Suddenly, despite all her other problems, Maggie’s concern was focused on that strange bit of brass hanging from its golden chain. “What is that?” she asked in a whisper.

Reeve let the medallion fall against his chest again. “I guess it’s a good luck charm,” he said, and that curious distance, tantamount to pain, was still visible in his eyes.

“Tell me about your brother,” Maggie ventured, guessing that Reeve’s brother and that odd talisman were somehow linked.

“Jamie and I were separated, years ago, on the trip out here from Dublin. I’ve been looking for him ever since.” Reeve rose, went back to his chair, and sank into it with a sigh that was almost forlorn. “I’ve hired detectives, gone everywhere I could think of myself—”

“But you never found him,” Maggie finished for him, saddened.

Reeve shook his head. His eyes were averted and his throat worked as he struggled to control some indefinable emotion.

“Elisabeth is his child?” Maggie pressed, though gently.

Reeve’s eyes swung to hers and he nodded. “The detectives found her, in Brisbane, in an orphanage. The people there told me that Elisabeth’s mother hadn’t been married to Jamie, though she’d left papers saying that he was the father of her child.”

Maggie had no doubt that Elisabeth was truly a McKenna; her aquamarine eyes were proof of that. “Why did this woman abandon Elisabeth?”

“She was sick,” Reeve replied on a distracted sigh. “According to the nuns at the orphanage, she died soon after she’d left Elisabeth with them.”

“Perhaps Elisabeth herself remembers something?”

Reeve looked at Maggie as though she were mad, but she knew that his annoyance was based in his deep disappointment at not finding his brother and not in anything she’d said or done. “Elisabeth was two at the time, and if she remembers anything, she can’t or won’t talk about it.”

Maggie didn’t ask if the little girl had been examined by a doctor; she knew this was something that a man as thorough as Reeve would not have overlooked. “Perhaps there was some trauma—”

Reeve nodded. “But what?” he demanded hoarsely. “What could steal away a child’s will to speak? And where was Jamie when all this was happening?”

Maggie looked down at her hands, not wanting to suggest the obvious: that death rather than choice might have separated Jamie McKenna from his child and the woman who had borne her.

“He isn’t dead,” Reeve said in a low voice that challenged Maggie’s secret suspicions. “If he were, I’d know it!”

Maggie was silent. She hoped that Reeve was right, that somewhere, somehow, Jamie McKenna was alive and well, waiting to be found.

“Are you hungry?” The question was so trivial, so ordinary, that it jolted Maggie out of her uncomfortable reflections.

“Yes, a little,” she answered honestly.