Maybe This Time

Ten

When he walked in, Andie looked up from where she was sitting on the floor beside Alice’s bed, looking exhausted. “She’s okay.”

He sat down in the rocker. “How are you?”

Her chin went up. “I want them forever. Alice and Carter. I’m staying with them forever.” She met his eyes, as if she thought he was going to argue.

“That’s good.”

“Who are you?” Alice mumbled, rousing a little from her sleep to blink at him.

“This is Bad Uncle, remember?” Andie said softly.

“Oh, thanks,” North said.

Andie leaned closer. “But he’s not taking you away. Nanny Joy got that all wrong. He won’t come get you until you want to leave. He promises.”

Alice turned accusing Archer blue eyes back to him, so he said, “As long as you’re not in danger, you can stay here until you say, ‘I want to go.’ When you want to go, I will take you home to Columbus.”

Alice pushed herself up on her elbows then, her face still blotchy with tears, an ugly doll tumbled beside her. “I’m not in danger.”

“We’ll see,” North said.

Alice scowled, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m not going.”

“As long as you’re safe here, you don’t have to,” North said.

“Pinky swear?”

“Pinky swear,” he said, having only a vague idea of what that meant until she held out her hand, her little finger crooked. He linked his little finger with hers, hoping there wasn’t some kind of ritual that he was going to screw up, and she shook his hand once and let go.

“Okay,” she said. “If you break a pinky swear, you have to cut your finger off.”

“That’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to tell me before you make me do it,” North said.

“Then you shouldn’t have done it without asking,” Alice said, and since that was an argument he’d often used in court, he nodded.

“You’re right. Pinky swear.”

Alice lay back down again, frankly surveying him now. “You were here before. When Daddy died. When Aunt May was here.”

North nodded.

“You never came back.”

“I know.” All the rationales he’d used-they were in good hands with their aunt, he didn’t know anything about kids, somebody had to run the practice-looked pretty stupid in the light of Alice’s direct gaze. “I was wrong. I was a Bad Uncle.”

“Whoa,” Andie said, and Alice looked at her. “Bad Uncle doesn’t say he’s wrong very often. Well, ever.”

“I’ve said that.”

Andie looked at him, exasperated. “When?”

Right offhand, he couldn’t think of an example, so he said to Alice, “I brought you something.”

“Books,” Alice said, and yawned again.

“No.” He opened his overnight bag and pulled out the soft, furry, long-eared, pear-shaped little bunny that had felt squashy in his hands when he’d picked it up after seeing it in a store window. He’d put it on her bed in Columbus so she’d have it when she moved in and then grabbed it on his way out the door with a vague idea that there should be gifts when he arrived. Kids liked gifts. “I thought since your name was Alice that you should have a white rabbit.”

“Huh?” Alice said, and then looked at the rabbit as he held it out to her.

“Alice in Wonderland?” he said and looked at Andie, who shook her head.

“She doesn’t know it,” she told him and then said to Alice, “There’s an Alice in a book who chases a white rabbit and has adventures.”

Alice looked at the rabbit, and North could tell she wanted it, but something kept her from reaching out.

Andie took it instead. “My God, this is a great rabbit.” She squeezed it, her strong hands holding it up in front of the little girl. “Alice, it’s squooshy. And really soft. And it’s smiling underneath its fur.”

Alice stuck her chin out, clearly trying to resist but watching the bunny anyway.

“And the tag says ‘Jellycat.’ Do you think that’s its name?”

“No. Its name is…” Alice frowned and then held out her hand. “Let me see.”

Andie gave the bunny back to North. “It’s from your uncle North.”

Alice looked exasperated. North held out the bunny to her, and she took it, knocking Jessica off onto the floor as she reached for it, her eyes widening as she held it up in front of her and felt how soft it was.

“What do you say for the nice gift?” Andie said.

“Thank you, Bad,” Alice said automatically, still staring at her bunny.

“You’re welcome,” North said, ignoring the “Bad” to watch her stare at the toy. Nobody he’d ever given a gift to had ever looked like that, all that unashamed naked wonder. Then Alice hugged the rabbit to her, and he felt his throat close in, completely blindsided by the little girl and her vulnerability. And he’d left her alone down here with a bunch of idiot nannies and some asshole who was faking ghosts to keep her there. “Bad Uncle” was exactly what he deserved.

