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It hadn’t been very different from the way things had been in L.A., when Kate had relied on Marie, the nanny she’d hired shortly after Griffin’s birth, to do all the samethings.
Now Declan was there in the morning when she woke up, sleeping next to her, his long eyelashes casting shadows across his cheeks. He got Griffin up for school, leaving a cup of hot coffee in the bathroom while Kate showered. He made Griff breakfast, cracked jokes that made him laugh, traded off taking him to school. Declan was even learning to cook, and it was more and more common for Kate to come home to a house smelling like homemade pasta sauce or roasting chicken or Thaicurry.
That was the other thing that was different: Kate tried to get home for dinner more often. It’s not that she hadn’t cared before. She’d always treasured her time with Griffin, had always aimed to get home before he went tobed.
But there had been times when she’d stayed at work later than necessary, enjoying the quiet of her office after everyone went home, the focused purpose of her work, which seemed so much safer and tangible than the work of being a singleparent.
Now she found that she wanted to be home, sitting around the table in the guest house she, Declan, and Griffin had moved into after Aiden and his boyfriend Miguel got engaged and bought a house in East Cambridge. She wanted to sit next to Griffin, watching his face light up when he told her about his day at school, watching his eyes shine when he laughed at something Declan said. She wanted to feel Declan’s hand brush hers when he passed the potatoes, wanted to look up to find him watchingher.
Declan dropped a kiss on her forehead. “I better go check Griff’s teeth if I want to keep impressing you with my paternal talent. You know the other day I caught him standing there with the water running? His toothbrush was totally dry. Kid was trying to pull a fast one onme.”
“He definitely gets that from you,” she said, walking to the sink to rinse hercup.
“Haha. See you later, beautiful. Have a greatday.”
She watched him walk through the living room and disappear down the hall. The guest house wasn’t huge, but it worked for now. Her mother had offered it to her when Aiden and Miguel closed on their new home. Kate had surprised even herself by asking Declan to move in one night when they’d been lounging in bed in the house Declan shared with his brothers, Ronan andNick.
She loved the Murphys, had come to love Julia, Ronan’s wife and their baby, John Thomas. She’d become fast friends with Alexa, Nick’s girlfriend and the newest edition to the family. She’d even come to see Elise, Julia’s sister, as a kind of little sisterherself.
But the Murphy compound in Back Bay, large as it must have seemed when it was just the men, was starting to feel tight in spite of the fact that each of the brothers had their own apartments in addition to the common kitchen and livingareas.
And that was without Finn, the youngest Murphy brother, who’d been traveling and hadn’t been back to Boston in at least fiveyears.
Still, Kate’s dad had taught her that no lie was as bad as the lie you told yourself, and she knew practical considerations hadn’t played a part in her decision to ask Declan to move into the guest house with her andGriff.
She’d just wanted to be with him, wanted to share her life with him, whatever that might mean in the future. She knew it was true even as the thought terrified her, even as the secrets of her parents’ marriage had revealed fault lines in the Walsh family that Kate hadn’t knownexisted.
Even as they still threatened to tear them allapart.
She sighed and picked her bag up from the floor. She hesitated over the hooks by the door, contemplating a light coat, then decided against it. The September mornings were starting to carry the faint bite of fall, but the days were still mostlywarm.
Thinking about winter made her feel depressed. Last winter she’d danced around the truth about Neil Curran, the man who’d been her father’s oldest and closest friend, the man who’d been at her father’s side when he’d founded Walsh Media Group, the man who was godfather to both her andAiden.
The man who had had an affair with her mother twenty-five yearsago.
The man who was her sister Beth’s biologicalfather.
The man who’d killed Kate’s father and endangered Griffin’s life when he’d taken Griff swimming too far out in the cove as a storm rolled intoMarblehead.
Knowing Neil — the man she’d called Uncle Neil her entire life — had paid someone to tamper with her dad’s plane, sending it crashing into the Atlantic, was bad enough. Learning that he’d had an affair with her mother, one that had resulted in the birth of her sister almost thirty years before, had leveledher.
Kate hadn’t had time to deal with the revelation at first. But after the failed raid on Neil’s apartment, a raid Declan had set up with Logan Hunt at the FBI, Kate had settled into a proper depression, replaying her interactions with Neil over the years, the interactions she’d witnessed between Neil and the rest of herfamily.
She’d berated herself for not seeing it: Beth’s alienation and anger, her difficulty engaging in relationships with everyone but their mom, the differences between Aiden and Kate, who’d inherited their mother’s copper-colored hair, and Beth, who had dark hair, something Kate had assumed came from herfather.
But it hadn’t. It had come fromNeil.
And now that she knew, she saw other things too. The angular line of Beth’s face resembling Neil’s rather than the softer curves inherited by Kate and Aiden. The way Beth could look into Kate’s eyes without blinking long past the point of comfort, something Neil did too, and Beth’s slight figure, which was more like Neil’s than Mac or Annie Walsh’s, who had bequeathed Kate and Aiden a sturdy athleticphysique.
In the months Kate had agonized over the paternity test she and Declan had found in Beth’s safety deposit box in the Bahamas, she’d raged internally at everyone — her mother for being disloyal and dumb and having an affair with Neil, her father for letting it happen and not telling Kate and Aiden so they knew what they were dealing with. Beth for being secretive and angry instead of just talking to them, telling them what she knew, how much it must have hurt her to know she wasn’t really Mac Walsh’s daughter in a family where being Mac Walsh’s child meanteverything.
The end of winter had seemed to go on forever. Kate had spent too many days walking the beach below the house, shivering inside her coat, staring out to sea like the answers to all her questions, to everything that had gone wrong with her family, could be found on the horizon if only she looked hardenough.
Like the answers to her new questions — where Neil was hiding, where Beth had gone when she’d disappeared shortly after Neil — might be found theretoo.
More often than not, Declan had accompanied her, keeping Griffin busy with searches for shells and facts about the ocean while Kate paced the beach, hands stuffed into her coat pockets, anger and frustration keeping her warm while she considered all the places Neil could behiding.
But there had been other times, times when Declan had been busy at MIS or with Griff, when Kate had stalked the shoreline alone, picking her way over the rocks that jutted from the bottom of the cliff, her mind as tumultuous as the water roiling in thecove.
