For the Children

Suddenly aware of Kirk beside her, of his tough-love approach to her boys, she smiled at the two of them. “Let’s talk about this later,” she said. “Everything’ll work out. You know it always does.”

She’d go see McDonald as soon as school was back in session. She’d ask him to reconsider his decision for next fall, explain why it wasn’t a good one.

“You know, if you guys do get separated, it won’t be the end of the world,” Kirk said lightly. “You’ll have that much more to talk about when you meet up again.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Nothing is ever going to break the bond that draws you two together,” Kirk interrupted. “Unless one or the other of you chooses to break it.”

He was right about that. But she didn’t think her sons should be separated. Especially not now that they were both on the road to recovery.

Let them just be happy and well. It was the only thing in the world she wanted.

As long as she didn’t look at the man by her side.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“FAX ME THE PAPERWORK and I’ll fly down over the weekend and get him to sign.” Cell phone to his ear, Kirk paced around a dining-room table filled with manila folders labeled alphabetically for immediate access.

“It’s the day after Christmas, man. I’m taking the rest of the weekend to spend with my sister and her kids.”

Yeah, he’d just bet Troy was spending four days with a sister he could barely tolerate for four hours.

“We’ll lose the deal if we don’t move now,” he said. There was an old man dying in a hospital who wanted to know that his eighty-nine-year-old widow wouldn’t have to worry about the business he’d run for nearly seventy years. Kirk had found him a buyer.

One who’d called Troy to renege on the deal when his son told him the investment wasn’t sound. Kirk knew it was. Knew, too, that he could convince his buyer.

He looked at the table. “And while you’re at it, get a flight to Phoenix. I have a week and a half before school starts again and three weeks’ worth of work to get through.”

“Which we’ll knock off before school starts if we have to stop the clock to do it.” Troy didn’t sound as upset about that as his words might imply.

“If we don’t move, we lose,” Kirk said softly, his mind on a merger between two family-owned regional hardware chains that were both going under beneath the buying power of the national home-improvement conglomerates that had risen up all over the country. Unless he could find common ground for them. They each had their own terms, seemingly incompatible terms, but Kirk had some ideas.

“We don’t move, we lose.” Troy’s nostalgic tone, more than the words, suddenly registered.

“What?” he asked,

frowning as he studied a piece of art his mother had bought years ago; it had never really gone with anything but it continued to grace the walls of this room.

“You’re finally back,” Troy said.

Kirk immediately launched an adamant denial. Refusing to give voice to the secret fear inside him that his friend and lawyer might be right.

He’d changed. He had to have changed. He couldn’t face his daughter, or himself, if he was the same man today that he’d been the day he’d received the phone call about Alicia. The call that said she’d been hit by a car and wasn’t expected to live. He’d been involved in a multibillion-dollar hostile takeover.

And had signed the deal before he’d let anyone interrupt him with the news.

Those precious hours were the last that Alicia had been conscious.

“V-V-VAL-ERIE?”

Her mind on the report in front of her when she picked up the phone, Valerie quickly focused on her caller.

“Susan?” There’d been so many tearful calls from the other woman two years before.

“Y-yes.” The next sentence was so badly garbled with hiccups and whispery sobs that Valerie couldn’t decipher the words.

“Calm down, Susan,” she said, speaking in the judge’s voice she used with kids who were losing control in her courtroom. “I can’t help you if I can’t understand.”