She was listening to him, waiting for him, and he understood why he’d felt her spirit so strongly at the house in Paradise Valley. She needed him to move forward so she could. She needed him to be one of her boys.
His throat ached as he touched her name penned in girlish script. “It’s okay,” he told her. “It’s okay.”
I promise.
His heart beat hard. He wanted to help her, wanted to protect her. She’d been through so much.
You have to know I love you. I’ve loved you every day of my life.
One day we’ll be together and we’ll talk it out. One day we’ll have all the time we need to make things right.
So rest easy, Momma. It’s all good. I’m good.
And it was true.
He was good. Everything was good. And maybe that was why he cried. He was free. Free to love, free to move forward.
He closed the Bible, put it on the table, and rapped on Jet’s bedroom door. “Hey, babe, do you have a minute? There’s something I want to tell you.”
Jet sat down on the cabin’s small couch next to Shane. It was a small sofa, more of a loveseat than anything else, and she could see he was upset. His long black lashes were damp and his eyes weren’t quite dry.
She swallowed and waited, hands folded in her lap.
He picked up the scuffed, black leather Bible and flipped it open to a page near the beginning and handed it to her. “That,” he said quietly, “is me.”
Jet followed his finger, saw the list of dates and the corresponding names—Brock, Troy, Trey, Cormac, space, Dillon. His finger tapped the blank spot next to 1982.
“That’s you?” she repeated, looking up at him, still seeing the emotion he was trying so hard to hide.
“Or at least that’s where I should be. I was the baby born in 1982.”
She’d been right. She’d got it right. “You are a Sheenan! I knew it, I knew—” She broke off seeing Shane’s expression. “I’m sorry. I’m ruining your big reveal.”
His brow furrowed. “You knew?”
“I figured it out today.”
“How?”
“You look so much like Brock…you fight like Trey…you’re witty like Troy…” Her voice faded. “Should I not have figured it out?”
He didn’t answer that, instead asking, “Do you think the others know?”
“No.” Her shoulders twisted. “I don’t think they’ve spent enough time with you. I have. And I’ve watched you with them. You have many of the same mannerisms—”
“Even though I wasn’t raised with them?”
“Must be in your DNA.” She paused, marveling a little at what he was telling her. She’d thought he seemed familiar. She’d felt strangely comfortable with him. But to discover it wasn’t her imagination and that he really was a Sheenan…
“Have you known this entire time?” she asked.
He left the couch and crossed to the fireplace where he picked up one of the pinecones on the stone mantel. “Yes.”
“Did you know before you leased the house?”
“Yes.”
She slowly exhaled, beginning to see the bigger picture. “That’s why you wanted to lease their house. Not because it was close to the Douglas ranch, but because it was the Sheenans’.”
He took a second to answer. “From the book perspective, I could have lived anywhere in Paradise Valley—maybe even in town, in Marietta—but as someone who always wondered what it was like to be a Sheenan, yes, I wanted to be there, in the home I never had.”
She winced inwardly. He hadn’t spoken coldly or sarcastically, and yet the words were painful to hear. He’d grown up so very alone, while the rest of them had been there, together, a family. “How did you find out you were a Sheenan?”
“When I discovered there were two birth certificates. The original and the amended one.”
“Sheenan was the name on the original.”
He nodded.
She couldn’t imagine what that discovery must have felt like. “How old were you when you found out?”
“Late twenties. I needed a new passport and had to request a birth certificate and the clerk asked if I wanted both.” He saw her expression and shrugged. “The clerk was new. She didn’t know as she’d never encountered an amended certificate before and so that was the first real ‘break,’ and it was a big one.”
“Knowing you, you didn’t just go okay, there’s a name, that’s who I am. I’m sure you did research.”
“A lot of research, including a DNA test. The test is quite reliable.”
“Who did you test?”
“Troy.”
“How?”
“I hired a private detective to get the DNA sample. Troy does a lot of appearances and meetings out of his office in San Francisco. The PI followed him and was able to get a Starbucks coffee cup Troy had discarded.”
“You tested the cup, and Troy was a match.”
“A ninety-nine percent match, and since Troy and Trey are identical twins, at least two of the five Sheenans are my full-blood brothers.”
Something in his tone brought her up short. “You don’t think the others are?”
He hesitated. “It’s not my place. I don’t feel right speculating.”
“But that’s what you do. That’s the whole nature of your work.”
“This is different.”
He didn’t say more. His jaw was set and he looked resolute. She knew that face. It was the Brock-Troy-Trey stubborn face. The one that said they were done negotiating, done playing nice. How fascinating that he had it, too.
She gave him a long look. “You don’t want to hurt him, whichever one he is.”
“I spent my life an outcast. I’d never do that to someone else.”
“Maybe…he…would want to know?”
Shane was silent, considering this, and then he shook his head. “No. In this case, I don’t think so. They’ve had enough grief and loss.
They’ve had more than their fair share of pain. I’m not here to cause pain. That’s not why I went to Marietta. It wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
She stared at him, somewhat dazzled and amazed. “This is the book you need to write. This is a story all of America—”
“No.”
“It’s fascinating—”
“Won’t do that to them. They are entitled to their privacy. No one needs to know all the Sheenan secrets.”
“What about yours?” she asked, thinking it incredible that he’d been here nine months and yet he’d never said anything to any of them. “Why haven’t you told them?”
“I wanted to get to know them a little bit.”
She frowned. “But when were you going to tell them? Before or after they evicted you?”
He smiled grimly. “I wasn’t sure I’d even tell them. It all depended on how things went. It all depended on who they were.”
She heard something in his tone that made her sit a little straighter. “You still don’t like them.”
“I still don’t know them.” He left his position by the fireplace and paced the room. “Arriving here last spring, I only knew what I’d discovered in my research. They were a wealthy, prominent Paradise Valley ranching family dating back to the 1880s. The Sheenans owned not just one huge cattle ranch, but two, with the eldest Sheenan son, Brock, having bought his own place years earlier. William Sheenan’s wife, Catherine, died in the summer of 1997—it was an incurable illness, that’s all the papers said—and had been buried in a private ceremony at the small cemetery in Cherry Lake, Montana, and Bill died late March 2014 and was buried at the cemetery here in Paradise Valley.”
“They weren’t buried together?”
He shook his head. “But discovering that piece, the burial at Cherry Lake, was important. That’s when I knew I’d found the right family, the right Sheenans, and bits of story and memory came together. My grandmother had told me that my mother used to bring her other children to a family cabin at Cherry Lake. My grandmother said twice a year she’d sneak away from the others to come see me.” He drew a deep breath. “And this is that cabin. This was hers, Catherine Cray’s.”