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successful in their own way. No matter that Pat had ungratefully turned his back on his father’s legacy.
    Mary Bernadette made the sign of the cross and offered up a prayer of thanksgiving. Thank you, dear Lord, for the gifts you have bestowed upon us. May the Fitzgibbon family continue to be worthy of your favor . Amen .

C HAPTER 7
    A lexis was preparing a marinade for a Chinese beef dish. On the counter before her was a bottle of soy sauce, a small bowl of chopped garlic, a bottle of hoisin sauce, a jar of black bean paste, a bottle of sherry, a shaker of sugar, and a tin of five-spice powder. If Mary Bernadette walked in right now and saw what I was making , Alexis thought, she would keel right over . A “foodie” she was not.
    Alexis and PJ had been living in the cottage behind Mary Bernadette’s house for almost a year. It was a single-story structure with a crawl space in lieu of a proper attic, a kitchen that flowed into a living room, a small full bathroom, and a bedroom. There was a flower garden out front, and behind the cottage stretched two acres of land, at the edge of which stood three massive American beech trees. Alexis would have been glad to help with the maintenance of the property, but she wasn’t much of a gardener. Well, she wasn’t a gardener at all ; she had even managed to kill innocent houseplants left in her care. For obvious reasons, she kept this bit of information from the clients of Fitzgibbon Landscaping.
    There wasn’t much she could productively do on the inside of the cottage, either, other than to keep it clean and bring her own small touches to a décor that Mary Bernadette had chosen long ago. But it wasn’t as if they would be living in the cottage forever. Someday in the not too distant future she and PJ would buy a home of their own and then they could decorate as they pleased.
    Alexis put the piece of flank steak into the marinade and the dish into the fridge. She got the rice cooker out from its cupboard. The kitchen was small but well stocked with appliances Alexis had received at her wedding shower and the flatware, dishes, and glassware Mary Bernadette had so generously provided. On the whole Alexis felt lucky to be living there. Really, the only thing that bothered her was the relative lack of privacy. She frequently came home from work to find things rearranged. It could only be Mary Bernadette, of course, and the image of her husband’s imposing grandmother sneaking into the cottage to shuffle trinkets from one shelf to the next amused her. What could possibly be the point in such tiny, meaningless manipulations?
    Only recently had Alexis begun to feel a hint of annoyance when she came home to find a vase moved from one end of a table to the other or the tablespoons stacked in the slot that had formerly held the teaspoons. Still, she had only become seriously upset when one afternoon the week before she walked in to the bedroom to find PJ’s Christmas gift to her gone from the wall over her dresser. It had taken her almost ten minutes of frantic searching to find it tucked away in the bottom drawer of the small desk that sat in a corner of the living room.
    The object that Mary Bernadette had found offensive was a black-and-white photo of a nude woman, the work of a critically acclaimed contemporary photographer named Adrienne Jonas. Alexis loved the photograph. She knew that the piece must have cost PJ an awful lot of money. It was a thoughtful gift, and it meant so much to her. The fact that Mary Bernadette had ventured into the bedroom of a husband and wife—a sacrosanct place, if you considered marriage holy, which as a Catholic Mary Bernadette was supposed to do!—and had in effect hidden a personal item of great sentimental value was just too much.
    Still, after some reflection Alexis had decided not to mention the incident to PJ. If found out, Mary Bernadette might be embarrassed—though how she could think she