Grant eased the chair away from the table and sat across from his daughter. The place settings were perpendicular to each other. The commander casually tried to shift the silverware to his side of the table without making a fuss of it.

“You planning on interrogating me?” she asked.

“That’s the furthest thing from my mind.”

He motioned to a passing waiter, desperate for a pot of tea to calm him. He would also have taken any advice the server had on how to break the ice with a daughter he hadn’t seen since they’d buried her mother the year before.

Rachel certainly didn’t seem interested in the melting process.

“So why exactly are we here?” she asked.

“I think Everett was just trying to do something nice.”

“By pulling a Brother Grant double switch?”

“I told him it was wrong to lure you here under false pretenses. He said you would never show up if you thought you were meeting me instead of him.”

“He wasn’t wrong,” Rachel responded.

Rachel had remained on speaking terms with Everett since things had taken a bad turn. He wasn’t surprised; Everett had always been in her life. But as a confirmed bachelor (“You know Allison was always the one for me,” his brother would gleefully rib Grant), Everett lectured all over the world and as a result was gone for months at a time. When he’d return to the UK, Everett would visit Rachel first thing, enthrall her with stories, and bestow gifts upon her from faraway lands, often saying Rachel was “the closest thing to a daughter that I will ever have.” Grant never begrudged the relationship—all he cared about was that her uncle made Rachel happy and laugh.

“I apologize for not calling directly,” he said. “My coming over here was sudden.”

“The priest who was murdered at Saint Pat’s.”

Grant gave her a solemn nod. “What else did Everett tell you?”

“That’s it. Don’t worry, Dad. I’m not writing a story about it.”

“I thought you covered crime for your paper.”

“I’ve moved on to Sunday feature pieces. I was going to do one but passed my notes on to a colleague when I heard you were involved.”

Grant suppressed a wince. “What sort of feature?”

“Murder in the church; tying it into religious fanaticism. But I didn’t want to step on your toes or try to curry some familial favor.”

He took a chance and leaned forward, desperate to engage with his daughter. “The last thing I would want is to come between you and your work.”

“And this way that won’t happen,” she responded, firmly enough that Grant could feel the door slam between them.

“What do you want from me, Rach?” he asked, using the nickname he always thought of as a term of endearment.