“This and that.”
He lifted the warming domes. Oatmeal—oh well. Berries, brown sugar, bacon. It could be worse.
“Summerset’s making bread.”
She said, “Huh?”
“He was kneading dough when I went down to see him, so I assume it’s bread.” He poured coffee for both of them. “Do you want to know why he killed Patrick Roarke?”
Her hand froze before it reached the cup. “What?”
“I should have seen it before,” he said easily now. “In him, in you. As a boy there was only relief, and I never thought of Summerset. He knew violence, and certainly had used violence during the wars, but he heals. His instincts are to heal, so I never thought of him for it. And, in truth, I thought of it all very rarely. You should eat.”
She only shook her head, so he covered both plates again.
“It’s secrets, isn’t it, and it dovetails with your case. Maybe that’s why it opened for me now. After your dream you say wasn’t a nightmare, though I suspect it came close, you wouldn’t tell me. You brushed it off. Evaded, and looking back, I realized you’d done the same earlier in your office when we talked of Mars, of her murder possibly being done to protect a child or another. Then of Patrick Roarke. You turned away, but I’d seen it, just something on your face for an instant. It didn’t strike home until I thought back, and I began to see. So I asked him, and he told me. He assumed you’d told me.”
“I—” She started to get up, but Roarke simply took her hand, held her in place. “I didn’t know. I suspected. I didn’t push on it. It wasn’t like I pushed him to…”
“Confess?”
Everything inside her went tight and cold. “I wasn’t after a confession.”
“Eve.” His voice qu
iet, Roarke gripped her hand tighter. “I know that. Just as I know it was hard for you to know that a crime had been committed, that murder had been done, and do and say nothing.”
“I didn’t have evidence. I don’t have proof.”
“Stop it.” He brought her hand to his lips, kissed it. “Stop now.”
“I should’ve told you, but—”
“No. You did exactly the right thing.”
“How? How is it the right thing? You have to be able to trust me. The Marriage Rules—”
A half laugh escaped him. “Oh, bugger the Marriage Rules over this.”
“If you bugger them over one thing, you start buggering them over the next.”
Because he understood her genuine distress, he pushed away all amusement, shook his head. “The world’s not so black-and-white, as both of us know well. We’ve lived in the gray. You didn’t tell me even though it would’ve unburdened you because it would be a betrayal, and because it may have burdened me. So I’m telling you it doesn’t. And it wouldn’t even if I didn’t know the whole of it now. I’d like to tell you why.”
“I know why. It doesn’t take a cop to understand he was protecting you and his daughter. It’s clear. I want to say he should have gone to the police, but they were corrupt, careless, cruel.”
“And a lot of them were in Patrick Roarke’s pocket. And still, for you, one who stands for the dead, whoever they were, it’s very hard. I hope to make it a little easier. He’d found me,” Roarke began.
He told her all, letting her go when she pushed up to pace.
“Would the cops have been complicit in this?” she demanded. “Would they have looked away while two children were sexually and physically abused?”
“There may have been some good or at least decent cops in that area back then, but the ones he had, the ones he knew? Not just looked away, Eve. They’d have participated.”
“In the brutalization of children.”
“Homeland looked away when a child was being brutalized by her father because it didn’t fit their agenda,” Roarke reminded her. “In my world then, the garda lined their pockets and did dark deeds more often than not.”
It sickened, and somehow steadied. “If what I did was self-defense, what he did was in defense of the defenseless.”