“Good present,” Andie whispered beside him, and he remembered she was there, too.

He looked back at Alice, rocking the bunny, her cheek on its head, and cleared his throat. “What’s his name, Alice?”

“Her,” Alice said, frowning.

“Sorry. What’s her name?”

Alice pulled back to look at the bunny. “She has a pink nose. Her name is Rose Bunny.”

“Not Pinky?” Andie said.

“Pinky is not a real name,” Alice said sternly, and lay back down in her bed, Rose Bunny jammed under her chin.

“Good point,” North said. “Rose is a fine name.”

“Did you get Carter one?” Alice said, around a yawn.

“No, I got Carter something else.”

“What?”

“Colored pencils. In a case. Will he like that?”

Alice’s eyes closed as her lips curved in a smile that could break a heart. “Yes, he will.” She snuggled deeper in her bed, looking normal now, no trace of her hysterics left except for the smudges of her tears, now mostly rubbed off on her pillow.

“Good night, Alice,” Andie whispered. “Good night, Rose.”

“Good night, Andie,” Alice murmured back. “Good night, Bad.”

“Good night, Alice,” North said, and then when Andie nudged him, he added, “Good night, Rose,” and watched Alice smile, half asleep.

“You did good, Bad,” Andie whispered.

That’s a start, North thought. “You coming downstairs?”

“I need to stay with her,” Andie said, looking back at the sleeping little girl. “She’s not deep asleep yet. I don’t want her to wake up and be alone so soon after everything else. And there are… things that show up sometimes. I don’t want her alone.”

“Ghosts.”

She stuck her chin out. “Yes.”

He got up and went over and turned on the gas fireplace, checking to make sure it was safe before he turned back to her. “Your medium-”

“Isolde.”

“-Isolde said that ghosts don’t like fire. She said if you kept the fire going, the ghost wouldn’t come in the room.”

Andie shook her head. “Don’t gaslight me. You don’t believe in ghosts.”

“No, but you do, and your expert says that this fire will keep Alice safe.”

“And you think we’re nuts.”

“No,” North said, surprised to find that he didn’t. “I think something’s going on here. I called Gabe and left a message for him to come down tomorrow. We’re going to go over this place until we find out what’s really happening.”

“There really are ghosts.”

“Then we’ll find those, too. And when we’ve gotten rid of whatever the problem is, the kids will come back with us.”

“With us,” Andie said, doubt on her face.

“I’m not leaving without you,” he told her, surprising himself and her.

Andie blinked. “Wow. You’re serious. You realize that could be weeks?”

“Yes,” North said, thinking, Christ, I hope not. “I’m going downstairs to see what fresh hell has broken loose, but I’ll come back soon and check on you.”

Andie turned her face up to his and smiled, and he thought, Oh, hell, and fought the urge to bend down and kiss her.

He turned to go and then remembered. “Will wants to talk to you.”

“The hell with him,” Andie said. “I told him not to come down here, he pulls this crap with Alice, and now he wants to talk to me. I don’t think so.”

“I’ll let him know,” North said, and went downstairs feeling more cheerful than he’d thought possible since he’d heard Andie say, “There are ghosts.”

The party in the living room was in full swing when North walked in, although “full seethe” might have been the better term. Flo and Lydia had their heads together over in the corner, probably planning on killing Kelly O’Keefe and dumping her body in the moat. Lydia was generally sane but her sons were being threatened, and nothing North had learned about Flo in the year he’d been married to her daughter gave him any hope that she’d be a voice of reason.

Over on the couch, Southie was sitting between Isolde and an annoyed-looking middle-aged man with a jowly face. “Well, I think both ways of looking at this are good,” he said, and both the jowly guy and Isolde looked at him with contempt.

Meanwhile Kelly O’Keefe had her head bent close to Will, listening to every word he said. Her cameraman lurked behind her, looking equal parts angry and fed up.

It wasn’t a question of if something was going to go wrong, it was a question of which one of the time bombs gathered there was going to detonate first.

“North!” Southie called, desperation under his voice, and North went over to the couch. “You have to meet Dennis, the ghost expert I told you about.”

“Right,” North said, and shook Dennis’s hand. “So there are ghosts.”

