Page 50 of The Homemaker (The Chain of Lakes #1)

Chapter Forty-Eight

Murphy

Stop planning. God is laughing at you.

Click. Click. Click.

Alice’s steps fade as she retreats toward the kitchen. Her confession echoes in my head like a weather radio with poor signal. Some words pass through the noise, while others get lost in the static.

Edina.

Son.

I hear my name again and again until I peel my head from the wall and stare at the hand on my wrist.

Blond hair.

Familiar scent of rose and saffron.

“Babe, did you hear me?” Blair smiles. “We’re parked out front. Come help my father inside, even though he doesn’t think he needs help.” She rolls her eyes .

“You’re home,” I mumble, following her as she pulls me to the front door.

“Yes. They released him early. What’s your deal?” She laughs. “Why were you just standing against the wall?”

“Um,” I quickly shake my head. “I was just thinking.”

Blair opens the passenger door to Vera’s Porsche.

“I don’t need your help,” Hunter says.

I reach for his arm.

“Son, you’re not hearing me.”

I release him and take a step back.

“You’re being so stubborn,” Blair says, hooking her arm around his.

Hunter seems okay with her help, so I trail closely behind them into the house.

“Stop,” he says, shaking off Blair’s hold as we pass the kitchen.

“Welcome home, Mr. Morrison.” Alice delivers a sparkling smile like she didn’t just blow my fucking mind.

“Smells amazing. What’s for lunch?” He shuffles his feet into the kitchen and sits at the island while she cuts herbs.

“It’s not lunch. It’s rosemary for my next loaf of sourdough bread. I thought you’d be home closer to dinner. I’ll get started on lunch right away.” She winks at him, and he gobbles it up with his shit-eating grin.

“My father will have a salad for lunch with chicken or fish. No more red meat,” Blair instructs, while handing him a glass of water.

He frowns at the water and then at her, but she returns an overly sweet smile.

I, on the other hand, keep my attention glued to Alice, but she doesn’t return the slightest glance. It’s as if I’m not in the room .

“Red meat my ass,” Hunter says. “That’s bullshit. It’s not the red meat that’s trying to kill me.”

“Then what is it?” Blair crosses her arms over her chest while leaning against the counter next to him.

“Stress.”

Blair scoffs. “Stress? What stress? You have people waiting on you hand and foot. If you wanted to stop working today, you’d never want for anything the rest of your life.”

“And you get your dick sucked once a week,” Vera says, floating into the kitchen with a sly grin before hugging the back of Hunter.

“Gross, Mom!” Blair scrunches her face.

Hunter looks at me as if to … gloat? I’m not sure. When I return my attention to Alice, she doesn’t flinch.

Head down.

Hands steadily chopping the rosemary.

“I’d rather die from choking on a piece of steak than eat chicken and fish the rest of my life.”

“Calm down, darling. You’ll give yourself another heart attack,” Vera takes his hand.

He stands. “You are going to suck my dick?”

“Stop!” Blair covers her ears.

Finally, Alice’s lips lift into a tiny grin, but she doesn’t look up.

When Vera and Hunter disappear around the corner, Blair drops her hands to her sides. “Let’s move out tonight and just elope.”

Before I can say anything, not that I have anything to say, she flips her hair over her shoulder and pivots. “I have to call Alison about the bridal shower this weekend.”

When it’s just the two of us, I take the knife from Alice .

She jerks her head up. “What are you doing?”

I take her hand and lead her to the back door.

“Murphy—”

“Shh.” I pull her out the door and past the gardens to the guesthouse.

As soon as we’re inside her sliding door, I release her hand and pace the room, massaging my temples. “You have a child?”

She’s much calmer than I am. Too calm. Easing onto the barstool at the counter, she nods. Then she crosses her legs and folds her hands over her knee, slowly bouncing her foot in those strappy wedge heels that Hunter loves.

“How? When? Why aren’t you raising him?” I rapid-fire questions without stopping my pacing.

“Because his father drowned in a car accident, and his mother ended up in a mental hospital.”

I halt. “Alice, you had a child when we were together?” That’s why she had to go back. She left her child behind. “I’m so,” I shake my head. “I’m so sorry.”

She returns a smile that’s a little sad, but not hopeless. “He seems happy. Good parents. Sisters. He plays soccer, and he likes theater.”

The pieces of the puzzle move into place. “You didn’t meet Callen at your nephew’s soccer game. You met him at your son’s soccer game.”

Alice smiles and nods.

“Does he know he’s adopted?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know because I’ve never talked to him or his parents.

They gave the adoption agency permission to share their information with me if I ever wanted to contact them.

But my parents and I didn’t give permission for my information to be shared with them for obvious reasons.

Who wants to find out the mother of their child was in a mental hospital? ”

“So you just,” I frown because it’s heartbreaking, “go to his games and plays? You watch him from a distance, but you’ve never spoken to him?”

“All I want is for him to be happy, and he looks really happy. I don’t want to disrupt his life because it seems like a good one. But,” she bites her lip and tears up, while still managing a smile, “I like seeing him. It makes me feel like his guardian angel. And that’s what mothers are. Right?”

“He must have been really young. How old was he when Chris died?”

Her eyes narrow into tiny slits. “He wasn’t born yet. I was pregnant when Chris died, but I didn’t know it yet.”

“He died. A month later, I rented a lovely little house for two weeks in Minneapolis.”

“Alice,” I whisper, slowly shaking my head, trying to make sense of everything, “how do you know he’s Chris’s son?”

Her bobbing leg stills, spine straightens. “B-because he is.”

“But how do you know?”

She shakes her head a half dozen times. “Because he has dark hair like Chris and … and …” She ghosts the pads of her fingers along her cheeks. “He has freckles like Chris had when he was a young boy.”

I blink. It’s all I can do because the rest of my body feels immovable.

“Alice?”

Her wide-eyed gaze shoots to mine .

“I have brown hair.”

“But—”

“And I had freckles when I was younger.”

Her eyes redden and she quickly blots the corners while clearing her throat. “It doesn’t matter,” she whispers. “I wasn’t well, Murphy.”

“It doesn’t matter ?” My jaw drops.

Alice shakes her head, averting her gaze.

“Alice, that boy could be mine, and your reaction is it doesn’t matter ? Well, it sure as hell matters to me!”

She winces. “Don’t do this,” she whispers. “You don’t know what I went through.”

“Do what? Care that I might have a child out there who doesn’t know I exist? How can you not know? Didn’t they do an ultrasound?”

She looks at me, and I feel the pain in her eyes, but it does nothing to temper my anger. “They did, but not until it was later, which made it harder to pinpoint the date of conception. But I just knew.”

“You knew it had to be his? Were you having sex every fucking day like we were?” I hate how harsh and insensitive my words sound, but I haven’t had time to process this like she has.

“We weren’t real,” she mumbles.

“Alice,” I drag a hand through my hair and grunt a laugh, “either you’re better or you need to go back into treatment.

We were real, and you damn well know it.

Stop bullshitting me. That boy you follow, the one for whom you want to move to Edina?

He could be my child. That’s pretty fucking real.

So don’t act like it can matter to you, but it’s not supposed to matter to me.

” I start to say more. Lord knows there is so much to say, but I bite my tongue and leave before I say something I can’t take back.

She’s right. I don’t know what she went through. I wasn’t there. And I hate no one in particular for the awful fucking truth.