And he had that overheard conversation. He told himself it was just—just natural curiosity. And maybe it would be good if he did something...different.

And he’d never been to Cork, after all.

He looked up at Aengus, and Aengus looked mildly back.

“Could you take me to a train station?”

Chapter Ten

They called them the “Gwynns Alumni Strip Poker Nights,” but there were only the three of them, and they never played poker. Though Genni did sometimes take her top off, but that was just the way she was, and Theo hardly noticed it by now.

Genevieve Jones, resplendent in a French lace brassiere, was still a stone-cold bitch, and he still loved her to death. When he was younger and their mothers arranged playdates (while drinking prosecco and complaining about everything), he thought he’d be all right with marrying her someday.

That, obviously, did not happen—their disastrous prom night encounter made sure of it. And she deserved far more than the half-life he would have given her. But he still knew he would never be able to live without her.

She sat close to the fire, the tanned skin of her torso glowing in the light, body just a little gentler with motherhood and age. Her hair, still in the same flapper cut, was deep black, and fine particles of shimmer on her cheeks picked up the wavering firelight. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever known. She made a lot of really dreadful faces. She was wonderful.

“Pass me that, would you?”

She held out an imperious hand, and he refilled her glass and his own from the pitcher of Manhattans. The only sound out of Phil across from her was the turning of a page and a contented sigh. Phil’s large frame, athletic despite his academic pursuits, fit snugly into his chair, and long fingers held a slim volume, and he had neatly removed his shoes, merino wool socks covering his shapely feet.

During college Genni had married Phillippe Dumont, who’d inherited quite a lot from his mother but was lucky enough not to inherit her tendency to choose rich older paramours to marry and then wait, with not a lot of patience, for them to die off. His father was the first of these, an Algerian-born Frenchman, and Phil had maybe always wondered what kind of man he had been. His mother had never allowed him to know.

When Genni and Phil married, they married for love—both children with complicated and generally disliked parents, they knew what it meant to need affection. To need someone to share affection with.

That wasn’t, of course, the story they told. By now their extended circle (and maybe half of Baltimore) had heard about the “desperate one-night, three European countries affair, which they just had to keep going, darling.” But Theo knew them best. They were starved for love, and they gave it to each other unreservedly. When they came home from that brief trip together, they were inseparable.