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“I don’t have an answer for that.” Her mom covered Alexa’s hand with her own. “But I know one thing for sure: you’ll never know if you don’t give him a chance to tell you it doesn’t matter.”
“What if he says it doesn’t matter, but deep down it does?” She was covering all her bases, looking for ways to head off every potential scenario, a plan B and preferably a plan C.
Her mom smiled. “You can’t lawyer your way out of this one, Lex. You’re just going to have to take a chance like the rest of us.”
21
Nick picked up a piece of driftwood that had washed ashore with the last wave and threw it into the shallow surf for Chief. The dog splashed through the waves to retrieve it.
Beside him, Ronan whistled and Chief came trotting back, waiting for Ronan to take the piece of wood from her mouth before backing up to wait for the next throw. Before Ronan had met Julia, Nick had almost been convinced Ronan would end up a curmudgeonly old bachelor who fed his dog steak off his plate and had no use for women.
Now Julia fed Chief food off her plate while Ronan pretended to be mad when really he was the happiest Nick had ever seen him.
“I’m taking the boat out with Dad next weekend,” Ronan said. “Weather permitting. You want to join?”
It was another thing that had changed: Ronan’s relationship with their Dad. Once upon a time Ronan had been Thomas Murphy’s golden boy, yet another reason for Nick to resent his older brother when they were growing up. Then Ronan, Nick, and Declan had opened MIS, something their dad saw as a betrayal of his own career with BPD.
They’d all been on shaky ground with their dad in the intervening years, but none so much as Ronan. He hadn’t said much about how the rift had been healed, but the day Ronan and Julia announced their engagement, Nick had seen their mother’s wedding ring flashing on Julia’s finger and had a hunch that something had changed.
Thomas Murphy dropped by the house more often since Julia had been pregnant, and Julia and Elise doted on him, inviting him to dinner and baking his favorite desserts, no doubt in part because they missed their grandfather. Ronan had taken to fixing things around the old house their dad still occupied, and when the weather was nice, they all spent time on the water with him, Declan included.
“I’ll have to see,” Nick said. “My schedule’s up in the air right now.”
Ronan watched as Chief trotted up to a boy bundled against the cold. The dog paced excitedly around him until he held out his hand. Chief licked it and the boy squealed with happiness as his dad smiled on.
Ronan whistled and Chief came to heel, walking beside them.
“You going to tell me what’s up?” Ronan asked.
“Nothing’s up,” Nick said, his eyes on the stretch of windblown beach in front of them. “Just busy.”
“With what? We haven’t taken a new case in three months, thanks to the AG’s office.”
Nick looked at him. “What are you, my mother? I’m busy.”
Ronan held up his hands. “Sorry. Fuck.”
Nick ran his hands through his hair and let his gaze travel to the horizon. This was it: the moment he could tell Ronan everything. Tell his brother that he’d gotten mixed up with Alexa Nash, worse than mixed up, that he’d fallen hard for her, had gone to bed with her.
But he couldn’t make himself do it. What was the point? Alexa was done with him. She was the most guarded woman he’d ever met, someone whose feelings were locked in a vault that would have to be blown to bits for the pieces to ever see the light of day, and he had betrayed her by not coming clean at the beginning.
“It’s fine,” Nick said. “Not having work is making me edgy.”
Ronan clapped him on the back. “We’re still getting inquiries. I wonder how long we should wait to assume we’re in the clear with the AG.”
MIS’s new business was cultivated mostly by referral, but an encrypted email address routed through several different VPNs in several different countries provided a place for prospective clients to inquire about their services. They’d continued to monitor the email account while the business was offline, but they’d agreed not to respond to any of the inquiries until they were sure they were in the clear.
They were all going a little crazy: Ronan with Julia’s pregnancy and nothing else to do and Nick with Alexa and nothing else to do. Even Declan seemed out of sorts, home more often than usual instead of out trolling for a quick lay.
Nick thought about Alexa, wondered if she was still working the case against them. “I don’t know, but it hasn’t even been three months, and you and Julia have the baby coming. You should take advantage of the downtime. We can discuss what to do after the baby is born.”
“You’re probably right.”
Nick wanted to record the moment for posterity. His dynamic with Ronan seemed permanently predicated on Ronan’s belief that he always knew best and rarely if ever had anything to learn from Nick, and on Nick’s belief that Ronan was a narcissistic asshole who wouldn’t take good advice if his life depended on it, least of all from his younger brother.
Everything was changing. Nick hadn’t realized he’d been penciling Alexa into his future until she was gone, but that’s what he’d been doing, imagining the day the AG closed the case against MIS, imagining introducing her to Ronan and the rest of the family, seeing her giving Declan shit in the kitchen or rolling her eyes at them when they watched reality TV.
It was stupid. She would never want to be with him if she knew the truth about MIS, and he wouldn’t have been able to keep that from her forever. They hadn’t known each other long enough for him to miss her, which meant that whatever this was — the hollow feeling in his chest, the heavy feeling that felt a lot like loss — was something completely irrational.
