“Yum, my favorite.” This was safe ground. Food, lemonade, summer. It was a lie of sorts. A lie that everything was okay, that they were like everyone else enjoying the last weeks of the season.
Sometimes you needed a lie to survive the truth.
He started for the side door with the pasta salad bowl cradled in his arm. “Bring my glass, will you?”
Was it her imagination that he moved slower than she remembered? That he held onto the bowl a little too tightly, as if he might drop it?
She shook her head against the notion. Her gramps might be seventy-eight years old, but he was as strong as he’d been when he was a drill sergeant, still capable of swearing a blue streak and kicking her ass — figuratively anyway — when she needed it.
She picked up his glass and carried it with her through the French doors leading to the deck off the kitchen.
It was cooler outside, though still pleasant, and she set the lemonade on the table and watched as her gramps opened the grill.
“Need help?” she asked.
“The day I need help cooking a steak is the day pigs fly, missy.”
She smiled. “Just offering.”
“Sit down and enjoy the lemonade,” he said. The steaks sizzled as he placed them on the hot grill. “There’s a blanket on the chair if you get cold.”
“You think of everything,” she said, settling into one of the teak chairs, her back against the old blanket.
“Anything for my girls.”
“Your girl, you mean.” The words slipped from her mouth.
He closed the grill, walked over to the table, and took the seat next to her. He placed his hand over hers. “My girls,” he repeated. “I’m doing all I can for Elise, and so are you.”
“Am I? It doesn’t feel that way.”
He searched her eyes. “What could you be doing that you aren’t doing?”
She searched her mind. How could she tell her grandfather that it felt wrong to be holed up at the Murphy house, surrounded by funny, strong men who made her laugh, who cooked for her and made her feel safe even as her sister was missing and possibly dead?
She gave up with a sigh. “I don’t know. It just feels like we should be doing more.”
She heard the unspoken accusation in her voice, knew he heard it too when he spoke again.
“You think I’m not doing enough.” His hand was still warm on hers.
“You don’t seem worried anymore,” she said. “It’s like you’ve given up on her.”
There. She’d said it, voiced her worst fear, the suspicion that had lurked behind every one of their dinners since she’d returned from Dubai.
“I call the hospitals every other day. I comb the papers for mentions of Jane Does. I offered up my savings to the Murphy’s.”
Shame heated Julia’s face as he stood and walked to the grill. She waited as he flipped the steaks and returned to the table.
“My generation was different than yours,” he said. “We didn’t talk about things so much, we didn’t… examine everything. Some would say we were cold, even repressed. We thought we were strong.” He shook his head. “I don’t know the right answer, Julia. Would showing my worry help Elise? Would it help you?”
“It won’t help Elise,” she admitted. “I know that.”
“And you?” he asked. “Would it help you?”
“Not really. I guess I just want to know I’m not alone. That I’m not the only one staring at the ceiling at night, wondering if she’s okay, if she’s hurt or cold or hungry, if she’s wondering why we haven’t come for her.”
“You’re not the only one. I’m trying to be strong for her. For you. That’s all.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He patted her hand and stood. “Don’t be. I may not be a big talker, but I’m always here to listen.”
He pulled the steaks off the grill and her stomach rumbled at the smell of cooked meat. She realized she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, something that happened more than she wanted to admit when Ronan was out of the house.
Her gramps returned to the table and set a giant steak in front of her. “Bon appetite.”
“It looks amazing. Thank you.”
She dished herself some pasta salad and dug in. They ate in silence for a few minutes before her gramps spoke again.
“I spoke to your mother yesterday.”
Her appetite soured in her stomach. She set down her fork. “Oh?”
Her gramps nodded as he chewed a bite of his steak. “You should pay her a visit. She’s worried about Elise, and she’d like to see you.”
Julia reached for her lemonade. “I’m not sure I believe either of those things.”
“Your mother has her own way,” her gramps said. “You know that.”
“Boy, do I.” Julia couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her voice.
“Don’t be unkind,” he scolded.
It was an old argument. Her gramps wasn’t exactly approving of the path Julia’s mother had taken, her pattern of dropping everything for the wrong man again and again, of neglecting Julia and Elise while she doted on one loser after another, but Lisa Taylor-Berenger-Burns-Maher was still his daughter.
“I haven’t heard from her once since Elise went missing,” Julia said. “The last time I talked to her was two days after Elise disappeared.”
“You can reach out too.”
Julia leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. She knew she was acting like a child but couldn’t seem to help herself. “Why does it always have to be me?”
“Because you can’t change people,” he said. “And trying only frustrates all concerned. Your mother loves you, she just doesn’t know how to show it the way you want her too, the way I wish she would. And apparently Ray’s out of the picture.”
“Now I get it,” Julia said. “She’s alone again, so it’s back to her perpetual Plan B.”
After the Plan A of her newest man inevitably failed, Julia and Elise were always their mother’s backup plan — for affection, for purpose, for validation.
Her grandfather was silent as he took a bite of his pasta salad, his gaze pulled outward to the trees surrounding the house, their shadows long and deep as the sun sank closer to the horizon.
