Page 68 of Hold on Tight

And have her heart broken twice in exactly the same way?

Only this time, of course, her heart was not the only one on the line.

Now there was a seven-year-old tilting his head to one side, exactly the way he did when he was trying to figure out a difficult riddle. Oh,hell.

“You slept in my mom’s bed,” Sam said. “She doesn’t even let me do that.”

“Because you squirm and snore and you put your head ontopof my head, and because sometimes you turn all the way around and stick your feet up my nose.”

“My feet wouldn’t fit up your nose,” Sam said.

“It was late and cold and it didn’t make sense for Jake to go back to his house last night,” Mira said.

Also, we were both limp, boneless, ecstatic pools of human being, and there was no way either of us was moving. The last thing she remembered thinking was,I should make him leave before we fall asleep. And then she’d heard her door creak.

She needed to get Sam off whatever puzzle was running in his brain. She needed to not let him think too hard about the situation. Because even though he was a little kid, he had a fatherless little kid’s obsession with the missing piece in his life. Too much more time to think about it and he’d have slotted Jake right into the Jake-sized hole he’d left in their lives.

Not so different from what she’d been doing herself.

A change of subject was in order.

Mira said, brightly, “Let’s go downstairs and make some pancakes.”

“Ooh, pancakes!” Sam said, because luckily, even smart seven-year-olds had the attention span of hamsters.

“I could use a shower first,” Jake said. “Then I could make pancakes. I know how to do that.”

Shower. Jake in the shower.

“Maybe I need a shower, too,” she said.

“We could, you know, conserve water,” he said, his eyes hot on hers.

Yes, yes, they could.

But she’d let herself get distracted at a fatal moment, and Sam hadn’t.

“You slept over. And you’re a soldier,” he said, and she could see it coming with all the force of a slow-motion impending disaster.

“My real dad’s a soldier.”

“Sam, do you want to watch Saturday morning cartoons?”

ButNinjagohad nothing on the need for a small boy to understand his paternity.

“Are you my real dad?”

He’d seen it coming, but that didn’t keep it from bowling him over. He’d stupidly thought he could only be surprised by bomb blasts and unexpected appearances, but it turned out that a simple line of questioning could carve its way through his defenses. Then, when the inevitable words wound their way into his heart, they pierced like a single, perfectly aimed bullet.Are you my real dad?

The last twenty-four hours had led to this moment, the fear he’d felt as he’d hurried to rescue Sam, the sense of peace it had given him to hold and comfort his scared child. The relief and freedom he’d experienced last night with Mira, the hurt he’d tried to tamp down when she’d told him she wanted him to leave, mixed with the relief he’d felt that she was holding him at exactly the distance at which he wanted to be held. Approach, avoid. Have sex, but don’t stay the night. Friends with benefits, a father pretending to be a babysitter. It was the perfect, safe distance.

This, however, was not.

This was a seven-year-old staring at him as if he could see straight into Jake’s head, which for all Jake knew, he could. Maybe sharing genes with someone gave him a more than usual ability to read your thoughts. It wouldn’t surprise him. Sometimes he felt like he and Sam shared more than eye color, an affection for pinecone baseball and lipstick bowling, and a love of running.

Lie? Tell the truth?

Before he could decide, Mira stepped in. “Why would you think that, Sam?”

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