Finlay Donovan Is Killing It(Finlay Donovan #1)(8)

The hard drive hummed, the hourglass flipping over and over on a discouragingly blank screen. Where would I even start? How was I supposed to write someone else’s heart-pounding romance when I’d completely failed at my own? It was already close to noon, and Steven was expecting me to pick up Zach in a few hours. Probably so he and Theresa could spend the rest of the day boning each other between a fancy late lunch and happy hour. If I worked every night after the kids went to sleep for the next six weeks, I might be able to finish a really horrible first draft. But why bother? Just so I could blow the remaining pennies of my advance on overdue bills? Judging by the size of the stack on my front stoop, the money would be gone in less than a week.

My home screen flickered to life. A search bar popped up. I typed the word how. As in, how do I write this damn book and fix my life?

The rest of the box auto-populated, fueled by a search history full of violent and salacious questions all beginning the same way: How long did it take dead bodies to decompose in a shallow grave in the winter in Virginia? How much damage would the bullet of a Colt 45 inflict on a large adult male with abnormally developed pecs? And how might a person eliminate the identifying features of his corpse?

I should have closed the search engine and opened a Word document instead. I had more than one good reason to get moving on this book. But I also had fifty thousand reasons to be curious about Harris Mickler.

Really, when it came down to it, what was one more search? Just a name to put a face to. Was there really any harm in a quick click through a few public records, just to get a feel for who Harris Mickler really was?

I eased back into my chair, feeling strange as I settled into its familiar dips and curves. Just as I lifted my hands to the keyboard, my phone vibrated on the desk beside it. A profile pic of my ex-husband flashed on the screen, and I swiped right just to make the image disappear. “Hey, Steven.”

“Is your power back on?”

“Yes. Thank you for handling it,” I said through a forced smile, hoping he could hear it. Zach squealed like an angry pig in the background. Steven grunted.

“Don’t thank me. Theresa took care of it. She has a client who works in billing at NOVEC. She pulled a few strings to reinstate your account. Then she and Amy went over to your place on their way to lunch and closed the garage. Speaking of that, Theresa said the service door to the kitchen was unlocked. You really ought to be more careful about that, since you and the kids are there alone so much.”

I bit my tongue before I could say something ungrateful and bitter. “I’ll take it under advisement. About this Amy person, who is she?” I seemed to have missed the memo.

“You know, Theresa’s best friend. Delia’s really smitten with Aunt Amy. She babysits the kids for a few hours on Saturdays so Theresa and I can have a break.”

A break? From his forty-eight hours with our children?

“Delia has an Aunt Georgia. She doesn’t need an Aunt Amy.”

“Great,” Steven deadpanned. “Let’s call Georgia and ask her to babysit.”

I gritted my teeth.

“Ouch! No, no, Zach! Come back here … Christ,” Steven muttered, a little winded. “Listen, Finn, I need you to come get Zach. Theresa had an appointment after lunch to show a house, so I took him to the farm with me. I’ve got a client coming in less than an hour for a meeting, and Zach is all over the place.”

“Of course he is.” I squeezed my eyes shut, envisioning the chaos playing out on the other end of the line. Steven’s sod farm was just a ginormous backyard without a fence. Acres of open space to run, and plenty of tractors and backhoes to climb. It was a toddler’s paradise, and unless you medaled in track and field, it was also a parent’s worst nightmare.

“Finn?” Between Zach’s shrieks, I could practically hear Ste ven’s sanity cracking. His farm was close to the West Virginia state line. It would take me at least forty minutes to get there. And I’d have to pick Delia up at preschool on the way.

“Fine.” I rummaged through my wallet and found the twenty dollars I hadn’t spent on lunch that morning. Enough for gas. “I’m coming. Give me a few minutes to use the bathroom and grab Delia.”

“An hour, Finn. Please.” He sounded desperate. And a little pissed off. He’d had only one of our children for less than three hours, and he thought he could handle full custody of both? I considered taking my time, showing up late, just to see how much hair he had left when I finally arrived. But then Zach started crying in the background, the kind of wails Steven had always been too impatient to learn to quiet. I got up from the desk, a layer of dust revealing itself where my hands had briefly skimmed its surface.

This was my life. A two-thousand-dollar contract for months of work, no sleep, and ten minutes in the bathroom alone.

“Tell Zach I’m on my way.” I hung up the phone, switched off the computer, and tried not to wonder about Harris Mickler anymore.





CHAPTER 4





Steven had bought his sod farm less than a month after we’d divorced. I’d taken the kids to see it once. I didn’t know much about the place, other than the fact that it covered three hundred acres, it produced various kinds of grass he then sold to homebuilders and real estate developers, and he’d been making a small fortune from it since. Mostly, I pictured him and Theresa frolicking naked in emerald fields of cash and fescue, which was probably why I’d never bothered going back.