Gwen considered the feast she had prepared for Patrick’s return. He had called from the train station to tell her he’d arrived back in the city and that she should expect a visit this evening. It gave her enough time to run to the Irish bakery a few blocks from campus and buy plenty of food because Patrick had been traveling all day and would be hungry. She spread an Irish lace tablecloth over the table, then filled the sideboard with a platter of corned beef sandwiches, cranberry scones, and a jar of clotted cream. She didn’t know if he would prefer the spiced apple cake or the almond cake, so she’d bought both. She arranged a few peony blossoms snipped from her garden to complete the table. Maybe it was a little much, but she wanted Patrick to know that she would celebrate his Irish heritage.
She had barely finished arranging the flowers when he knocked on her front door, and she hurried to let him in.
The shapes of two men were visible through the cut-glass leaded window in the door, and one of them was Patrick. The smile fled her face when she recognized the other. Liam Malone stood beside Patrick on the front stoop, looking like death warmed over.
“You look awful,” she said.
Liam’s mouth twisted. “Thanks. Can we come in?”
She glanced at Patrick, whose face was uneasy, but he met her eyes squarely and nodded. She clenched the doorknob as the implications of Liam’s presence sank in. Patrick wouldn’t have brought Liam here unless it portended something big.
She led the way to the parlor. “Are you hungry?” she asked, even though she suddenly felt too ill to eat a single morsel.
Patrick shook his head, and Liam plodded slowly into her parlor, where he lowered himself into the wingback chair without being invited. Patrick took the chair beside him and gestured for her to sit on the sofa across from them.
She remained standing. Anxiety made it impossible to sit. Liam was big and intimidating and seemed out of place in her parlor. His pallor made him look ill but didn’t diminish his toughness, and he frightened her.
“Tell me what you’ve learned,” she managed to ask Patrick in a calm tone.
“There’s no easy way to say this,” Patrick said. “Somebody attacked Liam last week. There were three of them, and they stabbed him in the gut. They meant to kill him.”
She sucked in a startled breath. “How do you know? Were you there?”
He held up his right hand. “I broke two fingers during the brawl. Yes, I was there, and it was an unprovoked attack. The ringleader came from New York and was promised a small fortune to take him out.”
Her gaze flew to Liam. Someone like him surely had a lot of enemies. The report submitted by Oscar’s detectives contained a long history of rabble-rousing likely to provoke resentment.
Liam hadn’t moved a muscle from where he sat, but he’d been watching her intently from the moment he walked inside. “I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot the other day,” he said to her. “I gave your ring back to Patrick. I shouldn’t have shamed you out of it.” He glanced at her bare hand. “Where is it?”
She covered her hand. The decision to stop wearing her wedding ring was a deeply personal choice she refused to discuss with a stranger. But Liam probably wasn’t a stranger, and the prospect made her queasy. He looked so much like her father it was scary.
The silence lengthened as Patrick looked between her and Liam.
Finally, Liam spoke. “My mother confessed that Mick Malone brought me to her when I was three years old. That makes me your brother.”
The news was not entirely unexpected but still drove the breath from her lungs. “Oh,” she said.
It was such a puny word and couldn’t begin to encompass the whirlwind of emotions triggered inside. This rough, hard-eyed man with a bitter heart wasn’t who she’d imagined her brother would be.
She clasped her hands to stop them from trembling. She couldn’t assume anything, and they’d always had a plan to identify her brother should someone come forward to assume his identity. They’d never told the police or the newspapers. They needed to keep this tiny detail private so it could never be faked. It was time to use it.
“Take off your right shoe,” she said.
“What?”
“Your shoe. If you’re really my brother, I’ll be able to tell.”
She eyed his shoes. They were battered and worn at the heel, the leather so scuffed it was beginning to split. He didn’t lean over, merely used his left foot to nudge the right shoe off.
“And the sock,” she said.
He gingerly leaned over to insert a finger into the top of his sock and tug it off. His foot looked shockingly white compared to his bronzed face, but he was a man who worked in the sun and had the weathered skin to prove it. His foot looked as pale as her own.
She pushed a footstool toward him. “Put your foot up on the footstool, please.”
He did, and she knelt to examine the bottom of his foot. According to her father, he’d taken Willy to the river to teach him to swim shortly before the kidnapping. The boy had been running along the shoreline and stepped on an oyster shell that cut the bottom of his foot so deeply it required ten stitches.
She held a lantern close. A silvery scar ran along the arch of Liam’s foot. It was an old scar, about three inches long, and impossible to fake.
