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down her cheeks, and she suddenly looked older.
    “My God!” Patrick had shoved away from the kitchen table, barely resisting the desire to break things, to shatter dishes the way his illusions had been shattered.
    “Let us explain,” his mother had begged.
    “We don’t owe them an explanation,” his father had shouted over her. “We did what we had to do. We’ve given the two of them a good life. That’s what we owed them. They’ve no right to question our decision.”
    Patrick hadn’t been able to silence all the questions still churning inside him. “What about what you owed your other sons?” he had asked, feeling dead inside. “Did you ever once think about them? My God, what were you thinking?”
    He hadn’t waited for answers. He’d known none would be forthcoming, not with his mother in tears and his father stubbornly digging in his heels. Besides, theanswers didn’t really matter. There was no justification for what they’d done. He’d whirled around and left the house that night, taking nothing with him, wanting nothing from people capable of doing such a thing. It was the last time he’d seen or spoken to either one of his parents.
    Daniel had found him a week later, drunk on the waterfront in Widow’s Cove. He’d tried for hours to convince Patrick to come home.
    “I don’t have a home,” Patrick had told him, meaning it. “Why should I have one, when our brothers never did?”
    “You don’t know that,” Daniel had argued. “It’s possible they’ve had good lives with wonderful families.”
    “Possible?” he’d scoffed. “Separated from us? Maybe even separated from each other? And that’s good enough to satisfy you? You’re as bad as they are. The Devaneys are a real piece of work. With genes like ours, the world is doomed.”
    “Stop it,” Daniel ordered, looking miserable. “You don’t know the whole story.”
    Patrick had looked his brother in the eye, momentarily wondering if he’d learned things that had been kept from Patrick. “Do you?”
    “No, but—”
    “I don’t want to hear your phony excuses, then. Leave me alone, Daniel. Go on off to college. Live your life. Pretend that none of this ever happened. I can’t. I’ll never go back there.”
    He’d watched his brother walk away and suffered a moment’s regret for the years of closeness lost, but he’d pushed it aside and made up his mind that he would spend the rest of his life living down the Devaney name.Maybe what that meant wasn’t public knowledge, but he would live with the shame just the same.
    That was the last time he’d gotten drunk, the last day he’d wandered idly. He’d gotten a job on a fishing boat and started saving until he’d been able to afford his own trawler. His needs were simple—peace and quiet, an occasional beer, the infrequent companionship of a woman who wasn’t looking for a future. He tried with everything in him to be a decent man, but he feared that as Connor and Kathleen’s son, he was a lost cause.
    He spent a lot of lonely nights trying like the very dickens not to think about the three older brothers who’d been left behind years ago. He’d thought about hunting for them, then dismissed the notion. Why the hell would they care about a brother who’d been given everything, while they’d gotten nothing?
    He heard about his folks from time to time. Widow’s Cove wasn’t that far from home, after all. And in the past twenty-four hours, he’d heard far too many references to his family, first from Caleb Jenkins, then from Loretta Dowd. As for Daniel, Patrick knew his brother was in Portland much of the time, working, ironically, as a child advocate with the courts. Daniel had found his own, less-rebellious way of coping with what their parents had done.
    Patrick sighed at the memories crashing over him tonight. He concentrated harder on the soup he was heating, then ladling into bowls, on the crusty loaf of homemade bread he sliced and set on the table