“We’re going to go there?” Harlow knew for a fact she’d never been on a date that had shifted to such serious topics so quickly. And she certainly hadn’t come here expecting to talk about her mother.

More than that, she hadn’t expected to talk about her father. Because there was no way to talk about Gretchen Reynolds’s dysfunction and unhappiness without discussing the man who’d created nearly all of it.

Fender shrugged. “It’s an elephant. Might as well acknowledge it.”

“I thought that’s all we’ve been doing.”

“I don’t know. You’ve apologized for your mother’s behavior way too many times. And both of us know the lingering specter of what happened makes us a bad match. I’m not sure that qualifies as talking about it.”

He had a point, but Harlow couldn’t quite fight the sudden desire to crawl under the small table that sat between them. She’d always considered herself well able to deal with her family drama. She’d acknowledged her father’s choices and had firmly put them in the box of “not something I can control.”

So why was it suddenly so mortifying to have the box placed in her lap, as open as a well-worn book?

“I’ll go first,” Fender said. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it bothers me that my mother thought it was okay to do a married guy.”

“Oh.”

He shrugged, but where she’d have expected a layer of bravado, all she saw was open honesty. “Louisa Mills saved me. There’s no other way to say that. She picked me up out of my shit life as a kid and gave me a shiny new one. Gave me brothers. Even gave me a grandmother, though I’d have gladly given that one back this morning.”

“What?”

He grinned and waved it off. “Later. What I mean is that she changed my life. Every good thing that’s come to me was because she changed my path. So it’s humbling and upsetting to realize she’s human and made a shitty mistake that hurt people.” Fender stilled. “That hurt you.”

“My father did the hurting.”

“Yeah, well, he had to do it with someone.”

Or multiple someones, Harlow thought. “I guess. That’s certainly my mother’s problem. She’s so determined to lash out at someone, and the one she needs to yell and scream at is dead.”

“How’d he go?”

“Heart attack. About ten years ago. It was quick, you know? It happened in a matter of hours. One moment I had a father, and the next he was gone. There’s no preparing for that.”

“No, there isn’t.” Fender quietly agreed.

“And once it happens, it seems really terrible and awful to list their bad qualities. He wasn’t all bad.” Something fierce gripped her, rising up with all the force of a volcano. “I think that’s what bothers me the most. He wasn’t all bad. We used to eat chocolate ice cream together while watching TV. And he called me Pip which was short for Pipsqueak. And he bought my mother roses every Valentine’s Day. You could smell them for days. He wasn’t all bad.”

Fender reached over and took her hand across the small table that separated them. Callouses pressed against her skin, the rough outward sign of a working man. She considered this—and how good that felt—as she shifted her hand beneath his, fitting their palms to each other.

“No one’s all bad.” He laced his fingers with hers.

“I think we use those terms to protect ourselves.”

The seriousness she’d seen in his gaze moments before darkened even further, something quiet and gloomy filling those depths. “You think?”

“If we add labels to the boxes we put people in, it’s way easier to catalog them in our minds,” she said. “‘Good person’ or ‘bad person’ has a place. A way to think about them. It keeps us from the real work of understanding who they are.”

“I suppose.” Fender nodded. “But some people belong in the bad box you put them in and don’t deserve to be let out.”

It didn’t take a big leap to understand who he meant. Nor did she need a sign to tell her pushing into that area was off limits. But oh, how she wanted to ask.

Wanted to know about that darkness.

His honesty about Louisa “saving him” was steeped in something she’d never understand, no matter how dysfunctional her own family had been or become. Abuse or neglect or whatever else he might have suffered before his adoption was a far cry from her own experiences.

What caught her was how much she wanted to understand. Wanted to dig deep and know the demons that shaped and made an abused child grow into a good and fine man.

* * *

Fender held Harlow’s hand as they roamed through another cavernous room at the Met. He’d never been big on art and had been more than skeptical that he’d enjoy a jaunt to the museum, but couldn’t fight the excitement in her voice over a Gauguin exhibit when she’d suggested they walk up to the museum after coffee.

Hell, it was a day with her, and he was fast coming to believe that staring at a bunch of art with her was preferable to doing just about anything without her.

Which was . . . whoa.

Fender fought off the shot of panic that pooled in his gut and rooted his feet to the spot. Thoughts like that pointed directly toward Relationshipville, and they were nowhere near that.

Right?

