“Love you, too, Mom. Will you be okay?”

“I am if you are.”

Sam took Jack by the hand. “Let’s go to work, my friend.”

“I’m going to school, silly.”

“I thought you said you had a job now.”

“I’m seven, Sam!”

“Oh! That’s right. I forgot. I thought you were a lawyer.”

He wrinkled his cute little nose as they made their way downstairs to meet Vernon and Jimmy. “I want to be a baseball player, not a lawyer.”

“Ah, got it. Have you got an agent yet?”

“Still seven, Sam.”

His giggle made her feel lighter and more hopeful than she had since disaster struck. If he could still laugh and joke, she could, too.

Vernon and Jimmy were waiting for her in the foyer.

“We have a young deputy today.”

Vernon and Jimmy shook hands with Jack.

“He needs a lift to school.”

“We can do that,” Jimmy said.

Sam nodded to Reginald, the usher who held the door for them. “Morning.”

“Morning, ma’am.”

While Jimmy held the door for them, Sam helped Jack into the back of the SUV. “Buckle up, my man.”

She followed him in and gave Vernon directions to the Capitol Hill neighborhood school.

“It’s weird,” Jack said after a long pause.

“What is?”

“Daddy usually drives me to school. He says it’s our buddy time.”

His words hit Sam like a punch to the chest. She had no idea what to say to that.

“Everything will be different now,” he added, compounding the pain.

“Yes, it will,” she said.

He looked over at her, his eyes big and shiny. “Why do people have to die?”

“It’s part of life, sweetheart. If you have the honor of living, you know the whole time that it will end someday. Some people get more time than others. That’s why you have to live each day to the fullest because you just never know.”

“Am I going to die?”

“Sometime in the very far-off future when you’re an old man.”

“Daddy wasn’t an old man.”

“No, he wasn’t, and it’s unfair that he was taken so soon when he had lots more to do here with you and Mommy and Ella and the baby.”

“Mommy is very sad.”

“Yes, she is.”

“I don’t like when she’s sad.”

“I don’t either, but she will be for a while. But the good news is eventually she’ll laugh and smile again like she used to, even if she’ll always miss your daddy.”

“Will I see him again?”

“Someday, a very long time from now, when you’re an old man and go to heaven, you’ll see him. He’ll be waiting for you, and in the meantime, he’ll watch over you and be so proud of you all the time.”

“I don’t want to wait that long to see him,” Jack said, his chin quivering.

“Any time you close your eyes, you can see him in your memories. He’s always right there, waiting for you.”

Jack nodded, seeming satisfied with that. For now. She had no doubt there would be more hard questions as he tried to understand what’d happened.