“Of course there aren’t ghosts,” Dennis said, evidently pushed beyond the limits of politeness. “There is no such thing as ghosts, at least not the kind that are supposed to be here.”

Isolde shrugged. “You can’t see them because you don’t believe.”

“That’s convenient,” North said.

“No, she’s right,” Dennis said morosely. “Disbelief suppresses sensitivity.”

“So you think there are ghosts,” North said.

“No,” Dennis said. “But if there were, I couldn’t see them because I don’t believe in them.”

“I could use a drink,” North said to Southie, and Southie reached over the back of the couch and picked up a decanter.

“You have to taste this brandy,” he said, reaching for a glass, too.

“It’s good?”

“No, it’s odd.” Southie splashed some liquor into the glass and handed it to him. “I think it’s local. There’s good stuff, too, I went out in the storm and stocked the bar, but that demented housekeeper decanted everything”-he jerked his head to an assortment of glass decanters on the table behind the couch-“so we’re guessing what’s what. But I’m positive this is the house brandy. It has quite a kick.”

“Local brandy,” North said, taking the glass, and then caught sight of his mother leaving the room. “Now where is she going?” he said, and put the glass down to follow her, only to be met at the door by Flo.

“I need to talk to you,” she said, and he thought, This night will never end, and followed her into the hall.

Andie leaned against Alice’s bed after North had gone, trying to be practical and failing miserably. She’d pretty much wanted him back the minute he’d come through the door, and then he’d turfed everybody out of the nursery for her, and brought Alice a rabbit, and told her he wasn’t leaving until they went home with him, and if she hadn’t been so tired, she’d have jumped him in the nursery except that was out of the question. Although, when she thought about it, jumping him for one night might be a good idea. Well, no it wasn’t, but it felt like a great idea, to have his arms around her again, to let him make her crazy and forget everything for a while. What could it hurt? He was sleeping in her old bedroom next to the nursery, Isolde said that ghosts didn’t like fire, she’d be right there if Alice needed her.

And God knew she needed him.

Bad idea, she thought, bad, bad idea.

But ten minutes of hot memories later, when the nursery door opened again, Andie looked up smiling, thinking, Maybe, and got Lydia instead.

“You’re an idiot,” Lydia said, and sat down in the rocking chair.

Wonderful, Andie thought, her hot thoughts evaporating. “Is that just a general observation, or do you have a direction you’re going with it?”

“You left my son.”

“Ten years ago,” Andie said, incredulous. “We’re over it. And you were thrilled. You probably did a dance when I left.” She looked at Lydia doubtfully. “The minuet or something.”

“He was happy with you,” Lydia said, looking at her accusingly. “That year with you, he laughed.”

“Well, I’m a funny gal,” Andie said, wishing she would leave.

“You’re correct, you were not what I wanted for him.” Lydia lifted her chin. “I was wrong. And I’m sorry.”

Andie blinked. “For what? You didn’t wreck my marriage. I mean, I knew you didn’t like me, but you didn’t tell North to divorce me. Did you?”

“Of course not. That would have been completely inappropriate.”

“Of course you wouldn’t.” Lydia was a bitch, but she played fair.

“He wouldn’t have listened anyway,” Lydia said.

Andie tried again, on the theory that if she forgave Lydia for her nonexistent sins, she’d leave, and Andie could go back to having hot thoughts about the man she wasn’t going back to. “Look, North and I had problems we couldn’t resolve. You have nothing to apologize for.”

“I should have helped you. I should have brought you into our world, showed you how-”

“Lydia, I didn’t want your world. I just wanted to love North. Then Uncle Merrill died, and all North cared about was the firm, and I couldn’t stand it, and I left. I could stay with North and make us both miserable, or I could leave so he could find a woman who was crazy about his career. I was the wrong wife for him.”

“That’s what I thought,” Lydia said. “But I was wrong. I should have been a better mother-in-law. I was delinquent in my responsibility to you.”

“Lydia, I appreciate what you’re saying, but you can stop. It’s over, it’s been over for ten years.”

Lydia clamped her lips together in exasperation. “You know, Andromeda, for such an emotional woman, you are not very sensitive. It’s clearly not over. My son left a major litigation to come to southern Ohio for you.”

