Page 33 of Man Advantage

“No. He never raised his voice in his life. That’s the part nobody understands about it.” Ford stopped. When he started again, he was talking to the floor. “He was in pain for twenty years. He never said the word aloud. All four of us carried it for him anyway.”

Cole waited him out.

“She asked me this morning if it was a bad day,” Ford said very quietly. “Six years old. She hadn’t even got to the tree yet.”

Cole put a hand flat between his shoulder blades.

“That’s my father,” Ford said. “In my house. Coming out of my kid. I have spent my whole life making sure I wasn’t going to be that man.”

Cole took the mug out of Ford’s hands and set it on the table because Ford’s grip had gone white on it.

Then he got an arm around him and pulled. Ford came.

“You’re not him,” Cole said.

Ford shook his head once against his shoulder. Not arguing it. Just done talking.

Cole felt him breathe out, long and uneven. Then Ford turned his face into Cole’s neck and stayed there, and Cole put a hand on the back of his head and held on, in the dark, in the one hour of the day that belonged to them.

They stayed like that a long time. Ford eventually got up, making the rounds and checking the locks. Cole rinsed the mug and left it in the rack. At the bottom of the stairs, Ford stopped him with a hand flat on his chest and kissed him, slow and unhurried, nothing in it that had anywhere to be.

Then he went up to his room, and Cole went up to his because Charlotte was down the hall.

Cole lay in the dark in the narrow bed with the door shut. The bookmark was on the nightstand. A hardcover book he had not asked for sat on the floor beside him. He could not sleep, and it was not the bed.

He picked up his phone. Britt had sent four more messages he hadn’t read.

He put it down without reading them.

He had built a whole life out of being easy to leave. He had just spent a day being impossible to replace. He had no idea how to be a man with something to lose.

FOURTEEN

Nadine’s car pulled in at nine, but Charlotte was not ready.

She had packed the night before, which had meant putting four stuffed animals and one sock in a duffel and announcing she was finished. Ford repacked it on the hall floor while she argued about the bike.

“What if it melts while I’m gone?”

“Then it melts.”

“You said first dry day.”

Ford got her toothbrush in. “First dry day you’re home. That’s the deal.”

She weighed whether that was worth a stand and decided it wasn’t. Ford zipped the bag. Nadine let herself in and stamped the snow off on the mat.

“Hi, Cole,” she said toward the kitchen, and Cole said her name back.

“Hat?”

Ford dug it out of the duffel and put it on Charlotte’s head. She pulled it half off. He put it back.

Then she hugged him hard and fast, already looking past him at the door. She went and hugged Cole around the middle and said something into his sweatshirt that Ford didn’t catch. Then she was down the walk at a dead run.

“I’ll have her back a week from today, around six.” Nadine got the duffel up onto her shoulder. “Call her tonight. She’ll be wound up.”

“I’ll call her every night.”