My phone buzzed on the table as my boss waited for my response. I glanced down and saw Jake’s name flash across the screen.

“I’m going to have to take this,” I said.

Steve turned his head toward me. “Where are you going in the middle of a meeting?”

“Just trying to keep my number one client happy.” I flashed him a fake smile and showed him Jake’s name flashing across the phone.

Steve rolled his eyes but reluctantly waved me out of the conference room.

“Jake. Everything okay?”

“No, it’s not.” He spoke with noticeable weight in his voice. That put me on alert, hearing his distress. Jake was the happy-go-lucky frat guy. When he was serious, something was really wrong. Also, there was a pain in his voice that I hadn’t heard before. Not when he’d been in jail or talked about Dani or his gang tattoos; not even when he’d been suspended from the team. Not ever.

“Oh my gosh. What happened?”

“It’s Tate. I need you to pick him up from school today.”

My skin erupted in goosebumps. “Tate? Why would you…? Why would I…?”

“I’ll explain everything later. Right now, it’s almost eleven, and I’m going to be late for my warm-up before the game. Just please. Trust me.”

Despite his seriousness, I smiled. “Since when have you cared about being late?”

He didn’t answer for a long second. “I’ve always cared,” he said. “I know that’s my fault for not getting that across, because it does matter to me—my job, this game. You made me realize the things that matter to me, I have to fight to be a lot better than I have been. And there’s nothing wrong with people knowing that I care.” He sighed. “Just...pick Tate up later today and bring him back to my place, please? I’ll be home later, and I’ll explain everything.”

I exhaled, just letting his words sink in. “Okay. But… I don’t have a key.”

“I gave Tate a key.”

Something wasn’t adding up. Something was going on, enough to freak Jake out. This was a highly irregular request, but Jake was asking for help. My help. I had a feeling this wasn’t easy for him. “All right…” I said. “I’ll pick him up.”

His relief was so visceral that I felt it. “You’re the best, Andrea. Gotta go.”

He hung up, so did I. A half-second later, he texted me the address of Tate’s school. I slid the phone back into my pocket and stood there, not sure what that had been about.

When I got back into the room, Steve was drumming his fingers on the desk like I’d kept him waiting an hour. Everybody else in the room gave me a glance before turning back to Steve and the other managers.

“How’s Jake?” Steve asked. The corners of his mouth curved upward in a smile that could not have been more fake.

“He’s good. Just called to say that he’s been thinking over the new strategy, and he thinks the new community service aspect of his campaign is a good idea. He was fighting me pretty hard on it at first.”

“Impressive,” Steve said. “How did you get him to change his mind on that?”

Oh, I dunno know…letting him pin my body against the couch? Me getting under his skin? Oh, nothing all that revolutionary.

“I gave him the pitch,” I said, with a boost of confidence, because I was proud of Jake and how far he’d come. He’d fought me, hard, but now he was realizing that I was here for him, on his side. “He’s finally buying into my strategy.”

Amy, from her spot near Steve, just smiled knowingly. “Well, I’m just glad people will finally see the full, unfiltered version of The Big Unit,” she said. “He’s clearly got some really great aspects to him that not a lot of people get to see. I’m just glad you were able to find them.”

Steve looked at Amy and, surprisingly, nodded in agreement.

“I agree with Amy. Not a bad job, Andrea. Sorry for the freak-out earlier. You’re starting to turn this around.”

I was shocked that he was dishing out a compliment. With Steve, I was never sure what he was up to. He did things so sly and under the table that I’d started to question his honesty and integrity. All of the interns and hardworking employees worked our butts off, but Steve seemed to do little other than tell us we needed to be better. But I held back and went for diplomatic. I was in a room full of my peers and bosses. I had no other choice. After getting robbed at gunpoint? Please. Dealing with Steve and his shadiness was a cake-walk.

“I’m glad you feel that way,” I said brightly. “Because I’m going to have to leave early today to take care of something with Jake.”

Steve frowned and raised a brow very high into his forehead, then he pursed his lips. He should trademark that look. It’d rival Derek Zoolander’s Blue Steel signature pose. “What exactly are you doing with him?” he asked, almost suspiciously.

A lot of R-rated things, I hoped. “We are, uh, doing another photo shoot for his Instagram.”

Steve pierced me with another look. “Excellent. Just get results.”

“I will, I promise.”

Amy bit her lip, holding back her laughter.

I knew that the food situation in Jake’s apartment was dismal (did he eat out for every meal?), so I had stopped at Whole Foods before I picked up Tate. I remembered what my brothers always liked to make when we were kids, and one thing stuck out: pizza.

So I’d picked out flour, tomato sauce, some pepperoni, and mozzarella cheese, as well as other ingredients to create different kinds of homemade pizzas. I didn’t make any money as an intern and was totally relying on what my dad had given all of us kids after the divorce. I was a tight budgeter, but with Tate, I just wanted him to not worry about a thing.

Besides, this would be a time-consuming process, and I needed an activity that I could do with Tate from four p.m. to whenever Jake got back from his late-afternoon home game.

“First, we have to smash the dough and let it sit for a while,” I told Tate. I didn’t cook or bake as often as I used to, but I’d always found it relaxing. And cooking with kids was even more fun.

“We just let it sit there?” Tate repeated, dubious.

“Yes. Which will be perfect timing, because we’ll be able to wait for Jake to get home. That should give us some time to get through your homework.”

“Homework?”

“Yes, don’t you have any homework?”

I felt a little bad talking about homework when the woman who was evidently his only living relative was in a coma at the hospital. But what else could we do?

