Page 106 of Rockstar Baby

I lifted my hand to knock on the rounded door my mum had painted an eye-searing red. It swung open and the woman in question stared at me, her soft blue eyes more lined, her perfect bow mouth slack with shock.

“Rory Michael.”

It made me smile despite the fatigue from the trip that hung heavy on my shoulders. “Ma.”

She hauled me in for a hard hug that rattled my ribs and settled my heart into a more regular rhythm. I hadn’t even realized how out of whack I was until I felt her arms around me.

Worse, I wouldn’t have said I even derived comfort from her in that way. Was I so unaware of my true feelings? Could I be that daft?

She drew me back and cupped my cheeks. I towered over her, but she’d always closed the distance between us as if will was enough to make it less. “You’re too thin.”

I scuffed my sneaker. “I haven’t lost more than half a stone.”

That wasn’t exactly accurate. I hadn’t been eating. I wasn’t close to wasting away, but my appetite wasn’t what it had been.

I definitely couldn’t go near ice cream.

“Your mum knows. Now you come in here and take a load off.” Before I could argue, she stepped back into the small foyer and called up the stairs. “Padraig, we have a visitor.”

I stepped over the threshold and dropped my bag. I’d traveled light as always. “Oh, Ma, he’s probably busy—”

My da appeared on the landing, his halo of bushy salt-and-pepper hair whiter than I remembered. How long had it been since I’d been home? It shamed me that I couldn’t remember.

That if not for my turmoil over Ivy and what that blasted town Crescent Cove had done to me, I might not even care.

“Son.” He didn’t ask me what I was doing here, or why I hadn’t called to warn them, just thundered down the stairs and pulled me into another bone-crushing hug. “You’re too thin.”

I had to laugh as we eased apart. “Is there a script?”

“No, we have eyes. You look good otherwise. Tired,” my mum declared after another inspection. “And you need a haircut. Don’t you have a barber in California?”

The way she pronounced it always made me smile. To her, LA might as well have been located on the sun. “I do. Haven’t had a chance to visit one recently.”

“Or eat.” My mum shook her head and waved me down the hall to the kitchen. “I just made lunch. You’re in luck.”

“You don’t have to go to any trouble—”

“It’s no trouble, boy. Didn’t you hear her say she just finished making lunch?” My father dropped his beefy arm around my shoulders. “Besides, it’s not often our oldest boy comes around. How long’s it been?

“Not more than a year.”

“Don’t lie to your father,” my mum admonished as she moved to the little stove and ladled out big stoneware bowls of soup. “Closer to two.”

“I think three. Maureen wasn’t even seeing Kevin then and she’s already pregnant with their first.”

“What? Maureen’s pregnant? She didn’t call me.” I scrubbed a hand over my face and tried to cut through the cobwebs enough to remember. Had she? I wasn’t the best at returning non-work calls. “I don’t think.”

“She called you. Six times.”

“No. That can’t be so.”

“She has the call log to prove it. She showed it to your mum.” My da jerked his thumb at my mother, and I hurried to help her with the bowls of stew. The smell of the rich, meaty soup made my stomach growl.

“I don’t think it was six,” I muttered as I carted them one by one to the cozy round table set by the windows. A sprig of yellow flowers sat in the middle of it, cheery and quaint.

“It surely was. It would’ve been more if she didn’t know better than to waste her coins on transatlantic calls you wouldn’t take.”

“I would’ve taken it had I known, but I was working—”