Harlow tugged on his hand, pulling him forward from his spot in front of a colorful painting of a figure standing in a red cape. The move was enough to jar his relationship thoughts so they were left to rattle around his brain while he followed her through the museum.

It left those same thoughts room to bump up against the other ones that had been simmering since they shared coffee. He’d asked her directly about her father yet she’d sidestepped it, focusing on her mother’s reaction.

Deliberate?

He suspected it was and wouldn’t fault her for it. He wasn’t exactly spilling his guts over his old man, so fair was fair.

But the ready defense of her father’s good qualities had captured him. And it gave him a small measure of understanding of what might have driven his mother’s choices. No one was all bad. His mother certainly wasn’t, and he assumed she hadn’t fallen in love with a total asshole. Whether that love was a good idea or not was another problem. On a moral scale, it sucked. In the messy world of human relationships, it was way harder to navigate.

He wasn’t condoning his mother’s choices, but he loved her and he couldn’t see his way to condemning her, either. Landon hadn’t had it quite so easy. His brother was moving past it—Daphne had helped that—but he’d taken the news hard. For himself, Fender knew, it had been more of an awakening. That the woman he had on a pedestal had her feet firmly on broken ground.

“You really are bored, aren’t you?”

Grateful for the reprieve from shit he usually avoided thinking about, Fender focused on the woman he was with. Yeah, there was stuff they had to figure out. And spending time with her probably was a bad idea. But staring at that heartbreakingly gorgeous face, he couldn’t quite summon up a single reason to walk away.

“I’m not.”

“Liar.”

“I never lie.”

Her eyes narrowed, those blue eyes calculating. “Never?”

“It’s not my style. I may keep my mouth shut, but that’s not lying.”

“It’s omission.”

“Or just knowing when my opinion isn’t needed.”

Her skepticism broke, a wide smile filling its place. “I think you may be that rare creature who walks through life quietly assessing the world. Sort of a mix of John Wayne and the Dalai Lama.”

“I’m no cowboy. And I’m not particularly spiritual. But I do think the world would be far better off if people knew their place.”

“Some people think it’s their place to comment on others. Lift them up somehow.”

“I know those people. They’re the ones who think speaking is a replacement for action. The same ones who left a kid in a shitty situation were the same ones who criticized a single woman for adopting him.” Fender shook his head, some of the old anger he’d carried as a kid rising up to swamp him.

Anger he’d believed long forgotten.

“Far as I’m concerned, people need to know when to keep their mouth shut,” he added, finished with the subject.

“So noted.” She squeezed his hand once more. “Now let me show you one of my favorites.”

Was Harlow done with the subject too? Most women would take an opening like that and run for the end zone of personal information and insights, yet she hadn’t pushed. “A painting?”

“A temple.”

“Here?” He owned his lack of enthusiasm about art, but what was she talking about?

“You bet. Come on.”

Because he was helpless to do anything else, Fender followed her.

* * *

“The Temple of Dendur.” Harlow waved a hand toward the Egyptian temple that rose up in splendor in a western, window-filled room of the Met, overlooking Central Park.

“A freaking temple in the middle of Manhattan.” Fender said.

“Exactly.”

He moved closer, his attention completely captured by the temple that had stood on the banks of the Nile for nearly twenty centuries. “Unbelievable.”

“It was a gift from Egypt in the sixties, but it also had a practical purpose which may interest you. Once the Nile was dammed up as Lake Nasser with the building of the Aswan Dam, the water was going to harm the structure. This temple, along with several archaeological sites, had to be moved and resettled.”

That sharp green gaze roamed up over the heavy sandstone columns before coming back to her. “So the Egyptians got a modern marvel of engineering and had gifts to give away to boot.”

“Pretty much.”

“Human ingenuity at its best.”

“And diplomacy,” Harlow added. “We can’t forget that.”

He smiled, and his attention returned once again to the carvings in the sandstone.

Well aware her knowledge of the temple bordered on fanaticism, she opted to press on, in full teacher mode now. “The temple was built to honor Isis.”

Fender’s gaze swung back around, his attention clearly switched from the temple to her. “I know you know a lot about art, but how do you know that? And all the other stuff, too? This is amazing and all, but it’s a far cry from your gallery and those paintings we looked at downstairs. I didn’t realize art expert extended to geological history lessons.”

“I like the temple.”

“And?” He stood there, expectant, and she knew it was her turn to share. In the quiet cavern of the large wing that housed the temple, strangers milling around them, it was easier to do than she’d have imagined.

