“Already checked,” Mary Beth bit out. “Damn it. He’s with her and my kids! I just know it.”
“You don’t know that,” Shannon said, cringing inwardly at the false ring in her words. Dear God, would he actually bring his kids into the middle of this mess?
“Of course I do. Just like you do and everyone at the fire station and this stinking town does, too. Even the kids. Oh, shit…This is so horrible…so wrong!” Her voice caught on a sob.
Shannon bit back angry advice she knew Mary Beth wouldn’t listen to. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything.” Mary Beth started to cry softly. Once she’d been Shannon’s best friend. Now she was a stranger.
“I don’t know why I called you,” Mary Beth choked out. “Probably because you called me earlier…I thought you knew something or wanted to talk…Oh, shit. This was obviously a mistake—”
“I’m sorry, Mary Beth. I know this is hard, but I didn’t call you…”
The microwave timer dinged softly.
“Of course you did. I have it on my caller ID. What the hell game are you playing?”
“But I didn’t—”
“Oh, God, Shannon. You’re just like the rest of them, maybe worse! Stop lying to me. You and your sick brothers. I never should have married Robert. Never!” She slammed down the receiver, cutting their connection.
Shannon’s spine was stiff. You’re just like the rest of them, Shannon, maybe worse. Mary Beth’s words echoed through her head and she gritted her teeth. There were other accusations her sister-in-law hadn’t said but remained forever between them: hateful, angry accusations that simmered in the air. Accusations that haunted her life.
“You killed Ryan, I know you did,” Mary Beth had told her once, shortly after the trial, when Shannon had run into her at the deli counter of the local grocery store. “No matter how that lawyer twisted my words on the witness stand, no matter what the judge decided, you killed him just as surely as if you’d dumped gasoline all over him and lit the match.”
Shaken by Mary Beth’s rage and fury, Shannon had managed to stand firm. “I didn’t kill my husband,” she denied for the hundredth time while she felt other people staring, women pushing half-filled carts with toddlers in the seats of the baskets, the shocked clerk standing on the other side of the salad case, a scoop of pasta salad stopped halfway to the plastic container in her other hand.
Mary Beth found the decency to lower her voice. “I’m your sister-in-law, Shannon, but that’s it, okay? I’m not your friend. Not anymore.” And with that she’d pushed her empty cart with its wobbling wheel toward the produce section.
Shannon had been mortified and miserable.
Now she closed her eyes and counted slowly to ten, listening to the wall clock ticking over the soft hum of the refrigerator’s motor. “What a disaster,” she whispered as she thought about her brothers. All with their Black Irish good looks, thick, ebony-colored hair, glittering blue eyes filled, as her mother had often said, “with the very devil himself.” Their cheekbones were high, their eyebrows thick, their jaws looking as if they’d been squared off by a carpenter, then creased at the chin. They’d all been blessed with impossibly white teeth that slashed easily into heart-stopping smiles. But along with those easy, sexy grins and the gleam in their clear blue gazes came trouble. Not only was she the lone female of what their father, Patrick, had often referred to as “his litter,” she also didn’t resemble her siblings all that much. To a one, the boys took after strapping, outspoken, fire-fighting Patrick while Shannon had a petite frame, auburn curls that refused to be tamed and green eyes that were identical to her mother’s. The difference was that while her mother, Maureen, had been frail all her life, nearly dying in childbirth with the twins, Shannon was headstrong and athletic like her brothers. Maureen had been a God-fearing woman who prided herself on sticking to a strict code of Catholic ethics and often told her children the Devil was just over their shoulders. All the boys, except maybe for Oliver, had ignored her dire warnings about sin and punishment. Shannon, much to her mother’s humiliation, had eagerly followed in the footsteps of her older brothers and nearly broken every one of her mother’s rules. Along with her poor mother’s heart. The worst had been, of course, getting pregnant before she was married.
Shannon felt the old tug on her heart when she remembered her father’s suddenly weary shoulders the night he learned about Shannon’s impending baby. He stood in the den, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth, leaning against the window casing, his back to her. But she saw his face in the reflection of the paned glass, his eyes turning into marbles of hatred in his suddenly florid face. “I’ll kill him,” he’d promised.
“No, Dad,” Shannon had whispered, holding tears at bay. “You won’t.”
“That lowlife bastard will marry you.”
“No way,” she’d insisted. “He doesn’t want me. Doesn’t want the baby and so I don’t want him. There’s not going to be a wedding.”
Her mother, ashen-faced, sat on an overstuffed wingback chair. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” she’d said on a weary sigh. “Shannon Mary Flannery, you will marry the father of my grandchild and you’ll do it quickly. I’ll call Father Timothy right now.”
“No!” If she’d ever been certain of anything in her life it was that she didn’t want to become the wife to the spineless man she’d thought she’d loved.
“Damned straight, you’ll get married,” her father grated. He strode across the carpet to stand behind his wife and place a big, calloused hand upon Maureen’s thin shoulder. “If I have to chase that boy down with a shotgun, he’s going to marry you.”
“That’s archaic,” Shannon argued, her spine stiffening. “I can raise the baby by myself.”
“Oh, for the love of Mary! That’s not an option.”
Her mother shot to her feet and some of the iron will that rarely showed itself in Maureen Flannery became apparent. She pointed an accusing finger at her only daughter and decreed, “I’ll speak to Father Timothy and Brendan’s mother and—”
“No! Keep her out of this. I’ll handle it!” Shannon’s cheeks burned. Tears started down her face. She nearly panicked at the thought of dealing with Brendan’s parents. They’d never liked her and this situation would only make things worse. Before she could say another word she felt her stomach roil, the hot taste of bile rise up her throat. It was as if the baby she was carrying could hear and understand and was protesting loudly.
She ran out of the room to the tiny bathroom tucked under the staircase and retched and retched. Spent and gasping, she ground her teeth, silently vowing she would do what was best for her child. She knew she couldn’t raise the baby herself. Not with her disapproving father and mother, certain the child had been conceived in sin. Not with a passel of brothers often considered immoral hellions even by their own mother. Not with the possibility of running into Brendan on the streets of Santa Lucia.
That night, in the tiny powder room, Shannon had swallowed hard, flushed the toilet and stared at her pale reflection in the mirror over the medicine cabinet. Outside the door her parents continued arguing, her father raging about “young bucks who can’t keep their peckers in their pants” and her mother going on and on about “the Flannery curse,” something Maureen constantly brought up when things didn’t go as planned. Shannon could practically visualize her mother sketching out a quick sign of the cross over her thin chest, just as she always did when she spoke of ill luck.