Page 119 of All the way home

She dropped her purse onto its hook and called out, “Hello?”

“Living room,” Mum called back.

Rena found her on the couch with her legs stretched out in front of her, a glass of wine in one hand, e-reader in the other. Her short, no-nonsense graying hair was messier than usual, thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses glinting in the candlelight as she lifted her head.

“I thought you were going out.” Rena frowned, one hand on the doorjamb.

“I was.” She sighed and waved a hand. “But they canceled the whole dinner, so here I am.”

“Here you are,” Rena echoed, skin prickling. Scanning the room, she turned to go down the hallway, calling over her shoulder, “Where’s Kieran?”

“Wasn’t he with you?”

Rena stopped. “Pardon?”

“Didn’t he go with you tonight?”

“No,” Rena said slowly, turning on her heel. “He didn’t come up at all?”

“Not since I’ve been here,” Mum said, then sighed. Her wineglass clinked as she set it down on the coffee table.

“I’m going to go check on him,” Rena said, more to herself than to Mum.

The moment she opened the basement door, Sully was on her, sniffing at her fingers with a high-pitched whine.

“What’s wrong?” Rena murmured, bending over to scratch between his ears. “What’s the matter with you, huh? Got the jitters?”

Bumping against her legs, Sully turned past her and sat down at Kieran’s closed door, batting at the wood with one paw.

Rena’s heart squeezed tight as she turned the handle.

Inside, Kieran’s computer was on, open to a Google document, cursor blinking. Rena moved past it, fingers tingling.

The shower was running, the fan’s low hum audible through the closed door.

Tentatively, heart hammering, Rena knocked. “Kieran?”

He didn’t answer.

Somehow, right then in the wing-flicker space between heartbeats, blood like ice, Rena knew it wasn’t because he didn’t want to.

It was because he couldn’t.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Zach

“Okay.” Zach swallows. “Airport, and?”

Grinning, voice lowered, Kieran murmurs, “And then I bother him with a ‘horrifying opening strategy’ until he agrees to hang out with me.”

Zach nods along, an electric current running underneath his skin. “Uh-huh, and then what?”

“Yeah, Kieran,” Lucas butts in as he returns to the gate, sidestepping them and sinking into his seat. “And then what?”

Kieran’s eyes dart up to his, flashing with something like a warning.

Watching Kieran is like studying a painting for the second time—Zach keeps noticing things that were always there but are only obvious now that he’s seeing him from a different angle. Kieran has a good jaw. Zach doesn’t really know what makes a jaw good, but Kieran’s is. And he has a small birthmark on the side of his neck.