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She followed her mom into the kitchen where her dad was removing a pan of lasagna from the oven.
“There’s my girl,” he said, his eyes twinkling. He set the lasagna on the counter and bent to kiss her cheek. “How are you, honey?”
“I’m good, Dad. How are you? How’s work?”
“It’s fine. Numbers are easier than people,” he said.
“They always add up,” Alexa said with him.
They laughed. Her parents’ work was one of very few safe topics for them these days: her mom’s job as a librarian, her dad’s as an accountant. They were topics that couldn’t get them into trouble, that wouldn’t bring them close to the subject of Nick.
Alexa had been forced to be more detailed about Nick once the investigation was announced by Imani Washington, her old boss at the AG’s office. She had no doubt her parents had done their own research online, but her dad had only asked the question once: Is it true?
Alexa had been tempted to deny it. Then she’d been tempted to come clean.
Yes, it’s true. Erin Murphy fell prey to a drug dealer in high school who ruined her life. She overdosed when she was still a kid, decimating her family. Nick and his brothers decided it wasn’t fair that the man who’d gotten her hooked on heroine would live out the rest of his life while Erin was dead, so they decided to fill a hole in the justice system, to do the dirty work of making people pay for their crimes when the justice system couldn’t. Now they’re hired — sometimes for a lot of money and sometimes for none — to kill criminals who got away withtheir crimes, who left ruined families like the Murphys in their wake.
That would go over real well.
Keeping secrets from her parents wasn’t something she wanted to do, but in the end, she didn’t feel like she had a choice. She told herself it was because it wasn’t her secret to tell, but the truth was darker and more complicated: she wasn’t sure she disagreed with Nick and his brothers anymore.
If she told her parents, she would be forced to take a position, to either condemn or support Nick and his family, and she didn’t think she could condemn them, not after seeing the havoc that Leland Walker had wreaked on the lives of people like Samantha and her family, people like Alexa, like Karen LaGarde who’d filed an assault charge against Leland and like the ten-month-old baby who’d lost his mother when Leland plowed into her in another unsolved hit-and-run uncovered by Clay, the computer guy MIS kept on retainer.
So she’d told them she couldn’t comment. That she was the subject of an investigation in the AG’s office and so was Nick, that talking about either would violate the NDA she’d signed when she’d accepted the job at the AG’s office.
She’d told them to trust her, even though shedidn’t know how she would reconcile that with the truth once it came out.
And it would come out, because the only thing Alexa was sure of was that she was in love with Nick Murphy. That she could no longer imagine her life without him even as she acknowledged the long string of complications that were a result of their relationship.
She helped her parents set out the food and they sat at the dining room table to eat, focusing on conversations about the weather, a new movie her parents had seen, the book she and her dad were reading as part of their informal book club.
There were only a few moments where they had to skirt the issue of Nick, mostly because her parents knew she was living with him and his family. But they were getting good at it now, getting good at stepping around the landmines that had suddenly appeared under their feet.
Alexa didn’t like it, but she didn’t know how to change it.
By the time she left, full of lasagna and chocolate cake and the warmth of her childhood home, she was exhausted. They’d touched on the swearing-in of Leland Walker — her parents knew Nick had uncovered evidence that he’d been behind heraccident — but that was the extent of their conversation on the subject.
Her parents had made it clear early on that they thought it would be best if she let sleeping dogs lie, especially where there wasn’t ironclad evidence pointing to Leland as the one who’d hit her and Samantha. Alexa couldn’t even be mad. They knew what she’d been through, knew how hard she’d fought to move on with her life. They were just looking out for her.
She’d asked herself the same questions in the weeks leading up to her departure from the AG’s office. The Walkers terrorized her, sending someone to slash her tires, and when that didn’t work, someone to her apartment to try and kill her. There had been another break-in while she and Nick had been in Cuba tracking down Allen Clatcher, a former employee of Frederick Walker who had left his employ with a fat settlement eerily similar to the one Karen LaGarde negotiated to keep quiet.
And then there had been the assault on the hotel where she and Nick had been staying after the vandalism of her apartment. She still had nightmares about the blackout, the race down the stairs, interrupted by Walker’s gun-wielding men, theirbullets echoing off the concrete and metal in the stairway.
She’d thought they were home free when they finally made it to the underground parking garage where Nick’s car was parked, but someone else had been waiting there, someone with dead eyes and the kind of calculating movements that told Alexa she and Nick were nothing more than another job on his to-do list.
It was only later that she’d found out it was Matis Juska, the shadowy figure recently hired by Frederick Walker. Juska had shot Nick twice before the police showed up, and if there was anything more nightmarish than the race to escape the hotel with Nick, it was the following days in the hospital, when she hadn’t been sure Nick would survive the near-miss to his heart.
Juska had gotten away, running when the police showed up.
She replayed it all for the thousandth time as she drove back to the Murphy house, searching for the forks in the road she had missed. But it always ended the same, with the realization that the only thing she could have done differently was to not fall in love with Nick. To accept his help at CopleySquare, brush herself off, decline his offer of coffee, and return to her office.
She would still be working at the AG’s office, would be heading up the case against MIS, interfacing with the investigators digging through the company’s financials and the movements of its three principles — Nick, Ronan, and Declan, the men who had protected her when everything went to shit.
The men who still protected her.
It was unimaginable.
She was almost back to the house when she changed her mind and headed for the beach. She was grateful every day for the Murphys, who had opened their home to her and given her a safe haven when she needed it most.
