Page 12 of Hold on Tight

“You okay, sweetheart?” Lani asked.

Three seconds in, and her stepmother knew the score.

“Mira?”

Mira sighed. “I saw Jake.”

“Honey?” Alarm rang in her stepmother’s voice.

“I took Sam to physical therapy and he was there.”

In the background, her father demanded, “Is everything okay?”

She heard her stepmother’s muffled voice. “She ran into Sam’s father. In the physical therapist’s office.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” her father said, clear as day.

“Hang on,” Lani said. “I’m putting you on speaker.”

The phone beeped and her father said, “What happened?”

She was glad to hear him, and for a moment, she thought,I could be there. I could be with them. Instead of here, swimming upstream—

She cut off the thought. This was what she wanted. To make her own life. A life where she made decisions, solved problems. She wanted to be sure she knew who she was. That was why she was here.

She gripped the phone tighter and listened for any sound from Sam’s room, but it was quiet. “He showed up in the waiting room at physical therapy.”

“Did you tell him about Sam?” her father asked.

She instinctively recoiled from the concern in his voice. She’d traveled three thousand miles to put some space between her father and his love, which was deep but rarely tidy. When her father found out she was pregnant, he’d accused her of being irresponsible and stupid. He’d told her she’d ruined her life and theirs and that she would pay for the mistake for as long as she lived. He’d called her selfish and told her she was worse than her mother.

Lani had reasoned with him, pleaded with him, and of course ultimately Sam had brought him around. It was impossible to hold Sam, to smell the clean baby smell of the crown of his head, to feel his trusting weight in your arms, and still believe him to be any kind of mistake. Or see anyone’s life as ruined.

But Mira’s father had been against her trying to contact Jake. The situation was bad enough, he’d said, without adding another complication. A man none of them knew, a man foolish enough to engage in unprotected sex during army leave with a barely of-age girl who was almost a stranger.

With the phone clutched to her ear, her parents waiting for her to answer, she felt a peculiar twist of defensiveness on Jake’s behalf.

“Yeah. I told him.”

“Do you think that was wise?”

She took a breath. “I’ve always believed that if I ever saw him, I would tell him the truth. No matter what the circumstances. I’ve always believed it was the right thing to do. He’s Sam’s father.”

“How did he react?” her father asked.

“He didn’t believe it.”

“Oh,honey,” Lani said, which was somehow way worse than her father’s “Mira, I think you need to be more cautious.”

Why was she surprised every time he demonstrated how little he thought of her judgment? Why did it still hurt that he didn’t think she could manage to run her own life without screwing it up?

“How did he seem?” Lani asked.

“He has a prosthetic leg.”

“Oh, honey.” Ten thousand subtleties to the way those words could come out of her stepmother’s mouth.

“Yeah.”

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