When Cade was about five years old, right around the time he and his mother moved back to the Chicago area and she took her first nursing job, he began to ask questions about his father. Quickly, he realized it was a sore subject. His grandparents tried to skirt around the topic as much as possible, and his mother, only twenty-three years old at the time, talked about Noah exclusively in the negative: how he’d dropped out of school, how he’d flaked on them when she’d gotten pregnant, how he’d never tried to contact them once. Eventually, Cade just stopped asking.

Until the day, five years later, when his mother came to him.

He’d been in his room, playing Super Mario Land on his Nintendo Game Boy before bedtime, when she knocked on the door and said they needed to talk.

Cade knew exactly what that meant. Trou-ble. “It was Sean’s idea to put the cricket down Mandy Franklin’s dress during the assembly.”

His mother folded her arms across her chest. “I hadn’t heard anything about the assembly. But now I know what we’ll be talking about next.”

Oops.

She sat down on the bed next to him. “That phone call I just got, the one I took in the bedroom? That was your father.”

Cade pushed the Game Boy aside and sat up. His. . . father? “What did he want? Did he say anything about me?”

“He did. He’s back from California and he asked if he could see you.”

Cade got an excited but nervous feeling in his stomach, like when he was waiting in line for one of the upside-down roller coasters at Six Flags. “What did you say?”

“I told him that it was up to you,” she said.

When she said nothing further, Cade wondered if this was some kind of test.

“Will you be mad if I say yes?” he asked cautiously.

She shook her head. “I won’t be mad, sweetie.” She reached over and brushed a lock of hair off his forehead. “This is your decision to make.”

Cade thought that over. “When does he want to see me?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I want to see him.”

His mom nodded, as if she’d expected that answer. “Okay. I’ll let him know.”

“You’re making that weird smile,” Cade told her. “The fake one you make whenever Mrs. Kramer comes over to remind us that our grass is getting a little long.”

“Yes, well, Mrs. Kramer needs to find something better to do with her time than monitor the length of her neighbors’ front lawns.” She suddenly reached over and pulled him in for a hug. “I’ll work on the smile for tomorrow, Cade. For you.”

She’d tucked him in and then lay down on the bed next to him, something she only did when he was sick or on nights like the one when he was positive he’d heard a strange scraping noise in the closet after his friend Sean’s older brother had let them watch A Nightmare on Elm Street. “Is there anything you want to ask me?” she said as they both looked up at the ceiling, her head on the pillow next to his.

“Maybe you can just tell me something about him?” Cade paused. “But, Mom . . . how about if you tell me something good this time?”

His mom swallowed, and wiped her eyes. Uh-oh, Cade thought. Maybe he’d pushed it with that one.

She turned to face him. “I haven’t totally messed you up, have I?”

Cade pretended to think about that. “Even if you have, I probably wouldn’t know it.”

She smiled, just like he’d hoped. Then she tucked her arm under the pillow, getting more comfortable. “All right, three good things about Noah Garrity. He can make people laugh. Back in high school, everyone wanted to be friends with him. Second, he was an awesome football player. Whenever he had the ball, the entire stadium cheered so loud you could probably hear it a mile away. And last,” she stopped for a moment, as if this one was most important, “for the homecoming dance, he told me he’d spent an hour picking out the flowers for my wrist corsage. He said he couldn’t find anything as pretty as me.”

Cade parsed through these precious nuggets, the most information he’d learned about Noah Garrity in ten years. He thought the part about the flowers sounded a little mushy and lame, but the other stuff was good to know. And he couldn’t resist one last question. “Do I look like him, Mom?”

She touched his cheek softly. “The spitting image.”

All next morning, his stomach was doing the roller-coaster thing again. His mother seemed about to say something when he came out of his room dressed in his best button-down shirt, but then she bit her lip and went back to making their breakfast.

Just before noon—a half hour late, probably just because of traffic—Cade heard a car pull up in the driveway. Unable to help himself, he ran to the living room and looked out the front window.

It was him.

Cade watched as a man wearing a brown leather jacket climbed out of a black car with a few dents and scratches. Noah stared at the house for a moment, then shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and walked to the front door.

When the doorbell rang, Cade hung back, unsure what to do or say. His mother answered the door, said a few things in a low tone that he couldn’t hear, and then, after ten years, his father was there, standing in his living room, looking very tall and cool in his leather jacket.

And suddenly, everything changed. Cade no longer felt nervous, or even excited.

He was angry.

Ten years it had taken him to show up.

“Holy crap.” Noah shot a look at his mom. “He looks just like me.”