Sam ended that call and placed another to Hill, who agreed to meet her at the ballpark’s VIP parking lot. She drove to the ballpark, rehearsing what she would say to the team’s owner and management as she drove. She glanced at the clock. Two-thirty. Nick would be picking Scotty up at school and breaking the unbelievable news about Willie. Sam would give everything she had, including the gold badge she’d worked so hard to earn, to spare the boy she loved from anything that could ever hurt him.

So this is motherhood. Her heart ached as she imagined how upset he’d be when he heard about Willie. Nick would take care of him this afternoon, and together they’d get Scotty through this.

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

Nick waited outside the gates to the Eliot-Hine Middle School, watching the flood of kids emerge at dismissal time. When Scotty let them know over the summer that he wished to live with them full-time, they’d had only a couple of weeks to apply for temporary custody from the commonwealth of Virginia’s child welfare authorities and to figure out where to enroll him in school.

Nick and Sam had gone round and round about the pros and cons of public versus private school. Both of them products of public school, they’d leaned heavily in that direction from the beginning, but worries about security had them visiting a couple of the city’s more prominent private schools.

After a couple of sleepless nights and many long debates over their first major parenting challenge, they’d decided to let Scotty make the final decision because they felt confident he’d do well at any of the schools they’d visited. He’d declared the private schools too fancy for him and had asked to attend the same school as the other kids in their Capitol Hill neighborhood. Nick had been pleased by the way the boy approached the decision and agreed with his reasoning.

Nick waited in the spot where Shelby met Scotty every day, where he’d met Scotty himself for the first week of school until he was certain the boy was settled into the new routine. It had taken tremendous schedule juggling to be free at two-thirty every day for a week, but he’d done it happily.

He’d waited a long time to be a father and to have the family he now cherished. And while he loved the career he’d inherited from his late best friend John O’Connor, his family came first. Always.

Scotty emerged from the school in a gaggle of boys who were talking and laughing, pushing and shoving, and doing all the things kids did after a long day cooped up in the classroom. Scotty wore a grin that stretched from ear to ear, and Nick smiled as he watched him, thrilled that he’d made new friends so quickly.