“Not for me,” Andie said automatically, and Lydia closed her eyes, impatience plain on her face. “Well, it wasn’t for me. You and Southie are here, there’s a journalist on the loose, and we have two children-” She broke off. “He has two children he’s responsible for.”

“It’s not over for him and it’s not over for you, either, I can hear it in your voice when you talk about him.” She was quiet for a moment. “I never doubted you loved him, you know. Anybody could see that you did.”

“Of course I did,” Andie said. “I married him.”

“After knowing him less than a day,” Lydia snapped. “The two of you were insane.”

“Well, we got over it.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Lydia said, glaring at her. “You didn’t, neither one of you. You have another chance here.”

“I’m engaged,” Andie lied, hoping that would get her out of the room.

“Oh, please,” Lydia said.

“Why doesn’t anybody take that seriously?”

“Because everybody has eyes. Listen to me.” Lydia leaned forward in the rocking chair, staring into Andie’s face, deadly serious. “You hurt my son terribly. He’s never gotten over it. I’d want you dead for that except that you’ve never gotten over it, either. And now you’ve both changed, you’re older, you could make it work this time. But if you’re going back to him, you have to stay.”

“I’m not going back,” Andie said, trying not to be caught by the thought of doing it again, better this time. “And I did not hurt North. I don’t think he noticed I left.”

“You’re an idiot,” Lydia said, and then took a deep breath. “Look, you’re very protective of that little girl.” She nodded toward the sleeping Alice. “But girls are strong. We’re built to withstand anything. Boys are the vulnerable ones. Alice will make it, she’s got Archer steel in her spine. But Carter’s bleeding inside, just the way North was bleeding when you left, and you can’t see it. You don’t look.”

Andie took a breath to say that Carter was fine, and Lydia cut her off.

“I raised two boys. They feel everything and have no way to express it. They die inside, and if you’re a mother, you die, too.”

“Lydia-”

“If you find out what’s wrong with Carter and fix it, if you bring these children to Columbus, you’ll have the full force of the Archer family behind you.”

“Okay,” Andie said, taken aback.

“But you break my son’s heart again, I’ll rip out your liver and fry it for breakfast.” Lydia stood up, looking down at Andie. “Don’t blow it this time, Andromeda,” she said, and swept from the room.

“Hey, I didn’t blow it the last time,” Andie said, but she was gone, and Andie was left alone in the firelight, Alice asleep behind her, Carter down in his room in terrible trouble if Lydia was right, and North downstairs as desirable as ever except that his mother was going to tear her liver out if she went for a one-night stand.

“Jesus,” Andie said, and went back to thinking about the ghosts.

It was simpler.

“It’s about my daughter,” Flo said when North was alone with her in the Great Hall.

“She’s doing a wonderful job with the children,” North said politely.

Flo narrowed her eyes, so tense that every gray curl on her head bounced. “I know what you’re up to, you bastard. You’re trying to get her back. Or at least into bed.”

Flo was crazy, North remembered, but she wasn’t stupid.

“Don’t even try it,” Flo said. “I ran the cards. You’re the Emperor.”

“No I’m not,” North said, confused. “I’m the King of Coins.”

Flo stopped, evidently equally confused. “What?”

“Andie brought me to your house and told you we’d gotten married and you ran the cards,” North said, remembering it like it was yesterday. It’d been his first clue that life with Andie was going to be seriously different.

“Oh. Yes, I did. Well, that was ten years ago.”

“You told me it was forever, and that Andie I were doomed because she was the Moon. Or something.”

“The Star,” Flo said. “And I was right, wasn’t I? It didn’t last.”

“You weren’t right if I’m an Emperor now,” North said. “Maybe you’d better run the cards again. Come back in the sitting room and I’ll get you a drink-”

“Well, if you’re not the Emperor, who is?” Flo said.

North started to say something soothing, and then thought, Why am I patronizing this woman? “Flo, I don’t believe in the tarot.”

“I know you don’t,” she said, frowning as she thought.

“Then why are you asking me about some Emperor?”

“You’re a lawyer. You don’t have to believe in something to argue about it.” She looked up at him, still frowning. “Somebody passionate and powerful. Somebody moving all the pieces in the game. Who else would that be besides you?”

