

“I’ve talked to them a couple times,” I admitted. “And they’re good people, honestly. They were young and poor and never wanted a kid. They don’t even know each other anymore. But I talked to them and it turned out that a lot of the resentment I had over them not wanting me was misplaced. They didn’t give me up because they hated me—they did it because they kind of…loved me, in a way.” I raised a shoulder, shrugging because I didn’t know what else to do. “Your parents didn’t do everything right and I don’t know shit about them, but god, it sounds like they really loved you, Cass.”

She raised an eyebrow. After a beat, she forced a smile and said, “Please tell me you’re doing this to make me completely not-horny and not because you’re wise and more mature than I am.”

“I just care and I just want to give you a point of view. Again, I don’t know anything, but I do know that you don’t need to ruin your day whenever you think about your parents.”

“Thanks, Marcus.”

Her face was soft, borderline vulnerable. It was the same look she got on her face when we were lying in bed, catching our breath after we came.

“Are you sure you want to meet up with Trevor tonight? We could get dinner. Keep talking about this.”

She shook her head and she was still shaking it when she looked down at her phone. “I should go, actually. I think we’re meeting up in Brooklyn.”

“Don’t go,” I said suddenly—blurting it out without really thinking.Fuck.That was probably a mistake. I definitely shouldn’t have done that to her.

Cass was frozen in place. “What?” she asked after a beat. “Did you just—”

Quickly, I shook my head. “That was nothing. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“You really don’t want me to go?”

I let my shoulders sag as I leaned forward and rested my arms on the table. “I just want you to do whatever is going to make you happy, Cass. If sleeping with your ex—or any other guy for that matter—is what you want, then you should do it. I’ll never,evertell someone how to live their life. It’s been happening to me for years, and I know that it’s not sustainable.”

She inhaled and exhaled in quick succession, eyes fixed on me.

“I don’t know what that relationship was like when it was good,” I continued. “To be honest, I don’t know anything about relationships. But I do know that if he doesn’t treat you well, and if he’s no different than the guy who didn’t even have the decency to break up with you three years ago, he’s not worth it. I don’t even care if you pick me. Just don’t pick him.”

The silence that followed my unplanned monologue was deafening. I regretted speaking. She probably thought I was possessive and pathetic. She probably couldn’t wait to get the hell away from me. But instead of bolting like a bat out of hell,Cass walked over and stood next to my chair. “Have a good night,” she said. “I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon. We’ll make plans, okay?”

I nodded.

She leaned down and planted a kiss on my cheek. “Night.”

“Night, Cass.”

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