McKettrick's Heart

“Let Molly do it, Florence,” Psyche said.

Molly gripped Lucas a little more tightly and made for the door.

Florence stepped out of the way, but only at the last possible moment.

“She’s a stranger,” the older woman insisted, once Molly was well inside and she’d closed the heavy door. “Whether you paid a bunch of fancy detectives to investigate her or not!”

“Nonsense,” Psyche replied, sitting down at the table and reaching for her lemonade with an unsteady hand. “She’s Lucas’s mother.”

“You’re Lucas’s mother,” Florence said staunchly.

Psyche shook her head. “I’m a ghost,” she said pensively. The lemonade was ice-cold and struck just the right balance between sour and sweet. She relished the taste, though she knew it would probably make her violently ill later on. Almost everything she ate or drank did. Calling a halt to the chemotherapy hadn’t relieved her of the nausea.

“Don’t you talk that way!” Florence scolded, shaking a finger under Psyche’s nose the way she had when she was a little girl, tracking in mud from the backyard or fidgeting in church.

“Why not?” Psyche asked, nibbling at a corner of a little sandwich with smoked salmon and cream cheese inside. “It’s the truth.”

“I’ve never heard such silliness!” Florence ranted on. “You’re as alive as I am. As alive as anybody.”

“No, I’m not. It’s strange, Florence, but the grass seems greener than I’ve ever seen it, and the sky is bluer. I hear every bird, every bug rubbing its wings together in the flower beds. And yet there’s something—remote about it all. As though I’m…receding into another place.”

Florence, reaching for a sandwich of her own, suddenly bent her head, curved her always-straight shoulders inward and began to sob.

“I can’t bear it,” she cried. “Why isn’t it me that’s dying? I’ve lived my life—”

“Shh,” Psyche told her, rising to stand beside Florence, put an arm around her and kissed the top of her head. “It’s all right.”

“It isn’t all right!” Florence fumed. “It’s a damn shame, is what it is! It isn’t fair!”

“You were the one who told me life isn’t fair, so we oughtn’t to expect it to be,” Psyche soothed. “Remember?”

Florence looked up, her beloved face ravaged by grief. “You’re like my own child, my own baby girl… .”

Psyche’s heart turned over. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

“Look at me, carrying on!” Florence boomed, straightening her shoulders, picking up a table napkin and swabbing at her tears. “You need me to be strong, and I’m falling apart like an old potato sack with its seams bursting.”

“It’s all right,” Psyche repeated.

The door opened again, and Molly stood on the threshold, looking as though she didn’t know whether to join Psyche and Florence or dash back into the house.

“Come and sit down, Molly,” Psyche said. “I want to hear all about your walk with Lucas.”

Chapter 4

INDEPENDENCE DAY.

Ironic, Molly thought as she joined Psyche at the table on the front porch. She was about to give up her personal freedom, her life in L.A. and, essentially, her career, for the sake of one little boy. Once the various documents were signed, she would be a captive, an emotional hostage, for all practical intents and purposes—to a child.

Lucas’s fate would be interwoven with her own—forever.

If his heart was broken, hers would be, too.

Was it worth it?

Molly had absolutely no doubt that it was, but neither did she suffer any illusions that the process would be easy and pain free. Joy, in her experience, was a Siamese twin to sorrow, conjoined at the heart.

She drew back a wicker chair with a bright floral cushion. “I saw Keegan while I was out,” she said. “He asked about you.”

Psyche smiled. “Keegan,” she repeated somewhat wistfully, as though by saying his name she’d conjured him and could see him clearly in the near distance.

Florence, her face wet, immediately fled into the house, muttering to herself and scrubbing at her eyes with a cotton handkerchief as she went.

“Are you in love with him?” Molly asked, and then was horrified, because she hadn’t consciously planned to ask the question. She didn’t pry. She was not, after all, a nosy person, nor was she impulsive. Indeed, she prided herself on her practicality, abhorred denial, went into things with her eyes wide open—her affair with Thayer being the one notable exception.

Now she awaited Psyche’s reply with a strange sense of urgency, braced, at one and the same time, for a stinging rebuke.

Psyche was silent for an interval, her expression still softly distant, almost diffused. Finally she shook her head. “No,” she said, and Molly marveled at the depth and swiftness of her own relief. “Keegan and I were childhood sweethearts… .” She paused to sigh. “Such an old-fashioned term, ‘childhood sweethearts’—don’t you think?”

Molly wanted to avert her gaze, but she didn’t allow herself to do so, because it would have been cowardly. “I think Keegan loves you,” she said, helpless against this strange and unwise part of herself suddenly rising up to say things she had no right or intention to utter. And she chafed at the stab of helpless sorrow her own words wrought in her.

Keegan hated her, and the feeling was mutual.

Why, then, did she care whether or not he loved Psyche?

More to the point, how could she stop caring?

“He does love me,” Psyche agreed. “He’s fiercely protective of anyone he cares about—all the McKettricks are.”

A lump rose in Molly’s throat and swelled there. She swallowed, determined not to break down.

Something moved in Psyche’s eyes—compassion, perhaps. She reached out, touched Molly’s hand.

“Keegan and I are friends,” Psyche went on gently. “Nothing more.”

“I’m not so sure he would agree,” Molly said. “Psyche, I—”

“What?”

“I’m so sorry—about what happened between Thayer and me, I mean.”

“Water under the bridge,” Psyche said. “When Thayer died I was—in some ways—relieved. It’s horrible to admit that, and maybe I’m being punished for it now. Maybe that’s why I have to let go, leave Lucas—”

“No,” Molly protested weakly. As much as she wanted to raise Lucas, the cost was simply too great.

Psyche smiled, but her eyes were misty, and her chin trembled ever so slightly. “Isn’t it remarkable, Molly? Your being here, I mean? I actually think we would have been friends if we’d met under other circumstances.”

Molly gulped. “I would do anything to go back and change things.”