Tate had been matter-of-fact when I’d asked him what was going on. And just like when he’d told me and Jake about his cousin getting shot a few days ago, he was sad but accepting of the situation. I couldn’t believe it, but I was starting to understand it. And it was devastating that he almost expected everyone he knew to just…die. And leave him. I thought about Jake and how he’d become a foster kid. I couldn’t imagine how much it would have hurt to have your sibling adopted but not you. Rejection was the worst feeling ever. And I realized that was why Jake had taken Tate in. To not have to go through whatever Jake had gone through. It broke my heart, twice over. My childhood had been hard, but this was harder.

He looked reluctantly at his backpack before he finally unzipped it and pulled out a textbook, staring at it. I patted the seat on the couch, inviting him to take the cushion next to me.

Tate slowly took a seat on the couch.

“Are you doing okay, Tate?” I asked again, brushing my fingertips through his hair. He shied away a little.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, without the slightest conviction in his voice.

He held the book in his lap but put his arm over the cover, shielding it from my view. It was a spelling workbook for third graders. He had a sort of glazed look over his eyes, and he didn’t want to make eye contact with me. I wondered if he’d learned that from Jake.

I opened the book up to one of the first pages. There was red marker everywhere. But that wasn’t what scared me. What freaked me out was that every word—every single word—was spelled wrong. The words weren’t even close.

I was sure the little guy was smarter than he let on, because he saw me reacting to all the red marks, and his eyes got a little teary.

“What happened here?” I asked, with the warmest smile I could.

Tate didn’t look at me. “I don’t like spelling. Spelling sucks. Ain’t good at it.”

I looked again at the letters. He had drawn shapes—basically nothing was legible that he’d written. He appeared to not know a single letter.

Did Tate not know how to read?

I mean, I knew South Side schools were bad, but no letters at all? Tate sat next to me, closed off. Glancing around the room, I noticed that Jake had signed his no-hitter jersey from last year. It’d been framed and hung on the wall.

“Well, let’s start somewhere. What letter is this?” I pointed to the N that began Jake’s last name.

“That…that’s Coach’s jersey!” he said excitedly.

“Right! And what’s Coach’s last name?”

“Napleton,” he said without hesitation.

“Good. How about we learn how to spell that first?”

We went through all of the letters of Jake’s name, and I’d never seen a boy’s eyes light up with such enthusiasm. For a few seconds, he forgot that he was in third grade and still didn’t know almost any letters of the alphabet.

So for the rest of this tutoring session, he copied “Napleton” into his notebook. Several times.

Maybe tomorrow we would make an anagram of Jake’s name.

Tate and I had just put the finishing touches on the pizza fifteen minutes before, and we were checking on it in the oven when we heard Jake’s key rattle in the door.

“Coach!” He ran to the front door, and as soon as Jake came in, Tate wrapped his arms around him, his head barely reaching Jake’s chest.

“Hey, buddy,” Jake greeted, exhaustion clear on his face and in his voice. But he grinned down at Tate with affection. “Did you have a good time with Miss Andrea?”

“Yeah! She taught me how to spell your name!” Tate led Jake to his notebook, which was open on the coffee table. We’d gotten bored of just copying Napleton (even though that was almost too hard for Tate to do), so I showed him how to do an acrostic out of Jake’s name. My cheeks flushed red as Jake picked up the notebook and read Tate’s ideas. They were transcribed in my handwriting, so he probably thought I came up with them:

Not a bad guy.

Always eating pizza.

Player (of baseball).

Laughs.

Eats Pizza.

The best player in the world.

On suspension a lot.

Never lets me down.

Jake shot me a funny look. It wasn’t worth explaining to Jake that the first letter of his last name was about the only letter this kid knew in the world.

“Pizza’s ready!” I smiled from the kitchen.

“Smells great, Miss Andrea,” Jake said.

“Well it should,” I said and pulled the pizza out of the oven. “We made it fresh, here.”

“Wow. You cooked pizza from scratch? Well, that’s a plus one.” Jake smiled as he kissed me.

I always felt a little weird displaying my cooking talents, but it was true: I kicked butt at cooking and baking. I didn’t like to show it off, though. I wanted guys to like me for me, not my cooking skills, as ridiculous as that sounded. I cut it into slices and put some plates out.

I felt Jake’s hand creep its way down my back as he grabbed a slice.

His brown eyes seared through me, and he brought the piece of pizza to his mouth. “Oh wow, that’s hot.” He smiled and grazed my hip with his other hand.

“I think we had better go sit on the couch and eat this like a civilized family, don’t you think?” I said, grabbing Jake’s hand to stop it from going places where I wanted it to go, just not in front of the kid.

He turned his attention from me to Tate. “Yeah! You want to go eat some pizza on the couch, buddy?”

The kid smiled like I’d never seen a boy smile. Something clicked in my mind at that moment—that this whole re-branding-of-Jake-Napleton thing wasn’t just about me and my job. It was about kids, everywhere, who looked up to someone. And a hell of a lot of kids looked up to Jake. They needed to know that it was cool to be a humanitarian. A good father. All that stuff Jake apparently thought was too good for him.

Everyone needed a role model who let them know that it was very, very possible to have all those good qualities—loyalty, family, strength—and be, nonetheless, oh so fuckable. Check that. More fuckable. Pardon my French, but there was no other word to describe the feeling that came over me as I watched Jake and Tate laughing hysterically on the couch. The boy who had been so stoic for the entire day was having a blast, face lit up like he was the luckiest boy on the planet. Funny thing was, though, Jake’s face lit up just the same.

Jake looked over at me as I awkwardly stood there, holding my plate and piece of pizza while I stared at them. “Andrea, come sit.”

“Yeah, Miss Andrea!”

Now that was a beautiful darn sight. It was a temptation I couldn’t resist.