Page 75 of Hold on Tight

The question was aimed at Jake, but Mira knew that ultimately, it was a question for her. That all the questions were for her.

We have a nephew. Strange how despite Susannah’s hard tone, Mira could feel so grateful for those words. And so joyful, too, because this was a room full of people that belonged to Sam. Hisfamily.

“We met when Jake was home on leave. We fought, and we broke up.”

“It was my fault,” said Jake.

She shot him a look, surprised and grateful, and he gave her a lopsided smile.

“I probably should have called him right away, but I didn’t, because everyone said I shouldn’t tell him, that it would be unfair because he was deployed and he’d get himself killed worrying over it instead of having his head where it should be. They said I should tell him in person when he came home.”

Susannah narrowed her eyes, but she nodded. “I can see that,” she said.

“So I left messages, but they didn’t explain.”

“And I didn’t get them. And I didn’t come home for almost fifteen months.”

“God. I remember,” said Janet, exchanging glances with Susannah.

“Okay, but at some point, right?”

Mira nodded. “I tried. I was looking for ‘Jake’ and he was Jackson, and I—I wasn’t thinking he’d be a Ranger, so there was nothing to help me narrow down ‘Jake Taylor.’ ”

“Taylor’s a common name,” Susannah said gently.

It was grace, Mira understood, and she bit her lip, holding back tears.

“And we’re unlisted,” Susannah added, her gaze moving from Mira’s face to her mother’s, then pausing and softening still more on Jake’s. “So you couldn’t find him that way. Even if you’d had anything to go on other than ‘Taylor.’ ”

“I wish I had,” Mira said. Her heart twisted. It was their loss, too, all those years of Sam they hadn’t had. She had never let herself really imagine that they existed, this other family, these people who belonged to Sam. Who could have belonged to her.

“Well,” Susannah said. “We’re all here now, right? That’s the important thing.”

Mira had to close her eyes, then, and they gave her a minute to put herself back together. When she looked up again, Susannah was smiling at her. Not an all-out, full-on smile, but one Mira recognized. Sam’s tentative smile. Jake’s.

“How did you guys find each other again?” Susannah asked.

Jake spoke before she could. “I ran into them in the physical therapist’s office. And she told me.”

“That must have taken a lot of courage,” Susannah said. Not warmly, not exactly, but with admiration.

Mira shook her head. “I’d always promised myself if I ever saw him again, I’d tell him the truth.”

“So just like that? Right in the physical therapist’s office?”

“Right in the physical therapist’s office,” Jake confirmed.

Put like that, so baldly, it was a little terrifying. The way she’d cracked their lives wide open on the strength of a promise she’d made to herself years before. He could have been an awful man. Deeply broken, unhealable. Years of physical violence could have made him angry, bitter—even violent himself. But something about him must have seemed essentially unchanged to her. She must have seen, felt, some coreJakereaching out to her, through the grumpiness, the unwillingness. And that Jake had become more and more present every day, until now he felt like the embodiment of everything she’d let herself love about him beside the lake.

She reached out and took his hand, and he squeezed hers, hard.

Susannah and her mother exchanged glances.

“Are you two—together?”

That was Jake’s brother, Pierce.

She felt panicky. She didn’t know the answer, and how could she not know the answer to such an important question? Why hadn’t she used the car ride down here to talk to him about where things stood? She could have brought it up tentatively, said something like,Hey. So, I know we said we’d keep things simple, but I think we can both agree they’re not anymore. Where do we go from here?

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