She settled for the more immediate question. “How did you hear about Irene?”
Finn took off his jacket and slung it over the back of a chair. “I Skyped with her last week. She told me about her hiking expedition to Mount Baker.”
Carly passed a hand over her eyes. “I still can’t believe she went by herself.”
“She was very fit, why shouldn’t she?” Finn said. “But I asked her to email me when she got back so I would know she’d gotten home safely. When I didn’t hear from her, and she didn’t respond to my phone calls, I asked Dingo to check on her.”
“Dingo? Is he your Aussie friend from high school?”
“Yeah, the ne’er-do-well who introduced me to rock music.” Finn’s grin flashed and then he sobered. “He told me Irene’s death had been reported in the local news that night. She was found on the trail by another hiker.”
Until this moment Carly had avoided forming a mental image of Irene at the scene of her death. Now she staggered to her feet and across the tiled floor to lean over the sink, her stomach contracting convulsively. It was wrong that her aunt should have died alone, possibly in pain, without anyone to even hold her hand. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Finn was instantly at her side. “I had no idea you were such a lightweight drinker, Maxwell. Do I need to take you to the bathroom and hold your hair?” He spoke lightly but his hand on her back was steady and comforting.
“No.” She swallowed, willing the wave of nausea to subside. Then she splashed cold water over her face. Finn handed her a towel to dry herself. When she’d recovered, she said, “Irene asked me to go on an Alaskan cruise with her this month. If I’d said yes she might still be alive. She and I could be watching humpback whales together right now. If something went wrong I would have been with her.”
Finn took her by the shoulders, forcing her to focus on him. “You couldn’t have known she was going to have a brain aneurysm. Her death wasn’t your fault.”
Maybe not. But she wished she’d made time for her aunt instead of chasing that Wallis Group account. An account she still desperately wanted. Carly dragged her sleeve across her damp eyes. “Did she know anything was wrong with her health? She didn’t say anything to me.”
“Nor to me.” He rubbed Carly’s arm. “Don’t beat yourself up. She had lots of friends. She could have asked someone else to go on the cruise. Or to go hiking with her. Even then there’s no guarantee she would have survived.”
“I know.” Carly filled her glass with water from the tap. Through the window she could see the backyard and the new leaves on the trees. A pile of tomato stakes rested against the fence next to the shed. April was the month Irene started to dig the garden beds for planting vegetables. Carly could picture her getting tools from the garden shed in the corner of the yard. Trundling wheelbarrow loads of compost over to the beds. Instead, the garden was overgrown with weeds and the grass needed cutting.
“Carly?” Finn said. “Are you okay?”
“I haven’t eaten much today.” She pressed a hand to her stomach. “The scotch is hitting me hard.”
“I meant, in general.” He paused, his gaze searching. “I got the impression Irene was worried about you. If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”
Carly closed her eyes at the rough caring in his voice. She’d had a massive crush on him for years when she was a teenager, but though he’d been friendly and teasing, he hadn’t seemed to notice her in “that way” until the summer after he’d graduated high school.
He’d invited her to the year-end concert put on by Irene’s students and to the party afterward. That night he was to perform part of the repertoire he was using for his live audition for the Juilliard School of Music the following week. She’d bought a new dress and sat in the first row next to Irene, her palms damp and heart racing, not sure if she was more excited about his first major public performance, or what might happen afterward.
The concert was held in the high school auditorium and was open to the public. All his schoolteachers and classmates, his friends and their parents, and all of Irene’s other students’ families had been in the audience. Everyone knew of his talent and was rooting for him to be awarded a scholarship to the prestigious music school. The anticipation had been building for weeks and was a fever pitch by the night of the concert.
And then, disaster. Finn’s performance was a shambles. His fingers stumbled over the keys, he forgot whole passages, he stopped midbar and skipped notes. It was so unlike him. Then someone in the back booed and Finn stalked offstage without finishing. Irene had been gray-faced, speechless. His parents, Nora and Ron, had hurried out, their heads hanging. Every single person in the audience had felt some combination of shock, betrayal and disappointment. What should have been a jubilant celebration had turned into a debacle. Finn hadn’t gone to New York for his Juilliard audition, nor did he pursue what should have been a stunning classical career. A week after the concert he left town, never to return. He’d not only stood Carly up for the party, he hadn’t contacted her or answered her calls. She’d never seen him again until today.
“Why was Aunt Irene worried about me?” Carly asked. One more thing she would never be able to ask her aunt. It was hard to comprehend the fact that she was gone. That Carly could never again pick up the phone and hear her voice.
“Just that you were working too much,” Finn said. “I could have misinterpreted. Aren’t you a high school guidance counselor?”
“That was years ago,” she said. “I switched to human resources. Recently I got a job with an international head hunting firm.” She had loved counseling teenagers but one day she’d looked around and realized that her friends were leap-frogging to the top in their various professions whereas she was stagnating. Now or never, she’d told herself, and started applying for jobs that would make use of her dual major in business and psychology. She’d worked her way up the ladder and had recently landed a plum position at a prestigious company.
“Sounds like a big change,” Finn said. “Do you like it?”
“Love it.” Mostly. Irene was right about working hard. Most weeks she logged upwards of sixty hours. Kind of put a cramp in anything else she might want to do, like have a life. But the payoff would be worth it when one day she got that corner office and the word partner after her name.
“Irene told me you live in Los Angeles,” she said, changing the subject. “What do you do there?”
“Drink too much,” he said cheerfully and raised his glass.
“She had such high hopes for you.” The words fell out of her mouth and hung in the air between them.
“My life isn’t over yet.” Their eyes met and his smile faded at the reminder that Irene’s was.
Cursing her lack of tact, she touched his arm. “Sorry.” She couldn’t begin to understand what had been going through his head at that concert or why he’d blown off a chance for a place at Juilliard. Such a waste of talent.
Finn poured himself another shot. Seeing his long, tapering fingers on the bottle—a pianist’s hands—brought back the memory of their first, and only, kiss. The stuffy heat in the third-floor turret of this house, his hands anchoring her hips, the slide of his tongue against hers. Remembering, a pooling warmth settled in her belly that had nothing to do with the scotch.
He raised the bottle. “Hit you again?”
She pushed her glass closer. He held her wrist to keep the glass steady and sloshed in another two fingers’ worth. Then he clinked glasses. “Here’s to you, Carly Maxwell. Long time, no see.”
This time when she looked into his eyes, a rush of boozy affection washed over her. With his black hair brushed back from