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  “I’ll make them later,” Lauren calls back to Ryan, feeling like the world’s worst mother.

  “Never mind.” In the kitchen, he bangs a cupboard door.

  “Here’s another Tom Clancy book,” Lucy announces.

  Lauren looks over to see her holding up a hardcover she just plucked from the bookshelf.

  “What should I do with it, Mom?”

  “Put it into Dad’s box.”

  “Okay, but I really don’t think he’s going to want all this stuff. He doesn’t have a lot of room in his apartment.”

  “Then he can get rid of it himself. I’m not going to throw away his things.”

  “That’s pretty nice of you.” Lucy gives an admiring nod, obviously convinced her mother is ex-wife of the year. “Most wives—I mean, ex-wives—probably would just dump everything in the garbage.”

  Yes, Lauren among them. But those books weigh a ton. Let Nick lug them all out of here next time he comes to get the kids. Let him sort through them and the memories they’ll bring. Every novel Lucy pulls from the shelf reminds Lauren of their newlywed apartment or past vacations or cozy afternoons spent in this very room when Lucy and Ryan were little, listening to CDs and reading.

  “Did Daddy ever actually read all these?” Lucy asks, tossing another book onto a growing stack.

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t picture him actually sitting down and reading a novel.”

  “He used to do that all the time.”

  “Really?” Lucy takes another book from the shelf—this one a Robert Ludlum espionage thriller. “Maybe I’ll read one of them and then I can talk about it with Dad. This one looks good.”

  “You don’t usually like to read books like that,” she tells Lucy, her heart going out to her daughter, trying so hard to relate to a man who’s making no effort—that Lauren can see, anyway—to relate to her.

  “It looks adventurous and I, you know, like adventure.”

  “Okay, sweetie. That’s fine.”

  Lauren looks at the CD in her hand and the pile on the floor, tempted to chuck the whole heap. When was the last time anyone even used the stereo? The kids have their iPods, and every song here would probably just remind Lauren of the good old days. Who needs that?

  “Mom?”

  “Hmm?” She looks up to find Lucy watching her.

  “You’re doing great.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything. Being alone. Being sad about Dad. Being stuck with us all the time. I think you’re doing great.”

  Lauren’s eyes well up and an enormous lump rises in her throat. Her instinct is to protest, but what message would that send to a daughter who’s looking at her with pride? Lucy needs a strong female role model. And you’re all she’s got, Lauren reminds herself, so buck up.

  “Thanks, Lucy. I really needed to hear that. You’re doing great, too. All of you.”

  “I am, I guess. But Ryan’s not, and—”

  “What’s wrong with Ryan?”

  “He’s so nasty. He’s always in a bad mood.”

  “He’s thirteen.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Almost. Trust me, you were the same way.”

  Lucy gives her an I-don’t-think-so shrug. “What about Sadie? She cries a lot. About everything. And she freaks if she thinks anyone’s touched her stuff.”

  “She’s four.” Even as the words come out, Lauren cringes inside.

  She’s four. He’s twelve.

  The kids’ ages aren’t the only reason they’re troubled. This is not just some developmental stage they’re going to grow out of. They’ll carry broken-home baggage for the rest of their lives. There’s nothing any of them—not the kids, and not Lauren herself—can do about it.

  “Whatever.” Lucy goes back to the books.

  Lauren looks down and realizes she’s still holding the Van Morrison CD. With a grim, decisive nod, she tosses it into the box with other relics for Trilby’s sale.

  “That’s not my concern,” Garvey hisses into the phone, pacing the length of the wide hallway leading from his study to the master bedroom.

  “But—”

  “Just do what needs to be done. And this time, do it yourself.”

  “But do you realize what that—”

  “Yes. I realize it. We have no choice. I don’t want anyone else involved this time. No professionals.”

  As in hit men. It was fine the first time. The second, even. But now…

  “Get it done. And make sure there’s no mess left behind. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Good. Call me when you have the file.”

  He jabs a finger against the end button, abruptly disconnecting the call.

  Hell. This has gone from bad to worse.

  But he has no choice. He tried to go about it the honorable way—with minimal collateral damage, as they say—but that didn’t work.

  What if this doesn’t work, either?

  Don’t think about that. It’ll work.

  He paces down the hall again, jaw set, past a row of framed family portraits.

  He can hear Shirley, the maid, vacuuming at the far end of the apartment. No way could she have heard a word he’d just said—not that he’d uttered anything incriminating, even if she had been listening.

  He’s so close.

  So close to losing his grasp on the situation…

  So close, too, to obtaining his goal and securing his future.

  One more obstacle…an obstacle that is, unfortunately, human.

  Luckily, compartmentalization is a dominant family trait, and one that’s served Garvey well.

  Where would he be if he allowed himself to sweat the small stuff?

  As Garvey learned once before, a long, long time ago, one obstacle—human or not—is insignificant, indeed, in the grand scheme of things. You do what you have to do in order to remove it, you make sure no one will ever be the wiser, you move on…and, whatever you do, you never, ever look back.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I can’t take your call right now, but if you’ll leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  Hearing the outgoing message—yet again—on his father’s cell phone, Ryan wonders whether it’s time to leave another message.

