I shook my head. “No. I don’t remember much from back then.” I’d blanked a lot out—whether that was my subconscious acting defensively or whether I’d done it purposely, I couldn’t say. And Aidan had let me stop going to the kid shrink he’d sent me to when I’d threatened to run away again.
“Well, she did. Her name was Aoife Donahue.” She ran a hand over her face. “Me. We changed our names to Keegan, her maiden name, after my stepfather died.”
For a second, I felt curiously light-headed. “You knew my mother?”
She shot me a look, and I could see her features were tense with wariness. “I did.”
“You knew me?”
“No. I was two when you…” She pressed her face to her knees. “Fiona spent half her time thinking you were dead, and the other half hoping you were lost and would be found again. Mom thought you were dead though, and she told me we just had to humor her.”
A harsh laugh escaped me. “Deluded as ever. She didn’t change at all.” I felt tense and on edge, and for the first time since I’d known Aoife, I had no desire to sit close to her. “We both won the lottery when it came to parents, Aoife,” I told her, my tone grim as I climbed to my feet.
Feeling her eyes on me, I didn’t retreat far. Just as near as the closest drink tray. Pouring myself two fingers of whiskey, I tipped it back, then headed over to the window at the foot of the room.
Leaning against the wall as I stared out at a multi-million dollar view and saw bupkis, I asked, “Why did you bring this up?”
“Because I’m going to ask you to look into mom’s death, and by doing that, you may see the truth anyway. I’d prefer you not to think I was lying to you.”
That jerked me from the dank pit where I housed memories of my early childhood. “What? Why?”
Aoife reached up to rub her forehead, and it was then I saw how frail she looked. She’d lost a lot of weight over the last few months, but it didn’t suit her. She was born to be ripe and curvy, and instead, she just looked emaciated. That, more than anything, tore my heart enough to return to her side.
Taking a seat on the coffee table in front of her, I prompted, “Aoife? What is it?”
She rolled her head on her knees. “I-I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.”
“About what?”
“The accident she was in.”
“It was a car crash, wasn’t it?”
She nodded.
It wasn’t hard to read between the lines, not when, in my world, the worst-case scenario often came to pass. “You think your father had something to do with it?”
“I-I’d like to think not.” She swallowed.
A harsh laugh escaped me. “Jesus, Aoife. You wouldn’t be asking me to do this if you more than ‘thought’ it was a possibility.”
“I’m probably just being paranoid,” she admitted huskily, her shoulders rounding as she tucked her hands between her knees.
Aoife was the last woman to be taken on flights of fancy, and fuck, did I mention that I hated it when she avoided my eyes? “You think he was tying up loose ends?”
“Sounds like something from a Tom Clancy book, doesn’t it?” she whispered, then she lifted a hand and rubbed her eyes. “Forget I mentioned it.”
“But mention it you did.” I reached for her hand and gripped it in my own. “Why didn’t you mention you knew me before?”
It was an abrupt topic change, but I was curious.
“It truly never came up. Until you proposed, I only thought we were hooking up, and after…” She shrugged. “It didn’t seem important.”
“I think we need to have a discussion on what is and isn’t important.”
She cut me a look. “Same could be said for you, Finn. Why didn’t you tell me how you’d met the O'Donnellys?”
“Because that’s a very, very dark part of my past, Aoife.”