Page 93 of The Christmas Yes List

“We’re bonded. If we happen to be slaughtering you in our bonding . . .” He shrugs.

It’s comical. The man who has been nothing but cooly put together like an eighty-year-old retired millionaire businessman in a fat recliner has rediscovered with Peter-Pan-returning-home wonder the delight of childish games.

I squint at him.

He grabs hold of the nearest kid and draws him loyally to his side with a smile that says See? Bonded. “It’s not all about winning, Chloe,” he chastises me, and I laugh.

“Right. Well. Fine. I think we should give you a handicap then.”

His brows jolt up. He glances to the kid, then back at me, thinking. “What kind of handicap?” he says eventually.

“You get one leg.”

He laughs outright. “No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Then we get Jordan.”

“You can’t take Jordan. We’re all bonded. We have an official team handshake.”

I point at him. “Then lose a leg.”

James looks down at his leg.

He looks at Jordan.

He looks down at his leg again.

“All right.”

“All right?”

He lifts one leg up until his foot is off the ground. “All right.”

I smile, turn, and report the news to my team.

“All right, Team Turtles,” I announce (Turtles was not my suggestion, but that was the condition of Micah—who did find his way up a tree—to come down). “Good news . . .”

The next play, we get our first (I’m a bit embarrassed to report) big touchdown. I whoop along with the cheers of several parents on the porch and the kids go wild.

“Not such a big head now, are we, James?” I call.

And to his credit, he could say Yeah, you’re beating a man who’s hopping along the field at the pace of a literal turtle, but yes, very impressive, Chloe. But he doesn’t. He just grins, bows his head, and acknowledges my own fairly decent spiral with “Nicely played, Hollis. Nicely played.”

It’s the first time since the discovery that I don’t hate myself for being so bad at hating him.

It’s the first time . . . a chip falls off my shoulder, and I have to acknowledge, in this moment at least, this one right here, he isn’t all bad.

The realization kind of knocks me by surprise, and with Charlotte pulling me by the hand back to the huddle, I can’t help looking over my shoulder just once more.

“Okay, Henry, this play’s just for you,” I watch James say to a seven-year-old as he gathers the group in a huddle. One hand is on Henry’s shoulder while the other is drawing imaginary lines of a play as he discusses, with incredible focus, their next plan of action against us formidable Turtles. The kids feed off his enthusiasm, even as he stands, true to his word, on one foot.

It’s . . . cute.

And I know it’s ridiculous, and I know it isn’t true, but I still find myself searching, hunting the crevices of my mind in hopes of finding something, anything, that might give me permission to think, Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he’s been sincere all this time.