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“And you’re okay with that?” She shakes her head, her curls swinging around her face. “You’re like your da. Shit scared when it comes to love. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it makes you vulnerable, but don’t you realize how strong it makes you, too?”

“This isn’t love.”

She laughs and starts straightening throw pillows even though the place is already neat and tidy and guest worthy. “So that’s why you’ve been driving me crazy with nonstop calls? You’ve called me more in the past few weeks than you have in your entire life, Callahan Francis.”

I sink onto the sofa, hands clasped, and I drop my head. “It doesn’t matter that I shot the prick to save her; I still killed a man she loved.”

“And she told you that, did she? Because from what she’s told me, they didn’t have a good relationship. He trapped her, caged her.”

Like I did, but I don’t say a word about that.

“And he treated her like shit. I don’t think she liked him. Now love,familylove is different. You can hate someone and still feel the love you’re meant to feel, but it’s not like loving someone properly.”

“She told you all this?” I ask.

Mam sits next to me. “Some, I read between the lines. We’re the same, me and Lucie. Mafia daughters. I hated my father, too, but the love part? It was there. I’ll tell you one thing. I never mourned him, and that girl isn’t mourninganyone but you. If you don’t love her, then let her go. But if you do, then dammit, go get her.”

“This isn’t?—”

“Don’t lie to me, Callahan.”

Because Mam always calls me on my shit. This is love. I know it. I think I knew it the first time I fucked Lucie Joy.

But how can you keep lying when a part of you almost gets killed, when that part runs off with your brother? When that part makes you so exposed and vulnerable that there’s nothing to do but hide?

“Mam…”

“Love makes you strong and that girl’s special. I know why you chose her.”

“I had to marry her.”

“You didn’t have to fall for her, Callahan, and I think you did before you even knew who she was. Your brother told me how you met. And that isn’t you, Cal. Saving someone is, but going after her? No, that’s you and Lucie finding one another. So get up those stairs. Talk to her. Fix this now. Don’t let this girl leave.”

Fuck me. Mam on the warpath is frightening.

But she’s also right, and I head for the stairs. I take them two at a time to get to her.

Telling her will be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The scariest.

What if she hates me?

What if Mam’s wrong about how Lucie feels?

I knock on the open door. “Hey.”

“Go away, Callahan,” she says, “If you need to stay married to me, you can?—”

“No, I don’t need to.”

She goes still. “Consider this a divorce. I don’t want anything from you.”

“I don’t want a divorce. I want to stay married to you, Lucie. But?—”

“You said you’d hunt me down and you didn’t.”

She whirls and glares at me, then she throws a book at me. I catch it easily and put it down on the dresser just inside the room.

“But none of that matters anyway,” she says. “You killed my father. I know he wasn’t really my father and he was a horrible man, but he’s the only one I had.”