Lucas stopped again, hearing Gramps telling him at the dinner table last week that he was the one full of beans. He was starting to tear up, but not because of that.

There was just a little left in the letter.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned since I got sick, it’s that I know as well as anybody ever could what really matters. And what matters to me is the time we’ve already had together, and the time we’re going to have. (Did I mention that I don’t give up?)

Since I found out what I did, I feel like I’ve had a lot of feelings to unpack, all because I had to unpack that shoebox. But one feeling will never change:

How much I love you.

Mike

There was a date on the bottom. Lucas looked at it, and realized it was a month before his dad had died.

Now he cried.

TWENTY

The pages that Lucas had printed out, about Joe Samuels and Tommy Angelo and the point-shaving scandal at Ocean State University that had finally put the school out of business, were on the kitchen table. His mom had them in front of her.

She slowly turned page after page, reading the old stories from newspapers that Lucas had already read.

“It’s the same as if he lied to us,” Lucas said.

“That’s not true, honey,” she said.

“Well, he didn’t tell the truth,” Lucas said.

“He just didn’t tell us the whole story,” she said.

She took off her reading glasses and looked at him across the table.

“I know all this is a shock,” she said. “But none of this changes the wonderful man Gramps has been to you.”

“You sound like Dad,” he said.

“That used to happen a lot,” she said.

Lucas reached across and poked a finger on one of the pages in front of his mom.

“No wonder he wanted to be somebody else,” Lucas said. “No wonder he turned himself into Sam Winston. He didn’t want anybody to know that he tried to fix basketball games when he was in college.”

Lucas felt as if he were out of breath.

“When I was online reading about this stuff, you know whose name came up? Clair Bee?”

“He wrote the Chip Hilton books,” his mom said.

“They called him Coach Clair Bee on some of the covers,” Lucas said. “It turned out he’d coached a college team once and this happened with some of his players.”

“Your dad told me about it,” his mom said. “It was at Long Island University. Coach Bee resigned because of it. But you should know that he also ended up in the Basketball Hall of Fame.”

“How can you not think he lied?” Lucas said. “And that means to both of us.”

“Maybe he thought the truth would hurt too much,” she said.