“You’ve got a houseful of wingnuts here,” North said. “Plus ghosts. Pick one.”

Flo’s eyebrows went up. “The ghosts. Isolde said one of them is a man who thinks he owns the house.”

“Isolde is a font of information,” North said, not happy about that.

“But of course, that’s it.” Flo folded her arms, as if she were chilled. “That’s so much worse. You’d never hurt Andie on purpose, but some awful spirit-”

“I’ll keep Andie close and safe.”

Flo looked up at him, scowling again. “Sea goat.”

“What?”

“Sex. That’s all you think about.”

North looked down at her, exasperated.

Flo looked back, defiant. “Tell me you haven’t been thinking about it ever since you saw Andie.”

“I saw Andie for about five minutes before Alice started to scream.”

“Not tonight. Since she came to your office a month ago.”

She had him there. “This is the first I’ve seen her since then.”

“You’ve been thinking about it,” Flo said, an edge to her voice. “You’re going to break her heart again. It’s not fair, North, you have everything, can’t you just let her go?”

“No,” he said, surprising himself but not Flo, who nodded.

“It’s in your stars,” she said.

“I thought it was in the cards.”

“There, too.”

Lydia came down the stairs and into the hall. “Now what’s going on?”

“Your son’s going to try to seduce my daughter,” Flo said. “He’s a Capricorn. They do that.”

“Don’t you think their private lives should be private?” Lydia said, sounding virtuous.

Flo looked at her for a moment and then laughed.

“I’m going upstairs now,” North said to both of them. “Not to seduce my ex-wife but to get some sleep. Tomorrow a private detective will be here to find out what the hell is going on, and then we’ll establish that there are no ghosts, throw Kelly O’Keefe out into the storm, and take everybody back to Columbus where the two of you can continue your feud.”

“We’re not feuding,” Flo said, glaring at Lydia.

“It’s not like you to be dramatic,” Lydia said to him, ignoring Flo.

“Good night,” North said, and went back into the sitting room to get what he needed to seduce his ex-wife.

Andie was sitting beside Alice’s bed almost asleep when North came back upstairs, carrying an ice bucket and two glasses. He put it all down on the floor next to Andie, took off his suit coat and threw it on the rocker, loosened his tie, opened his overnight bag, took out a bottle of Glenlivet, and opened it.

“Oh, good.” Andie straightened to rub her back. “My present.”

“No, I got you something else, but I’ll share.” North poured two generous slugs into the glasses, handed one to her. “Here’s to going home to Columbus with everybody. Soon.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Andie said and did, the smooth liquor going down like silk. “God, I needed that.”

“Plenty more here.” North put the bottle down beside her and sat down beside it, his back against Alice’s bed, too. “Should we go into another room? Will we wake her up talking?”

“No, when she finally goes out, she’s out,” Andie said. “So what’s my present?”

North reached over and dug into his overnight bag again. He pulled out a CD and handed it to her.

“Clapton Unplugged,” she read with delight. “Thank you!”

“It’s been out since August. I took a chance you didn’t have it yet.”

“No, I didn’t even realize they’d recorded it. I saw it on TV…” She’d seen it on TV and thought of North all the way through. She smiled up at him. “Thank you. You give good gifts.”

“I try. I have something else, too. Not a gifts.”

He dug in the bag and pulled out a box, and she recognized her old shell box from junior high, the one she’d made from a cigar box she’d found that her mother told her had been her father’s. She was pretty sure that had been a lie, but still, it was her shell box.

“Wow,” she said, taking it from him. “Thank you for keeping it.”

“You left some other stuff behind.” He leaned back against the bed, too. “It’s all in there.”

“Anything important?”

“I don’t know,” North said. “I don’t know what’s important to you now. You’ve changed.”

“In ten years? Hell, yes, I’ve changed.” She opened the box and saw old photos and ticket stubs and, in the middle, the velvet jeweler’s box from the diamond earrings he’d given her. She opened it, looked at the classic, tasteful earrings, hated them, and snapped it shut again. Of course he’d saved the damn earrings. “You haven’t changed.”

“You’d be surprised.”

He drank again, and she felt him watching her. He was sitting close, not too close but right there on the other side of the bottle, and he looked like he always had when he’d come up to the attic after work at the beginning of their marriage, tired but alive and focused on her.