  He left one earlier, both on this number and on Dad’s home number. Same message, pretty much: “Dad, it’s me…Ryan. I was just wondering if you were back yet. Can you call me when you get this?”

  Apparently, he hasn’t gotten it yet, two hours later. Or maybe he has, but hasn’t had a chance to call back yet. Ryan found himself dialing repeatedly all afternoon, hoping his father will happen to pick up, hanging up whenever the voice mail does. Not wanting his father to find a bunch of missed calls from Ryan’s cell phone number alone, he tried a few times from the house phone, too. Let Dad think one of his sisters is calling, too, or Mom, even. Otherwise, Dad might suspect just how needy Ryan’s feeling right now, and feel bad about being away for so long.

  There have been plenty of times when Ryan isn’t opposed to instilling some paternal guilt, but now isn’t one of them. He wants his father to see him as a grown-up—man-to-man. Maybe that’ll make him more likely to want to take Ryan on their annual fishing trip this summer.

  Last night, he promised Ryan they’d talk about it.

  Well, he didn’t promise, exactly.

  He said, “We’ll see. I can’t even think about it till I get home and see what’s what, Ryan.”

  That wasn’t exactly promising. But Dad hadn’t said no, either.

  “Who’s on the phone?”

  Ryan looks up to see his older sister standing in the doorway of his room, wearing her usual annoying expression, as though she just caught him doing something wrong.

  He tosses the cordless receiver onto his bed, telling Lucy, “You can’t just barge in here!”

  “I didn’t barge in. I’m not even in.” She motions at her polished toenails, care
fully positioned on the hallway side of the threshold. “Anyway, your door was open.”

  Yeah, because it’s too hot up here to have the doors closed. Not because he wants company.

  The weather outside is gray and gloomy, but still muggy. Ryan’s bedroom, tucked beneath the gabled roof, is sweltering.

  “Who were you talking to just now?”

  “No one.”

  They both look down at the cell phone in his hand.

  “Okay. So you were just talking to yourself like a crazy person?” She shrugs. “Whatevs.”

  “Nobody says whatevs anymore.”

  “I do,” replies Lucy, who, in her new, postcamp, who-cares-if-anyone-thinks-I’m-cool confidence, somehow manages to actually be cool.

  Not that Ryan would ever tell her that.

  However, a couple of his friends did say it yesterday at the pool. In fact, they didn’t just say that Lucy’s cool, but that she’s also very hot.

  Which, if Ryan really thought about it, is pretty disgusting, so he’s trying very hard not to. But he did allow himself to notice, in passing, that his sister has transformed into a semi-cool person over the summer. And he’s not the only one.

  Lucy’s been hanging around with Josh Zimmer at the pool since they got home. He’s in her grade, but he’s not the kind of guy who ever would have paid attention to Lucy before.

  Things change.

  Ryan hates that. Hates change. Why can’t life go back to the way it used to be?

  “Mom said to tell you that the weather’s supposed to start clearing up and she’ll drop us at the pool in a little while if you want to go,” Lucy informs him.

  “Maybe.” He nibbles the ragged edge of his thumbnail and wonders if any of his friends will be around. Probably not. Just about everyone is away. His friend Ian will be home tomorrow, though. He texted earlier to see if Ryan wants to hang out.

  “Can’t, dude,” Ryan replied. “I’m seeing my dad.”

  “That sucks,” was Ian’s response.

  “Yeah,” Ryan texted back automatically—then wondered if he really did agree.

  He misses Dad, yeah. And he’d give anything to be able to go away fishing with him, just the two of them. But it’s not like he can’t wait to spend a gorgeous summer Sunday in some boring restaurant with his sisters. Dad doesn’t seem to have a lot to say to any of them when he takes them out to eat, and spends a lot of time checking his BlackBerry.

  Probably because of that lady, Beth. She calls and texts and e-mails Dad. A lot.

  Ryan knows she’s his father’s girlfriend, but Dad hasn’t actually come out and said it. Mom hasn’t, either. But last spring when Ryan was at the snack bar putting ketchup on a couple of hot dogs before a Little League game, he overheard two of his teammates’ mothers talking about some guy having an affair and dumping his wife—dumping his whole family, pretty much.

  At first, he didn’t realize they were talking about his own parents. The moment he figured it out, he knew he was going to throw up. He dumped the hot dogs into the garbage and ran to the bathroom. Then he asked the coach to let him sit on the bench that game because he was sick, and the team lost.

  “So are you going to get rid of anything?”

  Startled by his sister’s question, Ryan looks up to see her surveying the piles of stuff around his room: books, school projects from last spring, a million comic books, a million baseball caps, fishing equipment, sports equipment, clean and dirty laundry…

  He wishes, not for the first time, that his bedroom door had a lock on it. But none of the rooms in this house lock, other than the upstairs bathroom—which Ryan wishes didn’t have a lock on it, because Lucy is always in there for hours and there’s nothing he can do about it.

  “Mom said we have to clean out our rooms for the tag sale, too,” she tells him.

  “What’s a tag sale?”