“I used to come here. When I was younger. Well—” She fought the heat that crept up her neck. “When I was younger and last week. And lots of weeks before that. I like this place. It makes me happy, and it takes me away.”

“From what?”

“When I come here I know that people can still create beauty no matter what mess is going on around them.”

“I can see that. I didn’t love the stuff downstairs, but I can see the appeal. The talent and the gift that made them.”

“Those talents were used through wars and famines. Through death and destruction and whatever problems their own family had dreamed up. Art is the proof we can find beauty even when the world around us is a mess.”

Fender had stood still before her as she spoke, that stillness belying the energy she usually saw rippling off him. He was a man in motion, constantly, whether it was his fingers tapping to a beat only he could hear or his feet shifting and moving as he considered things.

Only now he was still, paying attention to her. It was heady.

More than that, it was fascinating to realize how that change in rhythm could telegraph so much.

He listened to her.

Had she ever met anyone in her life, romantically or not, who did that?

Before she could consider herself or check her actions, she moved forward, wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling him close. Even with her heels on he was still taller, and as his body pressed against hers, she felt something inside shift.

She was attracted, yes. And she wanted him, in the same, age-old way that the men and women who’d walked around this very temple two thousand years ago had wanted.

Yet even with the attraction and sexual need, Harlow knew these feelings were bigger. They held more.

If she let herself, it would be oh so easy to fall in love. And it was the one thing she couldn’t allow herself to do with him.

Yet increasingly, it was the crazy, wonderful, persistently scary drumbeat that wouldn’t let her go.

* * *

Louisa put the last of the brunch dishes away and set a cup of coffee to brew on the Nespresso. Fender had given the machine to her for Christmas, and the handy single-cup brewer had quickly become her favorite appliance.

Her son did love his gadgets, and the newer and flashier something was, the better. She’d only known it as George Clooney coffee, but Fender had seen the practical application along with the convenience.

And she loved it.

When the machine finished brewing, she took her mug and settled in at the kitchen table with her laptop. Landon had taught her how to update her campaign website, and she wanted to add a few appearances she’d scheduled for the week. The opportunity to talk to the Kiwanis on Thursday had come into her inbox the night before, and Father Thad had just that morning confirmed a discussion session for all the candidates at the church the following week.

There was much to do.

Which meant it was considerably more fun to do none of it and contemplate her boys. Fender had her thoughts at the moment, his quiet in the face of Emily Weston’s ribbing earlier a curious thing that had nagged at her throughout brunch. She knew Emily had been excited about her jaunt to the End Zone on Friday night. At the time, Louisa wasn’t sure what the old woman had loved more—that she’d been accepted at the table of young people, or that she’d taken an Uber to get there—but now that she’d heard the conversation with Fender, Louisa knew better.

Something was going on with Harlow Reynolds.

Louisa could hardly blame Fender. The woman was lovely and incredibly beautiful. A genuine knockout, as it were, and the sort of woman who usually caught her son’s eye.

Yet there was something more.

Harlow was pretty, but Louisa sensed it was the least of the woman’s attributes. There was a genuineness about her that belied both her beauty and the privilege she’d grown up with. In Louisa’s experience, that sort of ease often created a person who was innately out of touch with others, not necessarily through intention, but by circumstance.

But Harlow seemed to have none of that.

It made it that much harder for Louisa to swallow the fact that she’d willingly contributed to the parental betrayal the young woman had lived with for most of her life.

“My Harlow, she’s a sweetheart. Pretty as all get out and whip smart.” Kincaide grinned broadly over the candlelight, his blue eyes alight with pride. “She’s my Pip, she is.”

“Pip?” Louisa asked. The conversation rarely turned toward his children, so it was a surprise he was so intent on it tonight.

“She’s my Pipsqueak. Though she’s been growing like a weed lately. I’m not sure I can call her that any longer. She’s going to be the tallest kid in third grade if what I see of her friends is any indication.”

Swallowing back the sour taste that coated her tongue, Louisa reached for her wine. She and Kincaide had spent a lot of time together of late, and it was jarring to remember he went home to his family when he left her. That he was there with them in his free time, playing with his children and shuttling them back and forth to their friends, to school. Putting them to bed.

“Are you alright?” Kincaide’s focus turned sharp. “Is there something wrong with the meal?”

