Maura McKinnon had won a scary battle with breast cancer and was now looking more fit than ever. She wasn’t anyone’s poor anything.

“Knock off the Irish-Catholic guilt trip. What’s really going on?”

“That’s why you’re such a good lawyer, Michael. You can read BS from a mile away. But you have been hard to pin down lately. You’ve missed two family dinners this month, and you weren’t at the last business breakfast for the pub. Your cousins and I are worried about you.”

He tapped his pen restlessly on the manila folder in front of him. She wasn’t wrong. He loved his big Irish family, but lately he’d felt suffocated by all the noise and chaos and questions. So many questions.

How are you, Mike?

Met anyone lately, Mike?

Isn’t that house getting lonely, Mike?

You know there’s more to life than just business, right, Mike?

They meant well. They loved him and wanted him to be happy. But they seemed to have decided as a group that it was time for him to “move on.” That after three years, he should be over losing his wife. That he couldn’t possibly be happy alone.

Except...he was happy. Or at least content. And that was enough right now. His law office might not be the thrill-a-minute drama of some fictional TV lawyer defending people in criminal court. But he was proud of the work his little one-man office did. Mom and Dad still hadn’t given up on convincing him to follow them to Albany, where Dad was raking in the big bucks as a lobbyist in the state capital. It seemed no one in his life wanted to accept that he was doing just fine.

“I don’t know what people want from me, Nana.” Mike raked his fingers through his hair, absently thinking to himself that he needed a haircut. “I’m tired of being everyone’s project. Find Mike a date. Find Mike a fancier job. Find Mike a way to be—” he raised his fingers to make air quotes “—old Mike again.”

His grandmother was quiet for a moment, her eyebrows gathering together.

“It’s been—”

He held his hand up. “Do not tell me how long it’s been since Becca was killed. I wake up every morning knowing exactly how long it’s been.” Thirty-five months and five days since the police came to his office with the news that left a gaping hole in his life—in his heart—that had never fully healed.

“I was trying to say it’s been hard for me to see you withdrawing from the family.” Nana’s eyes softened. “I understand what you’re saying about being a project, but it’s only because—”