“Goddamn it, he would, too. It’s no good that way. I’ve got to think about this.” Jaw tight, Ryder picked up his hammer, set a framing nail, and whaled on it.

“I guess we all do.” Beckett put his safety glasses on, turned on the saw.

Nodding, Owen strapped on his tool belt.

It was better to work, he decided, better to push through the strange day with the smell of sawdust and the sounds of nails hammered into wood.

By the time Clare and the kids arrived with provisions, they’d finished framing in on the second floor, and had started on the main level.

“You work so fast!” Clare wandered what would be her office—her own home office!—off the kitchen.

“We got a system.” Beckett draped an arm over her shoulders as the boys stomped around the subflooring.

“It works. Well, we’re here to help, if we can. And as payment I’ve got beef stew in the Crock-Pot. A manly meal for manly men.”

“I’m in,” Owen told her.

“I hate to miss it, but I’ve got a date.” Ryder tossed a hunk of his sub in the air. Dumbass caught the high fly like a veteran center fielder.

“Can you teach Ben and Yoda to do that?” Liam demanded. “Stuff just bounces off their face mostly.”

“D.A. here, he was born knowing how to field food, but yeah, we could teach them.”

“Not in the house,” Clare said absently as she pored over the blueprints.

Ryder just grinned at the boy, broke off another small hunk. “Go ahead, practice with D.A.”

“D.A. stands for Dumbass,” Murphy announced, “but we’re not supposed to say ass. It a bad word.”

“Depends, doesn’t it?”

“On how?”

“Well.” Considering, Ryder took a pencil out of his tool belt, drew on the subflooring. “What’s that?”

“It’s a donkey. You draw good.”

“Nah, it’s a jackass.”

“Mom! Ryder drawed a jackass on the floor!”

“Drew,” Clare corrected, and sent Ryder a sighing look.

“I like to draw. Can I draw on the floor?”

Ryder handed over the pencil. “Have at it, midget.”

Happily, Murphy sat on the floor and drew a box with a triangle on top. “This is gonna be our house when we get married.”

Liam trooped over to Owen. “I need more for D.A. to catch.”

Owen obliged him with a chunk of sub.

“You’re gonna be our uncle.”

“That’s what I hear.”

“So you have to buy us Christmas presents.”

“I guess I do.”

“I got a list.”

“A man after my own heart. Where is it?”

“On the frigerator at home. It’s only ten more days till Christmas.”

“Then I better get on it.”

Liam looked across the room where Beckett was teaching Harry how to hammer in a stud. “I wanna hammer, too.”

“Then you better help me finish framing in the pantry.”

“What’s the pantry?”

“It’s where your mom’s going to keep food.”

“That’s the frigerator.”

“Not everything goes in the fridge, kid. How about cans of soup?”

“I like Chicken and Stars.”

“Who doesn’t? Let’s get it done.”

Despite the endless stream of questions, he liked working with the kid, showing him how to measure, how to mark, how to hold a hammer. And he figured it showed their simpatico when Liam lasted nearly an hour before he joined Murphy on the floor with a pile of action figures.

He gave Clare credit, too. She fetched, she carried, she drove in a few nails herself—and rode herd on the kids.

He remembered his mother doing much the same when they’d added on to the house.

His father always had a project going.

After they knocked off, he found himself flattered when Liam asked to ride with him. They strapped the booster seat in the truck, strapped the kid in it.

“Where’s your house?” Liam wanted to know.

“Right down the road—or through the woods if you’re walking.”

“Can I see it?”

“Ah. Sure, I guess.”

It wasn’t much of a detour. Owen made the turns, cruised up his lane.

He’d strung a few lights, had the tree centered in the front window—all on timer so they sparkled against the December dark.

“Ours is bigger,” Liam announced.

“Yeah, it is. There are more of you.”

“Do you live here all by yourself?”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“Because . . . it’s my house.”

“You don’t have anybody to play with.”

He hadn’t thought of it quite that way. “I guess not, but Ryder lives right over that way, and when your place is finished, you guys will be right over that way.”

“Can I come play at your house?”

“Sure.” He hadn’t thought of that either, but hell, it might be fun. “Yeah.”

“Okay.”

Owen turned the truck around, started toward the road. “I’m going to get a dog.”

