Page 103 of Bounced!

“Yeah, sure,” I said, my head spinning. “But why me? Why even tell me?”

His jaw worked. “Because you’d have done the same for any of us and never said a word either. I wanted one person to know, and I trust you to carry it and shut up about it.”

Before I could say anything, he added, “There’s one more thing you should know, and this part you’re allowed to keep however you like.” He glanced across the room. I followed his eyes to where Dante stood against the far wall with his arms crossed, watching the chaos. “This didn’t start with me, Mark. Back at the benefit, your man pulled me aside and put a folder in my hands. That folder was filled with your drawings, the ones the fund killed. He’d copied it all off your shelf, carefully, so you wouldn’t know.”

I stared, unable to fully process what I was hearing.

“He didn’t ask me for anything,” Skyler said. “He said he didn’t even know what he was asking, just that a thing that good shouldn’t die in a folder. He said he thought I was the man who might know what to do with it. I didn’t, not then, but I had it in my jacket when I went to the owner, and I laid it on his desk. Your drawings are the reason he took me seriously instead of humoring his captain. Your plan and Dante’s numbers, that’s what I walked in with.” He shook his head, something close to wonder in it. “Dante built the case that saved this place, and he did it quietly. I didn’t think he’d ever tell you, so I had to. You tell him all this when the time’s right. He should hear that what he did mattered, that he made a difference.”

I looked at this quiet young man who’d spent the one thing he guarded most in the whole world, his own name. He’d spent it in secret, for us, and then made sure he could never even be thanked for it out loud.

“Why, Sky? Why do all this,” I said, “and let nobody know?”

Skyler shrugged and gave me a small, tired, private smile. “Same reason you mortgaged your house and didn’t tell anybody.”

That landed on me like a dropped anchor.

“You spent the one thing you’re never supposed to spend,” I said, when I could get my voice back. “And you don’t even get to be thanked for it.”

“Neither did you. That’s kind of the deal, isn’t it, when it’s family.” He clapped my shoulder once, and the private smile went a little wet. “Keep it and let them think it was the sign, okay?”

He held my eyes one more second, to make sure I understood, then went back into the noise, back to Jacks, and became the calm young man everybody thought they knew. I stood there holding the truest thing in the room, the one nobody else would ever get to hold, and for the hundredth time that day, I cried again.

Later, much later, when the joy had burned down to something warm and exhausted and everybody was draped over everybody else, Finn found me by the taps. He didn’t say anything for a minute. We just stood there, the two of us, the way we’d stood behind the bar for seven years. We looked at the sign propped against the back bar, glowing blue.

“We’re not closing,” Finn said, testing it, like a man pressing on a bone to see if it’s really set.

“We’re not closing.”

“They bought the building.”

“They bought the building, Finn.”

“Those idiots bought a multi-million-dollar building and won’t tell us what they paid for it because Erik thinks it’s vulgar.” His voice cracked, and he laughed, and it came out wet. “Seven years, Mark. I thought I was watching it end tonight. I knew exactly how it ended.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

He put his hand on the back of my neck, the way he did about once a decade, when it really counted.

“You were gonna give up your house,” he said quietly. “You’d have given up everything you had.”

He turned me to face the room, the whole crazy family of it, saved, roaring, and alive, then he squeezed once and let go.

I looked out at them, at all of them.

Dante was crossing the room toward me through the wreckage of the best night of our lives. I watched him come. He wasn’t stuck at the door anymore. Hadn’t been for months. He reached me, took the rag out of my hand, the one I didn’t even know I was still holding, and set it on the bar, then he pulled me into the middle of our family where we both belonged.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” I could barely talk. “We’re not closing.”

“We’re not closing.” He laughed and put his forehead against mine. “That’s the last time you try to carry the world by yourself, Mark Delgado. That’s the lesson. It’s the thing this place has been trying to teach you for seven years, and it finally had to move heaven and earth to get it through your thick skull.” He was crying and grinning at the same time. “You don’t take care of what’s yours by yourself. You let what’s yours take care of you back.”

“Ours,” I corrected.

He grinned and kissed me, his lips salty with tears. “Ours.”

I stood there in the middle of the bar we didn’t lose, in the arms of the man who taught me how to be held, surrounded by the family that had picked up the whole weight of the world and handed it back to us, under a sign that said we belonged to something bigger than we’d ever let ourselves hope for, and for the first time in my life, Mark the fixer, the provider, the man who carried it all, let go.