“Thank you for always being there for me, Allison. You are smart and lovely and kind—when you aren’t furious at me—and I’ll miss you.”
“I hope you and your new lady and the baby are very happy together,” she said.
“I hope so, too.”
A knot formed in her throat. A vise clamped down onto her chest. One tear escaped her eye before she could capture it, lock it up and throw away the key.
“You know what the stupid thing is,” Allison said, speaking to stave off the building panic. “I don’t even like you very much.”
McQueen chuckled. She felt his chest rumble against hers. She’d miss that, too.
“I mean it,” she said. “You’re arrogant and entitled and you do whatever you want, consequences be damned, and you’re...you’re...”
“Rich,” he said. “That’s the word you’re looking for.”
“That’s it,” she said.
“If you don’t like me, why are you so upset?” he said, his tone teasing, and any other day they’d be in bed together already.
“Because I’m going to miss not liking you.”
He pulled her a little closer, a little tighter. He kissed her cheek, her forehead and then, at last, let her go. She hated herself for letting him be the one to let go first. Once he was gone, she would be alone, completely alone. No family. No friends. A woman on call day and night for a powerful man didn’t get to make friends. She hated him and never wanted to see him again. She loved him and never wanted him to leave her. But she didn’t cling to him when he pulled away, and she counted that a victory.
“If it makes you feel any better,” McQueen said, his hands still on her face, “this wasn’t an easy decision.”
“Weird,” Allison said. “It doesn’t make me feel any better.”
McQueen raised his hands in defeat. “I’ll go.”
She swallowed again. “Bye.”
“Don’t forget there’s some mail for you in the box.”
“Anything important?” She never got mail at McQueen’s address.
“It’s a package from Oregon. No idea why it came to my house.”
“Oregon?”
She glanced in the box at the padded envelope. Sure enough, it was postmarked Clark Beach, Oregon. And the name on the return address read Roland Capello.
Allison gasped, then clapped a hand over her mouth in shock.
“Allison?” McQueen had been retreating during the conversation but now he rushed to her. “Honey, what’s wrong? You look like you’re about to faint.”
“It’s from my brother,” she breathed. “This is from my brother.”
McQueen stared at her like she’d grown a second head in the past three seconds.
“Your brother?” he repeated. “I’ve known you seven years. You never told me you had a brother.”
Allison looked at him with tears in her eyes.
“That’s because...I don’t.”
Chapter 2
McQueen sat her in a chair and poured her a tumbler of bourbon, which Allison nearly dropped. She’d almost fainted. Truly fainted. She wasn’t a fainter. She’d never been a fainter. But seeing that name on that envelope had nearly sent her falling to the floor. If McQueen hadn’t been there she might have passed out cold.
“Drink,” he ordered, and she took a sip. It hit the back of her throat and set fire to her brain.
“Whew. That’s strong.” Too strong, but it stopped her hands from shaking.
“That’s panic-attack bourbon,” he said. “Hundred-ten proof. Feel better?”
“I feel like I’m going to faint but now it’s for a totally different reason.”
“We’ll take that as an improvement.” Gently he removed the glass tumbler from her hand and set it on the side table. “Now, tell me what’s going on?”
“Why?” She met his eyes with confusion.
“Why? Because I say, ‘Hey, you have a package from Oregon,’ and then you nearly faint on me?”
“I’m not your responsibility anymore, remember? We had that talk.”
“Soon as I walk out that door,” he said, pointing at the white door with the white knob, “it’s over. Not until then.”
“It’s no big deal. Don’t worry about it.”
“Who’s Roland Capello? Don’t say he’s your brother. I know he isn’t.”
Allison didn’t want to tell him the whole sordid story, but she didn’t want to fight with him about it, either. McQueen had a strong personality and an even stronger will. Better to tell him and get it over with.
“He was my brother,” she said. “Once. A long time ago.”
“How was someone once your brother? Stepbrother?”
“Adopted,” she said. “Me, I mean. Sort of. It’s complicated.”
“Here. Drink more. You’ll feel less complicated in no time.”
He pressed the glass into her hand and she took another sip. Rough stuff but the buzzing in her head distracted her from the wild beating of her heart.