“It’s been good talking to you this past month,” he said. “Once we stopped fighting.”

She put the box on the floor and picked up her drink, trying to ditch the memories. “Southie says we haven’t been fighting, we’ve been bitching at each other.”

“He’s probably right.”

“He thinks if we have one big blowup, that would clear the air.”

North laughed. “And then we’d have makeup sex.”

Andie grinned. “How’d you know he said that?”

“It’s Southie. If it’s a plan, it has a naked woman in it.” He stopped smiling. “You want to have a fight? Clear the air?”

“No.” Andie cradled her drink. “That was a million years ago.”

“But you’re still mad.” North shook his head and drank again.

“I’m over it,” Andie lied.

“So am I,” North said.

Andie pulled back to look at him, annoyed. “What did you have to get over? I never did anything to you.”

He looked at her. “You left me.”

“You left me first.” Andie leaned back against the bed and took another drink.

“I was right there,” North said, his patience obvious.

“No you weren’t, you were down in that damn office behind that damn desk.”

“What did that desk ever do to you? Except support you well during sex.”

“It wasn’t the desk,” Andie said. “It was what it stood for.”

“Fine furniture?”

“The Family,” Andie said dramatically and drained her glass. “Of which I was not part.”

“Of course you were.” His annoyance was plain now.

“No. You and Southie and Lydia were family, the family law firm. I was the woman you slept with up in the attic.” Andie took the bottle and topped up her glass. “It was very Rochester of you.”

“Who?”

“Jane Eyre. He kept his insane wife in the attic.”

“Well, the insane part was right.” North finished his drink.

“You know that fight you were talking about?” Andie said, glaring at him. “It’s coming right up.”

“Good. We can start by you telling me why the hell you left.”

Andie let her head fall back on Alice’s bed. “A million times I’ve said this. You left me. You stopped paying attention, hell, you stopped seeing me. You’d sit behind that desk eighteen hours a day and then climb into bed at one A.M. and tap me on the shoulder for sex. That got old fast.”

“I thought you liked sex.”

“I did. I didn’t like being treated as your live-in hooker.”

“Drama queen.”

“Fine.” Andie set her glass down so she could shift around and look him in the eye. “Tell me something we did after your uncle died that didn’t involve the family business or sex.”

North didn’t say anything.

“I rest my case. You had two speeds at the end, ‘I’m working’ and ‘I want sex.’ Neither of them had anything to do with me.”

“The sex definitely-”

“No it didn’t,” Andie said. “I could have been anybody.”

“You were never anybody,” North said with conviction. “That’s why you stopped having sex with me? You thought I didn’t know you were there? Because that is insane.”

Andie took a deep breath. “After your uncle died, if I wanted to see you, I had to go to your office. You were always busy, but if it was six o’clock, I’d shove the papers off the desk and say, ‘Remember me?’, and most of the time we’d end up having sex on your desk.”

“I remember that,” North said over his drink.

“It was the only way I could get you to look at me,” Andie said. “You were always looking down at the desk, so I’d just slide right in there so you’d see me.”

“It was great. Why’d you stop doing that?”

“Because one night I came down and shoved the papers off your desk and you said, ‘Damn it, Andie, I’m busy, I’ll be up later,’ and picked up the papers without even looking at me, and I thought, Don’t hurry, and went back upstairs and that was the last time I volunteered for anything. It was humiliating enough to have to go down and remind my husband I existed, and then to get rejected…” She looked at his face, at the frown there, and said, “What?”

“I remember that.”

“Well, I remember it, too, you jerk. I should have sued that fucking desk for alienation of affection.”

“No, I remember what I was doing.”

“What?”

He shook his head. “We had troubles.”

“Which you never told me about.”

“Family business,” he said, and began to take a drink and then stopped as he realized what he’d said.

“And I wasn’t part of the family,” Andie said.

“Damn it,” North said to himself.

“It’s okay.” Andie leaned back against the bed. “It’s over.”

“We were in big trouble,” North said.

“It’s okay, you don’t-”

“Uncle Merrill took over the firm when my dad died, and he ran it for eighteen years.”

“Oh,” Andie said. “And he wasn’t competent?”