“It might make you feel better too, you know,” he finally said.
“I doubt that. And it’s a waste of time anyway. Ray might be gone, but it’s only a matter of time before Ray 2.0 steps into the picture. It’s not worth rushing the gap. She’ll be back to Plan A in no time.”
“Forgive me dear, but at what point do you intend to let go of these old hurts?” She looked at him, wounded as always by his insistence on trying to bridge the gap between her and Elise and their mother. Why did it feel like disloyalty? “I have news for you: none of us are perfect. Not even you, although personally, I can’t seem to find your fault.”
His words softened the crust that had been building around her heart. “Don’t be ridiculous. I know I’m not perfect. I just don’t see why it’s so bad to protect yourself from someone who’s hurt you over and over again. Isn’t that just self-preservation? Isn’t it the smart thing to do?”
Her gramps sighed. “I’m hardly the arbiter on smart, but I will say there’s a fine line between self-preservation and avoidance.”
She took a bite of her steak as she turned over his words. She’d been telling herself for years that avoiding her mother was the intelligent thing to do. In modern vernacular, her mother was toxic, their relationship damaging to Julia’s psyche, her peace of mind.
Had she been lying to herself? Was she just avoiding the painful work of forgiveness, of moving forward?
She wished Elise was there. They would buy wine and hash out their feelings on the sofa in the tiny apartment Julia couldn’t bear to live in anymore. Elise, with her breezy tendency to blow off anything that didn’t make her feel good, might be more forgiving, but she would understand Julia’s perpetual angst over the issue.
T
here were a million things she wanted to talk to Elise about: Ronan and the way he made her feel, her easy slip into the Murphy household, her affection for serious Nick and devil-may-care Declan, her worry that everything had happened too fast between her and Ronan to be sustainable, that they’d come together under circumstances that had heightened feelings that would otherwise have fizzled.
Despite their differences, Elise had been Julia’s confidant. Julia had a few acquaintances from her jobs over the years, and there was Emily Goldberg, a friend from college that she saw a couple times a year when the stars aligned, but without Elise, Julia had no one to talk to about the details of her life that were too intimate to share with her gramps.
She thought about Ronan. He would listen. He would hear her out without judgement.
But she wasn’t ready to give him all the sordid details of her fucked up childhood. Not when he looked at her like she was the sun and the moon, like she was perfect and pure. Not when their relationship seemed built on the finest of sand, on the peril they’d faced in Dubai, on their shared mission to find Elise and bring her home.
It was working right now. It was more than working: it was perfect. She didn’t want to rock the boat, and she was aware of holding back, of keeping a piece of herself apart from Ronan even as she verbalized her love for him.
It was one thing to say it. It was something else to have faith in it.
She tried not to think about what would happen after they found Elise. Would they settle into a normal life? Go out to dinner on Friday nights? Sleep in on Sundays?
It seemed an impossible dream.
She thought of his blue eyes, an ocean that pulled her under again and again, that made her believe it would be okay to let go and drown.
Except letting go was a mistake. Letting go meant losing herself the way her mother had lost herself time and time again. All the unspoken things between them were for the best, just like they were for the best with her mother.
Sometimes it was better to let sleeping dogs lie.
3
It was after ten in the morning by the time Ronan returned to the house. He and Nick had abandoned their post outside Moran’s office after midnight when the congressman left. They’d followed him home, then abandoned that location when several hours passed without movement.
Ronan had been too wound up to go home. He’d dropped Nick at his car at the office and taken the elevator to MIS’s headquarters on the fifth floor, running down the ways he could get a tap on the phones of Whitmore Club members like Moran.
It wouldn’t be hard to tap one or two of them, but the club had twenty board members. Ronan needed to narrow the field.
Mark Reilly, their greeter-slash-security-detail, wasn’t yet at the office and Declan was undoubtedly still in bed with another Boston beauty. The whole place had the hushed air of a library, which suited Ronan’s purposes just fine.
He’d spent the next three hours reviewing the details of Elise’s case, going over every person of interest their investigation had uncovered, looking for stones that had not yet been turned.
When he’d been through all the data, he called Clay to check on the work his team was doing to uncover the owners behind the club in Dubai. Clay was still working, butting his digital head against seemingly impenetrable firewalls and security protocols that frustrated him every bit as much as it frustrated Ronan.
They’d never been able to track the home server of the Manifest site that had led Ronan and Julia to the Whitmore Club and Dubai. Whoever was structuring Manifest’s digital security was better than good, something Clay took as a personal challenge.
Ronan had sat at his desk, his eyes pulled to the sea, a reflection of the lightening sky beyond his office’s glass walls. Nick’s words echoed in his mind, a warning: as much as Nick and Declan had come to care for Julia, they wouldn’t sanction use of the company’s resources on the Berenger case forever. Sometimes cutting your losses was good business, a fact even Ronan couldn’t deny.
But he would not cut his losses on Julia’s sister. Not until she was ready to do so, and that would never happen. By the time he left the office he was already planning how he could keep working the case without MIS, how he would hand off the company’s leadership to Nick, bring in Reilly to work in the field, hire someone else to secure the front desk.
