Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(12)

His older daughter is standing in the doorway of the sunroom.

Hudson has long, straight blond hair that people always assume she got from her mother, unaware that Allison’s natural hair color is brunette. Their daughter’s fair coloring comes from Mack’s mother’s side of the family—though he himself has dark hair—and so do the light green eyes that are a mirror image of his.

But that’s where the resemblance to her dad stops. Hudson has elfin features, a sprinkling of freckles, and is small for her age. She also has an air of precocious confidence she didn’t inherit from either of her parents.

“I don’t know where she gets it,” Allison frequently says, shaking her head over something their firstborn has said or done.

Mack has a pretty good idea. His own mother, Maggie, had the same strong-willed flash in her Irish eyes that he so often sees in Hudson’s.

But of course, Allison wouldn’t recognize it because she never knew his mother, who died the year before they met.

His first wife met her a few times. That was enough for a terminally ill Maggie MacKenna to decide Carrie was wrong for her son.

You were right, Mom. You were so right.

Back then, though, I kept thinking that if you just got to know Carrie, just got to know what she had been through in the past . . .

But Mack never had the chance to bridge the gap between the two women in his life, and he never got the chance to tell his mother that he regretted not having talked to her before he eloped with Carrie after a whirlwind courtship. His mother died a few months later.

Now, looking back, he knows it’s no accident that after preserving his bachelorhood well into his thirties, he quite literally married the first woman who came along on the very day he got the shocking news that Mom had just six months to live. He was in no frame of mind, at that time, to begin a relationship, let alone take marriage vows.

He also understands now that he avoided discussing Carrie with Maggie because he was afraid his mother would tell him he was making the wrong choice. He didn’t want to hear that, didn’t want to face it. Somewhere deep down inside, terrified of the looming loss, he was attempting to replace a mother with a wife.

No, not even just a wife—a family. He and Carrie started trying to get pregnant right away, even before they’d exchanged vows and rings. Why waste time, they asked each other. Life was too short.

That was for damned sure.

Later, Mack would look back and wonder what might have happened if only he’d asked Maggie’s advice before eloping; if only she’d noticed he was faltering and reached out . . .

But that wasn’t their style, either of them. They were descended from a proud, unflinching clan who’d fled the poorhouses and famine of mid-nineteenth-century Galway in search of a better life in America. Their legacy: everything they’d struggled to earn—food, money, time, privacy—was far too precious to squander. Thus, Mack was raised with plenty of love, but in a family that, above all, got things done, without benefit of much soul-searching or heart-to-heart discussion.

Maggie MacKenna faced her own death as she’d faced every other challenge life had tossed her way: with grim acceptance. Mack didn’t realize until later, looking back, that he’d adopted the exact same attitude with his first marriage, determined to make the best of it.

Things are so different the second time around. How he wishes his mother had had the chance to meet Allison. Maggie would have loved her; probably would have declared that he and Allison were as right for each other as two peas in a pod, a favorite saying of hers.

Although lately . . .

It’s not that anything’s wrong between them. It’s just that they haven’t had time for each other, what with his job, the kids, all the little details involved in daily life—and they’re both always so exhausted. . . .

“Shouldn’t you have some paint on that wall by now?” Again, his daughter’s voice jars Mack back to the moment. He looks up to see Hudson gazing around the room at the stepladder, paint cans, tray, brushes, rollers, tape, drop cloths draped over the furniture and across the slate floor tiles.

“I’m about to get started,” he tells her. “It just takes a long time to do the prep work.”

Longer than it should, today, Mack realizes, noticing the angle of the sunlight falling through the glass. He rubs the burning spot between his shoulder blades. He’s operating on an hour’s sleep—so what else is new?—and his weary brain keeps drifting to the past. To Jerry Thompson, and Kristina Haines, and . . .

Carrie.

Always Carrie.

She’s been dead ten years now, but dammit, she’s going to haunt him forever.

“I can’t wait to see how the color looks on the wall,” Hudson chatters on. “I’m the one who chose it, remember?”

“How could I forget?” He smiles, thinking back to that day in the paint store. He was leaning toward plain old white, and Allison was trying to talk him into a mossy green, and then along came Hudson, the artist in the family, waving a paper swatch in a creamy shade called Buttered Popcorn.

“It should be a happy color like this,” she declared, and she was right. It should be, and it will be.

Happy.

Absolutely.

A happy color for a happy family in a Happy House.

That’s what the Realtor called this center hall Colonial on Orchard Terrace when she pulled them up to the curb out front six years ago.