Page 69 of Hold on Tight

Excellent dodge, Mom.

It was a good idea, but she was messing with the wrong seven-year-old. Sam had apparently done a lot of thinking on this subject.

“My dad is a soldier, and you’re a soldier.”

“Wasa soldier,” Jake said.

“Area soldier,” Mira said. “Youarea soldier.”

She meant it as an expression of faith in him:You’re afraid you can’t do it, but you can. But it felt like a warning:Be careful what you promise him, because there will come a time when you have to go.

“You took care of me yesterday like a dad,” Sam said. “I just thought …”

There was defeat in Sam’s voice. Mira’s ploy was working. Sam had backed down, realized that he’d made a colossal leap, and was preparing to retrench.

His words fully penetrated Jake’s brain.

You took care of me yesterday like a dad.

He remembered how hard his heart had beat in the cab on the way over. The way it did when he was infiltrating a theoretically empty building at night, men ahead of him waving him on, men behind him covering his ass. Because some loser had showed up to harass his son’s babysitter, and he was going to cut off that loser’s balls and shove them down his throat.

He remembered the feel of Sam, curled in his lap, crying. Not because he was weak but because he was a seven-year-old boy and the world was still unpredictable and incomprehensible and he depended on adults to make sense out of it. To fight for him and tell him the truth and take care of him.

He remembered the way he’d set his nose against Sam’s tearstained cheek, the snuffles and sighs and hiccups Sam emitted as he’d realized he was safe and begun to relax in Jake’s arms.

He remembered how easily the words had come.

Being brave means being afraid and still doing what you want to do or have to do.

A father’s words.

“Can I help make pancakes?”

Sam had given up. Decided, under his own steam, that he’d been an idiot to draw the conclusions he had. He’d probably never ask the question again, or not for years.

Jake could be “the babysitter” for as long as he wanted.

He thought of the paternity test Mira had offered him, weeks ago. The time when it might have mattered seemed so long ago. When loving Sam might have been a matter of a technicality and not an inevitability.

He turned to Mira, and she must have somehow seen the question in his eyes, because her face softened, as sweet and vulnerable as it had been that night by the lake, before life had toughened her up. But he mouthed it anyway, because he wanted to be sure, because he didn’t want to take anything from her, because she deserved this decision after she’d made so many on her own, feeling her way in the dark, alone.Can I tell him the truth?

She nodded. Just that, a barely-there gesture that had the power to change three lives.

“Yeah,” he said, and he reached out and touched Sam’s cheek, still warm from sleep. “I’m your real dad.”

Chapter 22

They made and ate an obscene number of pancakes and way too much bacon, and they answered Sam’s questions and absorbed his small-person recriminations. Sam was very, very angry with both of them. He accused Mira of telling lies.

She had, of course, lied to him. There was no getting around that. But she calmly—as calmly as she could with her heart thudding in her chest, with her mind racing to try to figure out what the hellthismeant—explained to him that she’d tried to find Jake but that she hadn’t known his full name or that he’d been a Ranger, and rather than telling Sam that his dad was out there in the world but couldn’t be found, which might make him upset, she had told him the sperm donor story.

“Iamupset,” Sam said, with unusual acuity for a seven-year-old.

“I’m really sorry, buddy,” Jake had said, and served him three more pancakes polka-dotted with chocolate chips, which calmed him down a bit.

There would probably be years and years of therapy to sort that one out, but for now, things were peaceful.

Mira did the dishes while Sam and Jake played chess.

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