Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun (Finlay Donovan, #3)(11)

He seethed as he watched her go. “I can’t believe you let her move in with you.”

I grabbed Zach as he zipped past my legs toward the door. “The children and I love having her here and she needed a place to stay.”

“She should rent her own place.”

“She’s still in school. She doesn’t have enough money for her own place.”

He cast another suspicious look toward his truck as I wrangled Zach into his coat. “Finn, there’s something I need to tell you. Something I should have told you before, but…” I glanced up at him. He winced, bracing for the backlash of whatever he was about to say. “That time you found me in the garage … that wasn’t the first time I was in the house when you weren’t home.”

My hands froze around Zach’s zipper. “What do you mean?” There were more than a few terrifying things he could have found if he’d been snooping around in here. Not the least concerning was the misguided letter from Patricia Mickler, thanking me for killing her husband.

Steven cleared his throat. “Back in October, I came to talk to you about the custody agreement, but you weren’t home, so I let myself in. I grabbed a soda from the pantry. I was going to wait for you, but…” He let the rest hang as I stood up slowly. He didn’t have to finish. Steven hated drinking anything warm. He put ice in everything, which meant …

He’d opened my freezer.

“You had no business being in this house!”

He held out a hand to calm me. “I know, Finn, and I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let myself in. But listen to me,” he said, his voice growing urgent as Vero secured the children’s car seats into the backseat of his truck. “There was money in the freezer. A lot of money. It was hidden behind the broccoli. I was mad at you at first, because you’d been putting off the bills for so long and you kept telling me you were broke, but then it occurred to me that the money could be hers,” he said, thrusting a finger toward the door, “and you wouldn’t even know it because you hardly ever cook!”

“The contents of my freezer are none of your business!”

“I am telling you, that girl is hiding something. She’s too young to have that kind of money, and no one keeps that much cash in a freezer.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, we’ve found far worse things in yours!”

Steven blanched. He hadn’t known Carl Westover’s dismembered corpse was in a freezer in his storage unit when Vero and I had found the body in December, but Carl had been Steven’s business partner and Steven’s name had been the one on the rental agreement, so as far as I was concerned, he was in no position to judge. “That’s not fair,” he argued.

“Neither is sneaking around my house and making false assumptions.”

“For all you know, you could be living with a criminal!”

A laugh burst out of me. “I promise you, Vero’s no more a criminal than I am.”

“How can you be sure?” he asked as his truck door slammed.

“Steven,” I said, drawing his attention back to me. “Vero will be with me all week. If it will make you feel better, I promise to keep a close eye on her.”

“Wait,” he said with a confused shake of his head, “she’ll be with you?”

“Yes, she lives here, Steven. In my home. Why do you look so surprised?”

“It’s just that you were so eager to let me take the kids, and you and Nick were spending a lot of time together before I left for Philly. I guess I just assumed—”

“I’m not seeing anyone,” I said curtly.

“Not even that lawyer kid in the Jeep?”

“Julian’s twenty-four. That hardly makes him a kid.”

“So you are seeing him?”

“No!” I sputtered. “We broke up. Why am I even explaining myself to you?”

Steven’s shoulders sagged. He smoothed back his hair, relief naked on his face. “It’s just that I had a lot of time to think while I was gone, about you and Delia and Zach … about how we never really tried to fix things between us.”

“Fix things?”

“You know, like seeing a marriage counselor.”

I laughed at the absurdity of the suggestion. “We didn’t see a marriage counselor because you told me you wanted to be married to someone else!”

“I know,” he said, his ears reddening with his temper. He took a slow breath and lowered his voice. “I know. And proposing to Theresa was a huge mistake, but now that all of that is behind us, and since you’re not dating anybody, maybe there’s a chance that we could talk to someone. We owe it to Delia and Zach to clear the air between us and try to make a fresh start, and it’d be a lot easier without a third wheel in the house.” He didn’t bother to lower his voice as Vero opened the door behind him. “I can sleep in the guest room while we figure things out.”

Vero clapped a hand on Steven’s shoulder. She shoved Zach’s nap blanket in his arms and turned my ex-husband toward the street. “It’s definitely time for you to be going,” she said, holding the front door wide. “Don’t let anything hit you on the way out. You know … doors, frying pans, a restraining order.”

Steven growled at her. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”