“Eat your breakfast,” Finch tells me, returning again with a high-piled plate of his own, “and stop trying to boss everyone else around. This is Tara’s town, baby. She knows what she’s doing.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I reply. But there’s something about the way Tara sends an annoyed glance my way that suggests she doesn’t believe me.
I wonder if I’ll ever stop having issues with recalcitrant Donovans.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
LUCA
After breakfast, and with Darla’s permission, Tara invites me to walk in the yard with her. “It’s quite safe,” she adds, a hint of acerbity in her tone, “and I have something I’d like to discuss.”
“Business this early?” Finch groans.
“Not exactly,” Tara says. “And you can come too, Howie.”
I crook a finger at Carlucci once I’m standing, which I do without Finch’s help and only slightly regret as far as the pain goes, and he shadows us from a distance.
Tara waves us out before her into the walled yard, and then I hear her say, “Stay here, please, Mr. Carlucci.”
I turn to see Carlucci looking uncertainly at me.
“We have the entire block under guard,” Tara tells me. “I’d like to speak with you in private. We’re quite safe out here, unless the IFF decides to send a plane over and parachute in.”
“Drone strike?” Finch ponders.
“Then your bodyguard wouldn’t be able to protect you anyway,” Tara tells him, “and even if therewasa drone strike, my guards would warn us well beforehand; they have radar and remote radio interception. Nor can anyone eavesdrop on our conversation, because we have disruptors in place. Any other problems I can address for you?”
“Alright,” I say, because I can see she means to have her way. Under the leafy, abundant trees, we’ll make a difficult target anyway, and I’m enjoying the warm morning sun on my back. “Stay there, Carlucci.”
The yard is not enormous by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s large enough to do an ambling circuit, and that’s what I do. Darla might have warned me to take it easy, but I know my body, and I know what it needs right now is to move.
Finch stops by one of the sturdier trees, looking up into its branches. “Remember when Róisín got stuck up here?” he asks Tara, naming their remaining sister, the one who went off chasing God and redemption in a closed order of nuns.
Personally, I’ve always found Róisín a fascinating character in the Donovan family.
“Mom made us all leave her up there until she figured out a way down,” Tara says with a grin. “In retrospect, a little cruel, perhaps.”
“Róisín figured it out, though,” Finch says.
“And never went up there again,” Tara continues, “which I’m not sure was actually the point of Mom’s lesson.”
“Maybe,” Finch says, still looking up. He tests his weight on the lowest branch and then, before I can call out to stop him, swings up onto it.
“Get down!” I snap, but Finch just laughs and turns around to sit on the branch.
“I used to live up here, honey,” he says, kicking his legs. “Didn’t I, Tara?”
“Howie was very adept at climbing up and down,” she assures me, although she adds, “When he was six, of course.”
“Age ain’t nothing but a number,” Finch retorts, and begins to climb higher. “Talk among yourselves,” he calls down as the plush foliage covers him. The shaking of the leaves is the only clue I have about his location.
“Finch!” I call again, but Tara puts a hand on my arm.
“He’ll be fine,” she says with a smile. “He really did spend a lot of time in that tree growing up. Perhaps, of all of us, he was the one who learned the lesson Mom really was trying to teach us.”
If there’s one thing I don’t like much about the Irish, it’s their propensity to talk in metaphor and myth. “If he falls out of that tree—”
“Hewon’t. Besides, Luca, he’s giving us space.”