“He was very competent,” North said. “He was just crooked as all hell. Three generations of Archers established the good name of the firm and Merrill risked it all. Never got caught, either.” He drank again.

“So you had to cover up for him?”

“The statute of limitations on a lot of that stuff had run out, but the big problem was that if any of it got out, the reputation of the firm was gone. My mother was grieving, Southie was too young…”

“So you had to do it all,” Andie said. “North, even when Merrill was running the place, you did it all.”

“I wasn’t covering up felonies then,” North said, and his voice was bitter. “I’d just found out his latest screwup and it was about to break, and it was well within the statute of limitations, and I was scrambling to find a way out, and you showed up-”

“You know, if you’d told me,” Andie said.

“I didn’t tell anybody except Southie. And I only told him when he asked.”

“You should have told Lydia. She had to have known what he was like.”

“She wouldn’t have listened, and I didn’t want to be the one to disillusion her.”

“He was her brother-in-law,” Andie said. “Why would she care?”

“He was her lover,” North said, “and she’d care a lot.”

“What?” Andie sat up straighter. “Lydia and Merrill?”

“I thought you knew.”

“How? By telepathy?”

“From Flo.” North looked genuinely surprised. “Flo never told you?”

“Flo’s not one for gossip. She’s a live-and-let-live kind of woman. Why would she have told me?”

“That’s what started their feud.” North took another drink. “Christ, you did miss a lot.”

“Well, I was stuck up in that damn attic waiting for you,” Andie said. “What do you mean, that’s what started their feud? Flo didn’t like Lydia because she was so snotty to me.”

“That didn’t help, but there was a catfight one day. Flo was coming down the stairs from visiting you, and I invited her to a cocktail party we were having, and Mother said, ‘Yes, Flo, and bring whoever you’re with that night, too.’ ”

“Bitch,” Andie said.

“Well, Flo was pretty open-minded about who she slept with,” North said.

“She still is,” Andie said. “Doesn’t mean Lydia gets to take shots.”

“Then Flo said, ‘Well, you can be sure it won’t be my brother-in-law.’ After that it was pretty much open warfare.”

“Go, Flo,” Andie said. “Although Merrill wasn’t Lydia’s brother-in-law anymore, your dad was dead.”

North took another drink, discreetly silent.

“Oh. How far back did this affair go?”

“I think it started a year after I was born. Lydia had come through with the Archer heir, and my dad wasn’t the faithful type.”

Andie tried to process this new side of Lydia. “Yeah, but with his brother?”

“Merrill was the exciting one. Black sheep of the family,” North said grimly.

“So they were lovers for almost thirty years.” Andie thought about it, Lydia sneaking into bedrooms, or across the backyard since Merrill had the house next door. Lydia, in the middle of the night, tiptoeing through the begonias. “Wow.”

“Yep,” North said.

Andie squinted at him. “What else? When you get this terse, there’s something else.”

He hesitated.

“I know, I know, I’m not family.”

“Ever notice how Southie and I don’t look much alike?”

“Well, yeah, but… wait a minute. You’re kidding me.”

North shook his head.

“Have you told Southie?”

“Southie told me. Uncle Merrill told him when he turned twenty-one.”

“Wow.” Andie sat back. “And you never told me any of this.”

“Family secrets,” North said. “You were right, I shut you out. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

Andie blinked at him. “You have changed.”

“Yeah.” North smiled at her. “Enough about the past, it’s gone. Are we drinking to your engagement?”

“No, that’s over.” Andie sat back against the bed again. “Wow. Lydia had a son with a lover. Who was her brother-in-law. Amazing.”

“Back up,” North said, suddenly alert. “What do you mean, it’s over?”

“I broke it off with Will two days ago. So does Lydia know that Southie knows?”

“I don’t know. Are you sure you made it clear to him that it was over? Because he seems pretty sure it’s not.”

“He’s not paying attention, then. It’s a serious failing with the men in my life. What do you mean, you don’t know if Lydia knows? Don’t you people ever talk?”

“And say what? ‘Mom, do you know that Southie knows that he’s not Dad’s kid?’ Would you want that conversation with Lydia?”

“Oh. No.”

“So to return to Will-”

“I don’t want to return to Will. Will is history.”

“Glad to hear it,” North said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m not history,” North said, and kissed her.