* * *

Soot was a perfect gentleman, and Nancy Janice fell in love with him. Then again, her mother’s very nature was fall-in-love. Everything in her life was “perfect” and “beautiful” and “wonderful.”

Her glass was not just half full. It was overflowing with rose-scented denial. And Anne refused to see her intolerance of the woman as some kind of moral failing.

They had nothing in common and never had—hell, maybe that was why Anne had felt so betrayed when she had learned what kind of man her father really was. Even though Tom, Sr., had passed when she’d found out the truth, she had been prepared to live up to his memory for the rest of her days, to follow the example of bravery and charisma he had seemed to set.

Instead, the curtain had been pulled back on his true character and that had left her with nothing in common with her family. Her brother had already been living his own life and going into the Academy, and as for Nancy Janice? Anne had barely made it through a childhood of being forced to wear dresses and ringlet curls and paten leather shoes.

She’d already been waaaaaaay done with being pigeonholed into a feminine standard she didn’t care about by a woman she did not respect.

“Everything is so neat.” Nancy Janice stood up from petting the dog. “So tidy.”

“You make that sound like a bad thing.” Anne dropped her mother’s fifty-pound overnight bag at the foot of the stairs. “I have to take him out. Come on, Soot.”

“It’s not a bad thing.” Her mother followed the way to the back porch. “It’s just so spare.”

“I don’t see the need to clutter my space up with the Home Shopping Network.”

The way her mother sighed told her that the message had been received as it had been intended: That house Anne and her brother had grown up in had been crammed full of space-saving ideas, knickknacks, fads, and cutesy “moments.”

Nothing like being raised in an infomercial ecosystem.

“Out you go, Soot.” She opened the door and stood to the side. “Go on. G’head.”

Soot stood in between the jambs and eyed the sky with suspicion.

“You want me to go out with you?” Please make me go out with you. “Here, we’ll go together.”

“I’ll make tea,” her mother said. “Where’s your kettle?”

“I don’t have one. I use K-Cups. And I still don’t drink tea.”

“What’s a K-Cup?”

“Don’t worry about it. Help yourself.”

“I don’t drink coffee.”

“Come on, Soot.”

Thankfully, the dog decided to commit to a visit to the backyard, and Anne took the opportunity to breathe deep and brace herself for the return. When they came back in, her mother had set out two mugs and was boiling water in a pan.

“Don’t worry, Annie-Banannie, I brought plenty of Celestial Seasonings for the both of us.”

Annie-Banannie. God, she had hated that nickname her entire life. Annie-Banana would have been bad enough, but of course that cutesy end had had to be tacked on, a pink bow on a pink box.

The smile her mother sent over her shoulder was cheerful in a determined kind of way. “It’s for nighttime. For rest.”

Anne grabbed a dish towel and bent down, taking each of Soot’s paws in turn, wiping off the mud. “I told you. I don’t drink tea.”

“Oh. Well, I could make you a coffee? I could—”

“No. Thank you. I don’t need anything.”

“Oh. All right.”

Anne lowered her head. “I’ll sit with you.”

“Oh, I would love that. I’ve missed you.”

Yeah, wow, she’d forgotten how three-quarters of Nancy Janice’s statements started with “Oh”—as if she were constantly shocked by conversation, in spite of the fact that she was a chatter. Then again, she’d been a seen-and-not-heard wife to a flamboyant force of nature. It probably was still as surprise, even after all these years, that anybody listened to her.

It wasn’t Anne’s job to step into the void, however. And giving her mother an opening to speak was like setting off an entire can of Febreze in an enclosed space—and thinking you could keep the flower-fresh stench from your nose by batting the air away from your face.

She sat down at her table and told herself she needed to ask what the woman had been up to, but she wasn’t sure she could feign interest in Pilates, bridge, and senior center volunteering.

Especially as she thought about Emilio in that hospital bed, Danny struggling to find his way, and the people who had died in those warehouse fires down by the wharf.

See, this was the problem, There was a vast, uncrossable distance between what her mother worried over and what Anne had on her plate. It was Kleenex to surgical gauze. Sandals to steel-toed work boots. An off-key hum to a scream for help.

Her mother took a green-and-white box out of her corgi-themed purse and put a tea bag in each mug. Then she poured the hot water from the pan and brought her solution to insomnia over.

As she put the tea in front of Anne, her pale eyes were like those of a dog begging to be let in from the cold.

“Just in case you change your mind,” she said softly.

I won’t, Anne wanted to holler. For godsake,, is this the reason Dad cheated on you?

Chapter 27

The following morning, Danny pulled his truck into the parking area behind the 617 stationhouse and checked his phone. He was fifteen minutes early, but not because he’d planned it that way and set some kind of an alarm.

You needed to be able to sleep to worry about alarms. And anything even remotely REM-related had been a nonissue.

Lighting a cigarette, he cracked his window and blew a stream of smoke out. Following the storms, the early September sun was back out with a vengeance, the bright sky and utter lack of clouds making him think of someone starting an organic diet after an ugly binge.

He blinked gritty eyes. Drank some coffee. Smoked some more.

Five minutes ’til nine, he doused the butt in his cold Dunkin’ and got out. The chief’s shiny new stationhouse had a dedicated administrative entrance, so at least he didn’t have to enter through the front and face the crew, all of whom would know why he was here.

Anne’s brother was going to love this meeting.

And hey, at least his last act as a firefighter was going to be making someone’s day.

Danny pulled open the glass door and stepped into a waiting room as fancy as any you’d find in a lawyer’s office downtown: leather couches, coffee table, flat-screen TV, even a throw rug that picked up on the gray-and-blue color frickin’ scheme.

Nice to know that Ripkin’s people saw to everything. Not just the donation and the building, but the goddamn curtains and the furniture.

It even smelled nice.

Given how fancy everything was, he always expected some executive assistant to come out and demand his ID and fingerprints before he could get in to see the big man.

Nope. He just walked over to the fishbowl. The chief’s office was three sides of see-through, and the man was sitting at an old beat-up desk, paperwork everywhere, the phone in danger of falling off the far edge, a dead plant off to the side on shelves that were mostly empty.

Ashburn was like an isolated contaminant in all the otherwise perfectly orderly and new.

Tom looked up. “Come on in.”

Or something to that effect. The office was soundproof.

Danny walked around and pushed his way inside. “Morning.”

“Sit down.”

Why bother. He wasn’t going to be in here long. But Danny followed the order, parking it in a creaky wooden chair.

He crossed his arms over his chest. “So this was quick.”

Anne’s brother eased back and steepled his fingertips like he was a school principal with a delinquent. The man looked exhausted, dark circles under his eyes adding age to his face, that salt-and-pepper hair pulling an assist on the almost-fifty vibe. The poor bastard was just in his mid-thirties, though.

“Dr. McAuliffe got back to me yesterday.”

“Where do I sign?”

“What?”

Danny sat forward and motioned over the paperwork. “On my release papers. I already know I wasn’t on service long enough to vest my pension, but I want my COBRA.”