Sam, who had been about to say something from the threshold, closed his mouth. He didn’t dare disrupt the moment by leaving or intruding. He could only stand there, frozen in the understanding that something important was happening.
Mark’s face was carefully impassive. “What do you tell your friends when they ask if I’m your dad?”
“I just let them think it.” Holly paused. “Is that wrong?”
Mark shook his head. “’Course not.” His voice was husky.
“Will I still call you Uncle Mark after the baby comes?”
Reaching down, Mark took one of Holly’s hands, absurdly small in comparison to his, and sandwiched it between his palms. “You can call me whatever you want, Holly.”
The child leaned closer until her head was on his arm. “I want to call you Dad. I want you to be my dad.”
Mark was robbed of speech. It was clearly something he had not expected, or had even allowed himself to consider. His throat worked, and he bent to press his face against her pale, moonlight-blond hair. “I would love that. I … yes.” He lifted her onto his lap and hugged her, clumsily petting her hair. A few indistinguishable murmurs followed, three syllables repeated over and over.
The muscles of Sam’s own throat knotted. He was outside the moment and yet part of it.
“You’re squishing me,” came Holly’s muffled voice after a long minute.
Mark’s arms loosened, and she wriggled off his lap.
Renfield had padded into the room, a wadded-up paper napkin hanging from his mouth.
“Renfield,” Holly scolded, “don’t eat that.”
Pleased at having gotten her attention, the dog trotted from the room with the napkin.
“I’ll get it away from him,” Holly said. She paused to rub noses with Mark. “Dad,” she said with an impish grin, and dashed after the dog.
Sam had never seen his brother so utterly humbled. He came into the room as Mark let out a short, winded sigh and wiped his eyes with his fingers.
Seeing him, Mark blinked and began unsteadily, “Sam—”
“I heard,” Sam interrupted quietly, and smiled. “It’s good, Mark. Holly was right. You do look like a dad.”
Fourteen
Voices floated into the bedroom.
“… I want Lucy to use my pink bathroom,” Holly insisted. “It’s prettier than yours.”
“It is,” came Sam’s reply. “But Lucy needs a walk-in shower stall. She can’t climb in and out of the tub.”
“Can she still see my bathroom? And my room?”
“Yeah, you can give her the official tour later. For now, put your socks on. You’re going to be late for school.”
Lucy breathed in an elusive scent from the pillow, like leaves and new rain and newly cut cedar. It was Sam’s smell, so appealing that she hunted for it shamelessly, digging her head deep into the warm down.
She had a vague memory of waking in pain in the middle of the night. Of Sam coming to her like a shadow. He had given her pills and a glass of water, sliding his arm behind her back as she took the medicine. She had awakened another time, groggily aware of him replacing the cold gel packs around her leg, and she had told him that it wasn’t necessary to keep getting up for her, he should get some rest.
“Quiet,” he had murmured, straightening the covers around her. “Everything’s okay.”
As the morning brightened, Lucy lay quietly and listened to the muffled sounds of voices, breakfast, a phone ringing, a house-wide hunt for a missing homework folder and field-trip permission slip. Eventually a car rolled along the drive.
Footsteps ascended the stairs. There was a tap at the door, and Sam ducked his head in. “How are you doing?” The sound of his morning-roughened baritone chased pleasantly across her ears.
“I’m a little sore.”
“Probably a lot sore.” Sam came into the room, carrying a breakfast tray. The sight of him scruffy and sexy, wearing only flannel pajama pants and a white tee, drew a rampant flush to the surface of her skin. “It’s time for another pill, but you should eat first. How does an egg and toast sound?”
“Great.”
“After that you can take a shower.”
Lucy’s color deepened further, her pulse turning hectic. She wanted a shower badly, but in light of her physical condition, it was obvious that she was going to need a lot of help. “How exactly would that work?” she managed to ask.
Sam set the tray on the bed and helped Lucy to sit up. He propped an extra pillow behind her as he replied in a matter-of-fact tone. “It’s a walk-in shower. You can sit on a plastic stool and wash with a handheld spray. I’ll have to help you in and out, but you can do most of it yourself.”
“Thank you,” she said, relieved. “That sounds good.” She picked up a piece of lightly buttered toast and began to spread jam on it. “Why do you have a handheld shower spray?”
One of his brows arched. “Something wrong with that?”
“Not at all. It’s just the kind of thing I would expect an old person to have, not a guy your age.”
“I have hard-to-reach places,” Sam said in a deadpan tone. After he saw the smile tugging at her lips, he said, “Also, we wash Renfield in there.”
Sam went to shower and shave while she ate. He returned wearing a pair of raggedy-looking jeans and a T-shirt that proclaimed SCHRЦDINGER’S CAT IS ALIVE.
“What does that mean?” Lucy asked, reading the shirt.
“It’s a principle in quantum theory.” Sam set a plastic bag of supplies on the floor, and lifted the bed tray away from Lucy’s lap. “Schrцdinger was a scientist who used the example of a cat placed in a box with a radioactive source and a flask of poison, to demonstrate how an observation affects an outcome.”
“What happens to the cat?”
“Do you like cats?”
“Yes.”
“Then you don’t want me to tell you about the theorem.”
She made a face. “Don’t you have any optimistic T-shirts?”
“This one is optimistic,” Sam said. “I just can’t tell you why, or you’ll bitch about the cat.”
Lucy chuckled. But as Sam approached the bed and reached for the covers, she fell silent and shrank back, her heart lurching into overdrive.
Sam let go of the bed linens at once, his expression carefully neutral. He studied her, his gaze alighting on her tightly crossed arms. “Before we do this,” he said quietly, “let’s deal with the elephant in the room.”
“Who’s the elephant?” Lucy asked warily.
“No one’s the elephant. The elephant is the fact it’s surprisingly awkward to help a