Theirs was a lucrative business. An invisible cash business. Ronan had plenty of money stashed. They all did, in part thanks to Nick’s wise investments. Ronan would use every penny to find Elise on his own if that’s what it came to, anything to ease the pain in Julia’s eyes, to break down the last barrier she held between them.
It was the thought of her — at home in his bed, her eyes sleepy as she stretched, her fingers stroking Chief’s fur as she woke up — that finally got him out of the office.
When he stepped into the kitchen, she was at the counter, a cup of coffee and the newspaper in front of her, Chief at her feet. He was surprised to see Declan standing at the stove, cooking eggs and bacon.
Chief ran over, shoving her wet nose into Ronan’s palm. “Hey, girl. Are you begging for food again?” He baby-talked to the dog. “Julia thinks I don’t know she feeds you bacon but I do.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Julia said. Was it his imagination that her eyes lit up when she saw him? Wishful thinking? “Long night?”
He nodded and leaned down to kiss her. “Long night.” He looked at Declan, wondering if he’d already gotten rid of his one-night stand or if he’d had a rare night alone. “Losing your charm?”
“Very funny,” Declan said, turning off the heat on the bacon. A lock of dark hair fell over his forehead, a cowlick from childhood that he’d never outgrown. “I’m not a rabbit, you know.”
“Ew,” Julia said without looking up from the paper.
“He’s the one who brought it up,” Declan said.
Ronan plucked a piece of bacon from the hot frying pan. “What’s the occasion?”
Even as he asked, he knew the answer: it was her.
Julia.
She had a way of drawing them all out, bringing them together for baseball games in the living room and home-cooked meals in the kitchen.
Six months ago he would have said nothing was missing from the house. He’d lived with his brothers long enough that everything operated like a finely oiled machine. They each had their jobs and they each did them, except for Dec, who needed reminders.
Sometimes they’d ordered a pizza or had beers when they got home from the office, but they’d returned quickly to their own activities or respective wings of the house. Nick might have a date, the details of which he kept to himself with women that, like Ronan, he never brought home. Declan would be out prowling the city with his friends from college, looking to score a woman he wouldn’t hesitate to bring back to the house.
Ronan’s life was even less exciting — extra hours at the office or in the field, an occasional one-night stand at someone else’s place, runs with Chief by the water.
Something had shifted since Julia had been staying with them. She was like a magnet, drawing them out from their corners, pulling them into her orbit with the smell of homemade cookies in the kitchen or reality TV in the living room, something she swore she hadn’t watched before Elise went missing.
The shows were a source of entertainment for them all, causing them to shout and jeer at the TV like they were the World Series, pitting them against each other in their bets of who would cheat next, who would get a rose, who would be kicked out.
It was an escape for them all, not just the TV but the house that had become a refuge against everything ugly and painful. He saw it in the way Julia spent so much time there, leaving only to walk the beach with Ronan and Chief or visit her grandfather for their weekly dinners.
As a freelance network security specialist, she was uniquely qualified to analyze Clay’s data, but she combed through it curled up on the couch with her laptop or sitting at the kitchen isl
and, head bent to the screen, glasses sliding off her nose.
Ronan wanted it to last forever, wanted her to stay with him forever, and he often had to remind himself that the situation was a product of her tragedy, something that made him feel ashamed for the sheer joy her presence brought him.
Declan set a plate of bacon and eggs in front of Ronan and gestured to a paper bag on the counter. “Nick brought home bagels.”
“He sleeping?” Ronan asked, sitting next to Julia and shoving a bite of eggs into his mouth.
“I assume so,” Declan said.
“Did you have any luck last night?” Julia asked, her plate untouched in front of her.
Ronan shook his head. “Afraid not.”
Her shoulders sagged. “I thought this round of names was going to get us somewhere.”
It had taken them weeks to work through all the long-standing members of the Whitmore Club, weeks of surveilling homes and businesses and pied-à-terre.
Three weeks ago they’d reached the last ten board members on the list. After this they were out of leads unless Clay cracked the people behind Gold in Dubai, or even more unlikely, caught a break on the digging he was doing on the Darknet about Manifest’s members.
“It’s not over yet.” Ronan was glad Nick wasn’t in the kitchen to give him a meaningful glance. It would be an unpleasant reminder of their conversation in the car, and one Julia would more than likely notice. “All we need is one break.”
She nodded, but he could see that she wasn’t convinced.
He wanted to tell her not to worry, that he would find the break they needed if it took him the rest of his life, that he would leave MIS if it came to it, travel to the ends of the earth, spend every last dime looking for her sister.
He was self-aware enough to know it was irrational. Worse than irrational: it was bad business, but in the Berenger case he’d found the perfect storm of psychological fuckery — a chance to save someone like Erin before it was too late and a chance to do it for the woman who made him realize he’d been a fool to think he’d ever been in love before.
“I’m going to get ready for work,” Declan said.
Murphy's Wrath (Murphy's Law Book 2) Page 2