“You told me your mom died when you were seven, right?” McQueen said. “Car accident?”
“Drunk driving,” Allison said. “She was the driver. I didn’t know that until I was a lot older. I guess people didn’t want me blaming her for dying. I didn’t have any relatives around. Mom had moved us from Indiana to Oregon for a boyfriend but they split up. When she was gone, they stuck me in foster care. I was in one of those group homes with a bunch of girls. They were older and mean, and I was tiny and scared all the time. Then one day this man showed up in a big black car and took me home with him. Dr. Capello. He’s a very famous philanthropist and neurosurgeon.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Well, he’s famous in Oregon the way you’re famous in Kentucky.”
“So, pretty damn famous, then,” McQueen said. Allison ignored that.
“Dr. Capello inherited a fortune from his parents and I think he had his own money, too.”
“I never met a broke neurosurgeon.”
“He was known for helping needy kids. I think in the beginning he did pro bono surgeries and that sort of thing. But at some point he became a foster parent. He took in a bunch of kids.”
“An Angelina?”
Allison smiled. “Yeah, an old, male Angelina.”
“How old?”
“Very old. Fifty, I think.”
McQueen, age forty-five, gave her a dirty look.
“I was one of the kids he took in,” she said. “Lucky me.”
“And Roland?”
“Him, too. Except Dr. Capello adopted him,” Allison said. “I haven’t heard from him since I left The Dragon. That’s why I was so surprised.”
“The what?”
Allison smiled behind her glass of bourbon. “The Dragon—that’s what the house was called. You know how beach houses have funny names? Sandy Soles and Blue Heaven or whatever? Dr. Capello said we lived at the edge of the world and on old maps that’s where ‘there be dragons.’ And the house was big and green with shingles like scales. It kind of looked like a dragon when you saw it from a certain angle.”
McQueen nodded his understanding. “So you lived there with a bunch of other foster kids. Was it as bad as I’m imagining?”
“It was paradise,” she said. “Xanadu.”
“Xanadu?” McQueen repeated. “Like the movie?”
“Like the poem,” she said. “‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree...’ I used to have it all memorized. Anyway, it was lovely there.”
She couldn’t sit still anymore so she put her glass on the table and stood up. She went to the bookshelves that lined the walls and started searching for a book, not because she wanted to read it, but to find something she’d slipped inside it long ago.
“You know that’s crazy, right?” he said.
“What? Didn’t everyone live in a magical beach house with a famous doctor as a kid?”
“Cricket.” McQueen hated sarcasm as much as he hated when she w
ore jeans.
“I know it sounds nuts,” she said. “I do, but it seemed normal at the time. I was seven, though. I still thought Santa Claus was real. Of all the kids, Roland was the one I was closest to. He was older. He was nice. I just... I never thought I’d hear from him again. That’s all.”
McQueen leaned back in his armchair and steepled his fingers. He did this when he was thinking. She had a feeling he was thinking, That’s not all.
“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked.
“That I want you out of my apartment right now,” she said casually, without malice and without much truth, either. She ignored him as best as she could as she studied her shelves.
“About your brother. Usually when nice people send me mail, I don’t almost lose my lunch.”
“I’m done talking about this with you.”
“I’m not done listening.”
“Well, there’s nothing more to tell.”
“We’ve been sleeping together for six years, Allison. I know when you’re faking it with me. You’re faking right now. You went white as a sheet when you saw his name on that envelope. That’s not like you. You are not a drama queen. You don’t overreact. When we were mugged in Milan, I was the one who puked afterward, not you. There is something you’re not telling me, and I’m not leaving until I know what it is.”
“You’re being nosy.”
“I care,” he said.
“You have an interesting way of showing it,” she said. She’d found her book at last, but didn’t open it.
McQueen sighed. He beckoned to her and she walked to him, sitting in front of him on top of the coffee table between his knees. He leaned forward and took the book from her hand and put it aside. He raised her hand to his lips, kissed her knuckles, before turning her hand over. He caressed her palm with his fingertips, a sensual touch but also comforting.
“Did something bad happen to you in that house?” he asked, meeting her eyes. If she’d thought for one single second that McQueen was prying out of curiosity or nosiness or because he felt entitled to her secrets, she would never have answered. But the man who’d asked that question wasn’t McQueen the rich jerk who was dumping her, but McQueen the scared father who’d burn the world down if anyone hurt his children.