“Dogs are good.” Liam nodded wisely. “You can play with them, and you have to feed them and teach them to sit. They keep bad guys away. A bad guy came in our house, but the dogs were just puppies.”

Owen debated a response. He wasn’t sure how much the boys knew about Sam Freemont. “You have good dogs.”

“They’re bigger now, but they’re still puppies. But they’ll keep bad guys away when they grow up. The bad guy came in and scared my mom.”

“I know. But she’s okay, and the bad guy’s in jail.”

“Beckett came and stopped him. And you and Ryder came, too.”

“That’s right.” If Liam needed to talk about it, Owen concluded, it worried at the kid. “You don’t have to worry, Liam. We’ve got your back.”

“’Cause Beckett and Mom are getting married.”

“Because of that, yeah, and just because.”

“If the bad guy tries to come back, and Beckett’s not there, Harry and I will fight him, and Murphy’ll call nine-one-one, then Beckett. We talked about it. We practiced.”

“That’s smart.”

“And when the dogs get big, if he tries to come back, they’ll bite him.” Liam slid his gaze toward Owen. “In the dumb ass.”

With a laugh, Owen gave Liam a light slap on the head. “Damn right.”

After dinner, while Clare hauled the boys up for a bath, Owen relayed the conversation to Beckett.

“Bite him in the dumb ass. Kid’s got a way. Clare and I talked to them after it happened. Played it down, but played it straight. Still, they heard stuff at school. So Harry called a powwow, and they came to me about it.”

“Keep the women out of it?”

Beckett glanced toward the stairs. “Maybe that’s not politically correct, or even correct, but it feels right in this case. They need to know we’re covered, and that I trust them to help take care of their mom.”

“We’d’ve done the same.”

“Yeah, we would. Speaking of, I was able to tell Clare about that situation on the way home. You pitch the radio to a certain level, your voices to another, you can actually have a conversation that doesn’t carry to the backseats. Plus we used a lot of code.”

“What did she say?”

“What you’d expect. Mom’s entitled to a life. She’s a vital woman, Willy B’s a good man. Blah blah. I mean she’s right, but still.”

“It wasn’t her mother and Willy B mostly naked in the kitchen.”

On a sigh, Beckett closed his eyes. “And thank you for that fresh image to add to my growing collection.”

“We could start trading them, like baseball cards.”

That triggered a laughing shake of the head. “The other thing? When I talked to Clare about it, she didn’t really seem surprised.”

“What do you mean?” Owen lowered his after-dinner beer. “Like she already knew?”

“That or one of those woman’s radar deals. With stuff like this? They’re kind of like bats. Anyway, I started to ask her, but then Harry and Murphy started on each other, and that was the end of adult conversation.”

The thought slapped hard into his brain. “If Clare already knew, then Avery . . . Son of a bitch.”

“Coulda been that radar.”

“Avery’s a woman. She has radar. She’s as much of a bat as any of them. Plus, it’s her father groping our mother.”

“Stop. Stop.” Beckett covered his ears.

“If she knew, she should’ve told me.” Now the thought rooted in his brain, sprouted like a weed. “I’d’ve told her.”

“We know now. And I guess we’re going to have to get used to it.”

Owen started to respond, but Harry ran in, shiny from his bath in his X-Men pajamas, and announced a Wii tournament.

Roped in, Owen gave it an hour. He liked the kids, he liked Wii, but he just couldn’t get the idea of Avery keeping the situation from him out of his head.

He chewed at it all the way home, sat in the truck chewing over it some more. Then he turned around, drove back to town. He went into Vesta from the back.

“Hey, Owen!” Franny stood behind the counter slicing up a large pizza. “What can we get for you?”

“Is Avery around?”

“You just missed her. She’s running some deliveries. More people calling in than coming in tonight. I’m closing, so she’s going to go right on up when she gets back. I can give her a call if it’s important.”

“No. Nothing important. I’ll catch her later. How are you feeling?”

“Back to normal. Are you really opening the inn next month?”

“Yeah, we are.”

“I’m spreading the word.”

“Keep spreading. I’ll see you later, Franny.”

He went out the back and, after a quick debate, went up the stairs rather than down.

She had to come back sometime.

He considered the fact that he had keys; he was the landlord after all. But that crossed the line.

Instead, he sat on the floor outside her apartment door, took out his phone. He passed the time reading and answering emails, texts.