“Well, at least he got that right,” Lucas said.

“But he still has the right to tell us his side of things,” she said. “We owe him that.”

“Why?” Lucas said.

“Because you love him and he loves you,” Julia said.

“I love Sam Winston,” Lucas said. “Not Joe Samuels. Not the guy in those stories. Not the cheater.”

He practically spit out the last word.

“They’re the same person,” she said in a quiet voice. “Like two sides of the same coin.”

“He talks all the time about doing things the right way,” Lucas said. “Playing basketball the right way. And now it turns out he did something as wrong in basketball as you could ever do.”

He stood up.

“I want to stop talking about this now,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

Lucas turned and walked out of the kitchen. He went up to his room and shut the door. He was still angry. He could still feel the heat inside him. And the disappointment. And the shame. But he made himself sit down and open the file on his basketball journal and write about the coach who it turned out he didn’t know at all.

When he finished, he shut his laptop and got on his bed.

Then he started to cry again, rolling over so he did it into his pillow, so his mom couldn’t hear how much the truth really had hurt him.

TWENTY-ONE

The gym at Claremont Middle was open after school on Friday, so Lucas and Ryan, and Richard and Billy, played two-on-two.

Lucas didn’t tell Ryan about Gramps. He hadn’t told Maria at lunch, as much as he wanted to, because she was smart and sensible about everything.

For now he just kept what he’d learned from his dad’s letter, and then from his own research, to himself.

When they’d lost track of how many games they’d played, Lucas told the guys he was going to stay in the gym and work on some of his stuff alone.

“You want us to find you a sleeping bag so you can sleep here tonight?” Ryan said.

“Just trying to get better,” Lucas said.

It was only four thirty. His mom wasn’t picking him up until five. Still plenty of gym time left. You never wasted that, even when you were feeling as hurt as Lucas did right now.

So he worked on taking outside shots without dribbling the ball, just catching and shooting, because in a real game, in real time, sometimes you just did the defender a huge favor by taking one more dribble. He worked as hard as ever on his left-handed dribble, working toward his ultimate goal of being as confident going to his left as he was going to his right.