  Ryan sees Sadie in the hallway, listening in, as usual. There’s no privacy around this house. None.

  “It’s where people give away stuff they don’t want anymore,” Lucy explains. “Did you see all those boxes Mom and I filled up downstairs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Those are for the tag sale.”

  “Do I have to give something away?” Sadie asks, looking worried.

  “Well, now that you’re a big girl, there are probably some toys you’ve outgrown, and some clothes, too, so—”

  Sadie bursts into tears so abruptly that Ryan finds himself actually feeling sorry for her—which he rarely does, because it’s not easy to be the only guy in a house full of women, including a little crybaby sister who’s always making a scene.

  “You don’t have to give away your toys, Sades,” he assures her.

  Lucy nods vigorously. “Just the ones you don’t play with anymore. Like that My Little Pony set you got for—”

  “I play with that!” Sadie wails. “I play with everything!”

  “What is going on up there?” Mom’s voice calls from the foot of the stairs.

  Great. Just great.

  Sadie bellows, “Lucy and Ryan said I have to give away my toys!”

  “I did not!” Ryan protests. “I said you didn’t!”

  “Mom, I was just saying that Sadie can get rid of the stuff she’s too big to play with,” Lucy calls, and Sadie cries harder.

  “I play with all my toys!”

  “Will you all please just get out of my room?” Ryan goes over and kicks the door closed in his sisters’ faces.

  God, he hates his life.

  Brett sighs behind his newspaper, and Elsa, seated in the opposite chair, looks up from her book. “What’s wrong?” “I can’t believe I’m just sitting around on a Saturday afternoon. I had so many things I wanted to do today”—he lowers the paper to look at her—“and if it weren’t raining out there, I’d be rushing from one thing to the next.”

  “Like mowing the lawn?”

  “And playing golf, and getting the car washed, and watching the Yankees–Red Sox…”

  The televised game is in an indefinite rain delay. Every ten minutes or so, Brett reaches for the remote to turn on the TV in hopes that it might have started, but the field remains covered with a tarp, the announcers making idle on-air chatter.

  “Maybe we can go to a movie or something,” Elsa suggests. “Want to check the paper and see if anything good is playing over at the Cineplex?”

  “Already did. Nothing. But there was something interesting here.” He leafs back through the pages, folds the paper open to an article, and hands it across to her.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “The article about the new upscale condo community they’re building over by the golf course.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s going to be gorgeous. Every unit will have a fireplace and a deck with a view.”

  “Of the golf course?”

  “No, of the sound!”

  “Very nice,” she agrees, handing the paper back.

  “Maybe we should go look at a model.”

  “Why? We already have a house. With a private backyard,” she adds. She’ll take privacy over a cookie-cutter condo deck and a sound view any day.

  “We can’t even keep up with the yard work,” Brett protests.

  Speak for yourself, she wants to say. He’s the one who isn’t doing his part—which merely consists of mowing the lawn. Meanwhile, Elsa has her work cut out for her, thanks to the avid gardener who formerly owned the house.

  The landscape is loaded with shrubs and perennials, and when the Cavalons moved in, the borders and beds desperately needed tending.

  Brett suggested that they hire someone to tend to it, but Elsa wanted to do it herself. She didn’t really know why it mattered so much to her, or even what she was doing. But eventually, she got the hang of pruning and staking and dividing—even planting flowers in the barren raised beds out front.

  “Someone else would do the work in a condo,” Brett points out now. “Worry-free.”
>
  “I don’t want to live on top of other people, though. I like privacy.”

  “It’s a mature adult community, Elsa. It’s not like there will be a million kids running around, or loud parties at all hours.”

  No kids running around.

  She considers that.

  “If we were to move to an adult community,” she says slowly, “then I guess it would mean we weren’t considering another child at some point.”

  Brett’s eyebrows shoot up and he removes his reading glasses abruptly, leaning forward to stare at her. “I didn’t know we were still considering it.”

  “We never really ruled it out.”

  “But it’s been years, Elsa. I didn’t know it was still an option.”

  She shrugs. “I didn’t know it wasn’t.”

  They look at each other.

  What are you doing? she asks herself, scarcely able to believe she raised this topic after all those years of trying to avoid it. It just came out, as if catapulted from some deep, dark region of her psyche.

  After Jeremy was lost to them, Brett wanted another child. He brought it up a lot at first, and then just occasionally, over the years.

  Elsa couldn’t bear the thought of it. Another child—a replacement.

  No. It was out of the question. Besides, she wasn’t exactly stable in the aftermath of their loss. How could she take care of a child when it was all she could do to get out of bed in the morning?

  It’s been a long time now since Brett raised the subject.

  And now here she is, bringing it up again out of nowhere.

  “Do you want to look into it?”

  Seeing the spark of interest in his eyes, she automatically says, “No, it’s not that…”

  But maybe it is.

  Oh hell. She doesn’t know where any of this is coming from, or what she wants.

  “I mean,” she elaborates, watching him warily, “not yet, anyway. I just—”

  “Not yet? But when? We’re not getting any younger, Elsa.”

  “I know. But—”

  “If this is something you want, then we need to talk about it.”