“No.” She waved him off and pasted on a broad smile. “No, it’s fine. I’m sorry for the frown. I randomly remembered something I left at work is all.”

He took the lie at face value, but the shift in conversation was enough to have him changing topics. “The Novasis merger is going to be a big one. You ready for it?”

“I am. The paperwork’s nearly completed, and we began the SEC filings on Monday.”

The words felt bland on her tongue, but they were easy. Work was her life, and she could navigate her way through business conversation even as other things swirled in the back of her consciousness.

What was she doing here?

Kincaide had told her repeatedly that his marriage was over. That Gretchen was cold and aloof, and that they had no discernable marriage to speak of any longer. That it was only a matter of getting his business affairs in order so he was protected financially before he began the divorce proceedings.

But the way he spoke of his daughter didn’t sound cold, or aloof, or separate. It sounded real.

And so very far removed from the two of them and the life she’d begun to imagine.

The heavy knock at the door pulled Louisa from the long-forgotten memory, and she caught herself, recentering her focus on the warm, yellow kitchen in Brooklyn, in what felt like a million years from that fine restaurant in Manhattan.

The side door in the kitchen was a throwback to the days when ice, milk ,and bread were delivered by hand and, she got up to answer the casual knock, only to find Dave Maxwell standing on the other side.

“Dave.” She gestured him in, pleased to see him.

“Louisa.” He leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to her cheek. The move was vintage Dave—and a normal, affectionate greeting between neighbors—yet she saw his face grow a light shade of pink that had nothing to do with the August heat as he pulled away.

She ignored the awkwardness that had sprung up between them and tried to focus instead on being grateful he was there. “Come on in. We missed you at brunch this morning, but I have some waffles and bacon I can heat up.”

“No.” He waved her off as he stepped in. “I had breakfast already. I’d love some coffee, though.”

“Coffee then.” She said, determined to keep a bright smile on her face. Dave had been one of her brunch misfits, as her sons called them, consistent in his attendance week in and week out. She’d been the one to ruin that by her stupid reaction to his ill-timed kiss earlier in the summer. A kiss she’d wanted desperately, even though she’d ultimately told him that she couldn’t be in a relationship. Since then, he had been conspicuously absent from brunch, a fact her other misfits had begun to notice.

But no one had noticed it more than she did.

They’d had a few coffee dates, random catch-ups that never delved deeper than neighborhood gossip and her prattling on and on about the boys for something to say. Nothing of weight or substance. Or anything that could take away the heaviness of what she’d told him earlier in the summer, when she’d confessed her affair with Kincaide. But even with those tentative meet ups, he’d stubbornly avoided brunch.

God, how she missed him. Missed their easy conversation and the appreciative look in his eyes when they spoke. Missed the way he understood her, listened to her, and sparred with her over ideas. He’d been one of the people most adamant that she should pursue the candidacy for borough president. And she’d gone and ruined it all by reacting poorly to his kiss.

One she’d wanted desperately.

“I’m sorry I missed everyone this morning. It’s been a busy summer.”

“It has.” She fussed with the coffee maker, selecting a pod with the strength she knew he liked. While that brewed she dug up the fresh carton of cream she had in the fridge, keeping her back to him as they exchanged the sort of pointless conversation acquaintances shared.

Which hurt almost as much as his not coming around. And she had no one to blame except herself.

Well, herself and the wretchedly poor timing that had Dave finally making a move at the same time Gretchen Reynolds came back into her life, determined to put a black mark on her credibility and her personal choices.

She knew what she was. What her choices all those years ago really meant. She was a home-wrecker. And while she’d built a new life for herself and her boys since then, none of it changed her choices when she’d decided to become Kincaide Reynolds’s mistress.

It was a sordid term, but it was accurate.

And it had colored how she’d seen herself and her willingness to enter a personal relationship ever since. She’d dated off and on through the years, especially after her boys had left the house, but she’d never let the relationships go very far, stepping away before they could become too serious.

Or force her to share too deeply of her past.

Dave had been different. A widower who’d moved in next door shortly after losing his wife, she’d simply reached out to him in friendship, urging him to come to her home so he wouldn’t be alone. How that gesture of friendship had turned into something deeper had been a mystery, but once on that path she’d been unable to think of him any other way.

Gathering up the creamer, the mug from the coffee maker, and her determinedly bright attitude, she crossed to the table and set the coffee before him.

“Thanks. How’s the campaign going?”

