“No, no. Everything is fine.”

“Let me guess. She stormed off and won’t return your calls.”

“Something like that. Have you heard from her?”

“I haven’t seen or spoken to my daughter in weeks. By the way, thank you for the cruise. The Adriatic was amazing. You should take her sometime.”

The sudden urge to confess, to shake this venal woman from her self-absorbed life, was overwhelming, and the words spilled from his mouth.

“She’s gone, Siobhan. She left a note and walked out on me. I’m worried about her. She didn’t take her things—her phone, her computer, her wallet are all here.” As if that would explain it all.

And it did, enough at least that his mother-in-law reacted. “I’m on my way over,” she said, and hung up on him.

Oh, bollocks. All he needed was Siobhan wandering the house looking for clues. Looking in the corners, at the dust and secrets.

You’re an idiot, Ethan. Whyever did you tell her? That desperate, are we?

He poured himself a fresh cup of tea, looked around. Fuck cleaning up. So the place wasn’t pristine. Who cared? Siobhan would find a flaw, a fault, no matter what. They could scour the place top to bottom, have it Architectural Digest photo-shoot ready, and she’d still want to move a vase or find a small part of the counter with a smear.

Siobhan Healy—Shiv-awn, for the uninitiated, which she delighted in sharing, loudly—took pride in being different. Her friends, and some of her enemies, Sutton included, called her Shiv for short. She was Sutton’s opposite in every way. Looks: small and dark, Black Irish with her ebony hair liberally streaked with gray, and cobalt eyes, face pinched and mean. Temperament: brash and extroverted; Siobhan adored attention, good or bad. Speech: lowbrow; though she didn’t have an accent, she claimed she was from a Dublin slum and never hesitated to share the story of her continually upward journey.

She’d come to the United States and married a succession of men, each wealthier than the last. She was on husband four now, a meek-mannered man named Alan, who liked to make jokes, corny jokes—hey, we should go into business together, call ourselves...Ethan Alan. Ha, ha, ha, ha, get it? Ethan Alan—when he drank too much.

Ethan wasn’t sure how this woman could have created her daughter, often wondered about their storied past, but Siobhan and Sutton both refused to ever talk about her childhood, or the one-night stand sperm donor who was her father. He wasn’t, as Sutton said, one of the husbands. He was anonymous. Never around. Sutton had never met him.

Ethan found that wretchedly sad. His own parents had been kind, generous people, though he hadn’t understood them well, nor they him. They were both gone now. They’d died quietly and unobtrusively four months apart when he was twenty-two. He’d been quite upset, but not devastated. They’d sent him off to Mount St. Mary’s as a boarder when he was a wee lad, and he’d only seen them at breaks. Ethan had always been bookish; it was the school he attended that shaped his personality: cocky and wildly creative. It was a fine way to grow up, but Ethan wanted something different for his life. He’d always dreamed of a close-knit, exuberant household for his own family one day. Children running in the backyard, dogs playing and barking, a knockout wife, madly in love. Safe and stable.