Page 98 of Kade

“What are they saying?”

He shook his head, and his usual excitement gleamed back at me. He loved football. Loved playing it.

I tugged on his Fallen Crest Academy football shirt. “How was your practice?” He’d made the junior varsity, which was early for someone in his grade. They hadn’t had a game today.

“It was good.” He yawned, looking around. “Oh!” His eyes rounded. “My coach wants to talk to you and Dad after the game tonight.”

My eyebrows furrowed. “What’d you do?”

A ghost of a smile flashed over his face. “Mom.”

I grinned back. He was like me in some ways, but if you pissed him off, he turned Mason in zero-point-two seconds. People thought he was easy going, and mostly he was. He and Nolan were good kids, but I knew my son had a vicious streak. I’d witnessed it. The other kids didn’t seem wary of him so far, but it would happen. That’s how it had been before. The other boys learned not to mess with Nash. It started happening as early as second grade. I’d been tense as he grew up, worried about whether I should say something or step in, because I didn’t want him to hurt another kid. But no parent ever came to me about it. Then one night Nolan had whispered in my ear that I didn’t need to worry about it. “He only does something if someone is trying to mess with me or him,” she’d said.“And he’s smart, Mom. He’s better at handling bullies than Maddy is.” She had rolled her eyes.“We both are.”

I’d been surprised, a little relieved, and then worried. Because how many bullies did they deal with? Her comment about Maddy also concerned me, until I’d discovered what she was talking about when I was called to Maddy’s school. A group of girls had been trying to bully my daughter. Maddy turned the tide and ended up bullying them, or so they claimed. When the girls wouldn’t say what exactly Maddy had done to them, the meeting was dismissed, but I laid down the law when I got home. Maddy spilled the details. A girl tried to cyberbully her, so Maddy had befriended a hacker who got into the girl’s phoneand shared all of her private messages publicly. I’d blanched when I heard that. Another girl tossed something in Maddy’s locker, and it destroyed some of her books. Maddy got even by going to that girl’s house, pretending she was a friend, and hooking up a hose in the nearest bathroom. She soaked the girl’s entire room.

To this day, I had no idea why that girl’s parents never said anything. We should’ve been on the hook to pay for the damage, but Maddy laughed when I shared that concern.

“She wouldn’t dare open that window,” she’d said. “Once the parents are involved, she knows I can get more dirt I’ll spill to her parents. She’d be so grounded she’d never see her friends until she was fifty. These kids nowadays, Mom. They aren’t all saints, not like they were when you grew up.”

“Maddy, I’m not that old,” I’d told her.

She’d rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Okay. But you’re so old, you can read a map that’s on paper.”

I stopped bringing up our ages after that conversation.

Nash shrugged at me now. “It’s nothing. I think they want me to start dressing for the varsity games.” At that moment some of his friends ran past. Nash yelled to them, giving me a rushed kiss on the cheek. “Love you, Mom. I’m going to sit with the guys. See you after!” He tore after them, and I was left with a strange wave of nostalgia.

He was so tiny. Or he should’ve been.

My little boy.

Now he was going to start dressing with the varsity team? I had a feeling he wasn’t going to be dressing and standing on the sidelines. They wouldn’t need to talk to us about that. They were going to start playing him.

My baby.

They grew up fast, too fast.

37

MASON

“Mason.”

After the game, I waited on the side of the field, near an exit that was off the path of everyone else. I was staying out of the way because a crowd started to form around me whenever I left my seat. It was only because it was my first time at a varsity game. It’d die down over time, but tonight, I caught the looks on my kids’s faces. They didn’t want pro-athlete dad. They wantedtheirdad tonight. Sam needed to stick around and talk to David and Malinda. Nolan kept insisting her and Nash needed to go with the grandparents for the night and weekend so I made myself scarce. We were flexible. We generally let them. The only time we wouldn’t was if they got in trouble, but that rarely happened with the twins.

Sam’s stepbrother was heading my way as the teams filtered past. Mark had his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans, his shoulders hunched forward.

I moved farther to the side, ducking my head as a few of the visiting team’s players seemed to notice me. A couple recognized me, cursed, and shot forward into their locker room.

I wasn’t close to Mark.

It just never happened over the years, and I wasn’t sure why. He’d stuck around in the area, getting his real estate license a while back. Turns out, he was good at selling houses. He’d helped us with ours. He also owned and managed a few apartments in Fallen Crest and another town south of here.

He and Cass ended their relationship, and it looked more and more like it was going to be official this time. Evidently he’d been drowning himself in alcohol, and he’d been taking home a string of one-night stands.

“You’re sober?”

He stopped abruptly a few yards away. “What’d you say?”

---