“Well.” She took her own seat and gestured toward the still-closed laptop. “Landon taught me how to update my website so that’s my project for the afternoon.”

“How’s it going?”

She avoided the eye roll but knew a frown marked her features. “I haven’t started.”

He laughed at that, tapping the machine. “You know he’d do it for you.”

“I know. But I feel like I need to apply the adage that I now know how to fish and can do it all by myself. Plus, he’s spending time with Daphne. He doesn’t need to be doing stupid tasks for me that I’m well able to do myself.”

“I saw him the other day. That boy’s floating about three feet off the ground.”

“He is. It’s a wonderful thing to see.”

A wonderful thing that had been a long time coming. Her sweet Landon, the quietest of her three boys and the one she’d worried over the most. He’d rarely shown his pain, but his past had always concerned her. The abandonment by his drug-addicted mother had haunted him. Would he be able to fall in love? More, would he be able to trust another person?

In Daphne he’d found both, and the reality of that touched her heart more deeply than she could have ever imagined. The fact that he’d found a tentative path back to his birth mother in the process warmed her equally.

“Look, I stopped over because there are some things we need to say,” Dave began. And—” He broke off, then took a deep breath. “I’m sick of sitting in my apartment every Sunday morning when I’d much rather be here.”

“I’d rather have you here, too.”

“So what are we going to do about it?”

Images of her sons faded, her own problems rising to the fore. She hadn’t been so selfishly focused since before she’d found the boys, and it was odd to suddenly concentrate on herself—on her own needs—so closely.

“You’re my friend. We’re weathering a bump, Dave. That’s all. You’re always welcome here and I’d like us to put whatever that moment was behind us and move on.”

“What if I want to be more than your friend? What if I don’t want to move on?”

Pleasure shot through her, electrifying her nerves and nearly sending her out of her seat to pace the room. Even with the desperate hope that made her want to say yes, she forced herself to sit still.

And pushed him to see the reason behind why what he was asking wasn’t possible. “Why would you want that? I already told you about what happened. About my past.”

“A past that happened nearly a quarter century ago.”

“Yet it still found a way to my present.” Gretchen Reynolds had seen to that. The woman might have stopped her defamation campaign, but it didn’t change the fact that Louisa’s own behavior was still an easy mark.

More, that it still had the power to damage others.

“Let it go.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Actually, it is.” Dave reached across the table, taking her hand. “I don’t judge you for what happened. Why do you keep judging yourself?”

The earlier memory of Kincaide tugged at her, twisting up with the lovely woman who had captured her son’s eye. “My choices didn’t just ruin another woman’s marriage. I participated in a betrayal of his children, too. I knew better at the time, and I certainly know better now.”

“It’s in the past.”

As if to prove his point, he got up out of the chair and came around the table, leaning over and cradling her face in his hands. Her pulse sped up, the thick heartbeats throbbing in her throat as he leaned in and pressed his lips to hers.

The taste of him was all she’d remembered from their kiss earlier in the summer, but layered beneath this time were distinct notes of longing she hadn’t been fully cognizant of last time. She wanted to protest, or push him away, or tell him to stop, but knew they’d be token gestures only.

She wanted him.

Wanted him for a million reasons, even as she knew there was one huge, gaping one that meant she needed to stay away.

But oh, if things could only be different. She laid her hands over his and allowed him to continue the kiss. To take them both another fathom deeper, to where there wasn’t regret or sadness or mistakes she’d spent a lifetime running from.

To a place where there was acceptance and desire and second chances.

And then she thought of Emily’s gleeful retelling of meeting Harlow on Friday night. Thought further of the young woman’s apology a few weeks before over her mother’s actions. And no matter how much she wanted to believe Dave, she knew deep in her heart that he was wrong.

With one final squeeze for the backs of his hands, she pulled back, away from him.

Her past had come alive in her present. If not for the possible embarrassing personal consequences to her borough candidacy, she might be able to believe Dave’s sincerity. Believe they could put her past behind them.

But her son was attracted to Kincaide’s daughter, and that put her in a position of confronting her choices in the most tangible way possible.

Could she dare drag Dave into that? Ask him to support her when she was most surely going to come face-to-face with the daughter of the man she’d had an affair with?

Could she?

She’d made her choices and she had to face that burden alone, and it hardly seemed fair to bring another person into it all.

“Louisa?”

“I’m sorry, Dave. I want to believe you. Please know I do. But nothing’s in the past. Nothing at all.”