Seeing her bag sitting there, deflated and waiting, ticked off a punch of anxiety. She wasn’t ready for any more change. Her house held horrifying memories she hadn’t processed. Liam had inherited Baines’s house and offered it to her, but she didn’t want it because no amount of bleach would wash away the stench of death there. Then there were the job and money issues, and Kennedy’s anger, which she hadn’t tackled yet.

Gabby wasn’t great at begging, but she would. Unless he needed her out. For all she knew, she’d finally trampled over his feelings for her, and he wanted to move on. She wanted him to be happy, but . . . Yeah, she wasn’t ready to deal with that issue yet either. She was going to need a lot of therapy.

“New York trip,” he said.

“Huh?”

He exhaled as he shot her a why isn’t she getting this? look of frustration. “It’s time to bring Kennedy home. Well, I guess that’s your decision, but it’s midterm break, and you got her a therapist, but we haven’t done a great job of spending time with her and answering her questions. Not with everything else going on.”

Gabby’s body went into a defensive clench. She agreed . . . mostly, but danger still lurked, and Faith was a huge question mark, even with the news of her being under investigation in the Young case again. The idea of dumping Kennedy into the middle of that? No.

“She hates me right now. Not teen hate. Real hate,” Gabby said, stating the obvious.

“She doesn’t. Even if she did, she can hate you from her bedroom upstairs, while engaging in therapy and family dinners.”

He made his solutions sound simple. He didn’t know so much of what had happened behind the scenes or what she’d had to concede to save him. Gabby wasn’t sure how she’d live with letting Jessa’s death go unpunished, but she would. That deal with Retta wouldn’t implode because of her.

“Look, you decide about the coming-home part, but I would like to see her,” he said.

“You have a lot of work mess to untangle.” But he sounded so . . . normal. She knew what he’d discovered about Baines weighed on him. She’d caught Liam searching for information on the fire, as if he wanted to find some tiny piece of information to contradict her beliefs on Baines’s guilt.

“I’m taking one issue at a time,” he said. “The easiest one is the money. Baines took it to go after Earl. That’s clear now. There’s a list of unforgivable things he did, but stealing to fill his own pockets and screw me and the business out of income isn’t one.”