He tossed his shabby work boots into the trash before heading on to their last stop, a barbershop, to get Liam a haircut and a proper shave. Women weren’t welcome in the barbershop, so she stepped outside to wait for them. It was a relief to get away from Liam’s bawdy humor and relentless criticism of her. She bought a pretzel to feed the pigeons and tried to count her blessings.

Twenty minutes later, Liam and Patrick emerged from the barber. Gwen turned away from the pigeons to assess the results, and her heart nearly stopped.

With his new clothes and neatly groomed hair, Liam looked so much like her father that a bittersweet ache bloomed in her chest. What sort of man would Liam have become if Mick Malone hadn’t snatched him as a child and turned him into a barbarian? If Crocket Malone hadn’t raised him to be full of bile and resentment? What happened to Liam wasn’t fair, and she needed to be more patient with his boorishness. No matter what it took, she would honor her father’s memory by ensuring that Liam had a decent shot at the world.

The friendship Patrick had formed with Liam didn’t preclude him from occasionally wanting to strangle the man, and it was entirely because of the atrocious way Liam treated Gwen.

They’d been on the Queens campus for almost a week, during which Gwen was consistently patient and compassionate toward her brother, yet Liam went out of his way to goad her, constantly needling her or rolling his eyes when she tried to help him.

His behavior baffled Gwen, but Patrick understood. Liam’s pride was stung as he was forced to shed every aspect of his former life like an old snakeskin while trying to ape the manners of a world he held in contempt—but one that also secretly intimidated him.

With each of Liam’s digs, Gwen wilted a little more. During Patrick’s long afternoons tutoring Liam on business and investments, Gwen scrambled to find an excuse to escape the tension indoors and had decided to breathe new life into the scraggly horse pasture alongside the stable. Leave it to Gwen to see a patch of land and want to beautify it. She’d gone to a hardware store to buy supplies, and now she hoed, weeded, and worked on resurrecting the patch of Kentucky bluegrass.