“Dr. Capello didn’t molest me if that’s what you’re asking.”
McQueen took a heavy breath, relieved on her behalf.
“That’s what I’m asking,” he said. “So nobody hurt you, then?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“It’s not—”
“Tell me what happened and I’ll leave.”
“You promise?”
He carved an invisible X on his heart with his finger. “Once I know you’re okay, I’ll go.”
Allison hadn’t thought about her old life with Dr. Capello and his kids in a long time. She tried not to think about them, she certainly never talked about them and she never ever invited memories into her mind. They came sometimes, however, uninvited, creeping like ants through a crack in the wall.
“You wouldn’t be this freaked out if it was really that good there,” McQueen said.
“I’m not freaked out,” she said, maybe a lie, maybe not. She was just...surprised, that’s all. “You’d be shaky, too, if your brother contacted you out of the blue after thirteen years.”
“True. Because I don’t have a brother, even an almost-brother. You do.”
Allison released his hand and picked up the book she’d found, an old copy of Shaw’s Pygmalion, the pages highlighter-yellow from her days as an English major in college.
“Allison?”
She gave in.
“The last summer I was there, someone in the house maybe possibly pushed me down the stairs.”
“What?” McQueen said, eyes wide with fury.
Allison shrugged, said nothing.
“An accident?” McQueen asked.
“So I was told.”
“But you don’t think it was an accident?”
Allison held the book to her chest.
“My great-aunt was seventy when my mom died. She was living in southern Indiana. That’s why I went to live with Dr. Capello instead of her. But I still called her once a week to check in. The day of my fall—or whatever it was—someone apparently called her, pretended to be me and told her that there was a killer in the house and I needed her to come get me.”
McQueen started to speak.
“Before you ask,” Allison said, “I don’t know who it was who called or who pushed me—if someone did push me. When I fell, I hit my head so hard I don’t even remember falling. I don’t remember waking up in the hospital. I don’t remember much of anything from around that time. What I do remember is that I was living at The Dragon, happiest kid on earth, and then I was in Indiana later that summer, living with my aunt in her tiny apartment.”
“That must have been a hard hit,” McQueen said. “What did the police say?”
“There wasn’t even an investigation,” she said. “There was no evidence other than the phone call, and everyone chalked that up to my aunt being old and hard of hearing, maybe even confused. Everyone but me. That woman could hear a pin drop and she had all her faculties intact to the day she died.”
“No witnesses?” McQueen asked. Allison ignored the urge to roll her eyes. He was talking like a cop.
“Nobody came forward that I know of.”
“Kids can be really violent,” McQueen said.
“Not these kids,” Allison said.
“Then who did it? Someone did something or you never would have had to leave.”
“I’m telling you what my aunt told me when I started asking her why I was with her and not with the Capellos anymore. Apparently Dr. Capello was the one who found me at the foot of the steps bleeding from the ear. He said he was too panicked to do anything but scream for someone to call 911. If it had been an accident I’d like to think whoever it was would have admitted to it. But nobody ’fessed up. Not even when my aunt flew out to pick me up and take me home with her. When I went to live with her, she wouldn’t let me contact the Capellos. She thought... She didn’t know what to think. And the Capellos never contacted me, either, after that. Probably because my aunt told them not to. Thirteen years of radio silence. Until today.” She glanced over at the table where the package from Roland still sat, unopened.
“So you never called? Never visited?” McQueen asked.
“I wanted to when I was a kid and then a few years passed and the whole thing kind of felt like a good dream with a nightmare ending. When I was old enough to go back on my own, I just...didn’t. If they’d sent me even one birthday card, I might have. But they didn’t.”
“I can’t believe you never told me any of this,” he said, shaking his head.
“You never asked. You never wanted to know, did you? Then you’d have to think of me as a real person,” she said. McQueen had the decency to look ashamed of himself.
“You still could have told me.”
“You still could have asked,” she said. “Anyway, doesn’t matter. Ancient history. I’m over it all.”
“Except you aren’t,” he said. “Except you see the name Roland