“You had no right!” she said, as she hurried over to where he’d spread the files across her desk.
“I think I have more right to those records than you do,” he pointed out. “They’re all about me.”
She trembled as she shoved the papers back into folders. “But you shouldn’t have seen them.”
“That’s what you were working on when we were together,” he said, his gut aching as it had when he’d found the folders. If the drawer hadn’t been locked, he probably wouldn’t have bothered to jimmy it open. But he’d wanted to know all her secrets so that he might figure out who was trying to kill her. “You thought I killed my own father? That’s the story you were after when you came after me.”
She released a shuddery sigh. “That was a lifetime ago.”
“But you’re still a reporter.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“You teach journalism,” he said, gesturing toward a framed award that sat among the books on the shelves of the den. She had given up so much of her old life, except for that. No matter where she was or what she was calling herself, she was still a journalist.
“I teach,” she said, her tone rueful, “because I can’t do.”
“Because you can’t give it up.” Not for him. Not even for their son.
“I had to give up everything,” she said. “My home. My family.”
Family.
“Where’s CJ?” he asked, glancing around the shadows. She’d been alone on the stairs. Where had she stashed their child this time?
“He’s at his sitter’s,” she said. “He’s safe.”
“Are you sure?” He never should have let the boy out of his sight.
“I can trust the people here.”
Skeptical, he snorted. “She wouldn’t have thrown the brick?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “It must have been one of my other students. Or one of Michael’s friends.”
“What happened to Michael?”
Sadness dimmed her eyes and filled them with tears. “He was killed pursuing a story.”
He touched his fingers to the scratch on his temple. It didn’t sting anymore; it throbbed, the intensity of it increasing with his confusion and frustration. “How could you be responsible for that?”
Her eyes glistened with moisture. “It was a story I suggested that he cover.” She blinked back the tears. “But that brick—that has nothing to do with what happened in Chicago. Nobody here knows who I really am. Nobody here would have tried to kill me.”
“Just scare you,” he said. But the brick and the note were nothing in comparison to gunfire and explosions. “You should be scared,” he said. He reached out and jerked one of the folders from her hand. “This story could have gotten you killed.”
She sucked in a quivering breath. “It almost did. It is why someone tried to kill me four years ago.”
“Someone,” he agreed. And now he knew who. “But not me.”
She gestured toward those folders. “But you see why I suspected you. All the people I talked to named you as your father’s killer.”
People he should have been able to trust—men who’d worked with his father since they were kids selling drugs for Brendan’s grandfather. And his stepmother. When his father had first married her, she had pretended to care about her husband’s motherless son. But when Brendan had returned to claim the inheritance Margaret O’Hannigan thought should have been hers, she’d stopped pretending.
Josie continued, “In all the conversations I overheard while hanging out with you at O’Hannigan’s, only one suspect was ever named in his murder.”
“Me.” Did she still suspect him?
“I was wrong,” she admitted, but then defended herself. “But I didn’t know you very well then. You were so secretive and you never answered my questions.”
She didn’t know him very well now, either. But it was obvious she couldn’t stop being a journalist, so he couldn’t trust her with the truth. He couldn’t tell her who he really was, but he could tell her something about himself.
“We wanted the same thing, you know,” he told her.
“We did?” she asked, the skepticism all hers now.
“I didn’t want an award-winning exposé,” he clarified. “But I wanted the truth.”
She nodded. “That’s why I never printed anything. I had no confirmation. No proof. I could have written an exposé. But I wanted the truth.”
And that was the one thing that set her apart from the other reporters who’d done stories about him over the past four years. She wouldn’t print the unsubstantiated rumors other journalists would. She’d wanted proof. She just hadn’t recognized it when she’d found it.
“I want to know who killed him, too,” he said. “I came back to that life because I wanted justice for my father.” After years of trying to bring the man to justice, it was ironic that Brendan had spent the past four years trying to get justice for his father—for his cold-blooded murder.
“You spent a lot of time reading through everything,” she said, staring down at the desk he’d messed up. “Did you find anything I missed?”
Because he didn’t want to lie outright to her, he replied, “You weren’t the only one who must have gone through those papers. If there’d been something in there, one of the marshals would have found it.”
“Nobody else has ever seen this stuff,” she admitted.
The pounding in his head increased. If anyone familiar with his father’s murder case had looked at her records, they would have figured it out. They would have recognized that one of her sources knew too much about the murder scene, things that only the killer would have known. She never would have had to go into hiding, never would have had to keep his child from him. “Why the hell not?”
She lifted her chin with pride. “My dad taught me young to respect the code.”
“What code?”
“The journalist code,” she said. “A true journalist never reveals a source.”
Ignoring the pain, he shook his head with disgust. “After the attempts on your life, I think Stanley Jessup would have understood.”
She chuckled. “You don’t know my dad.”
“No,” he said, “you never introduced me. I was your dirty little secret.”
“He would have been mad,” she admitted. “He wouldn’t have wanted me anywhere near you, given your reputation.”
“Good,” Brendan said. He’d worried that the man had put her up to it, to getting close to him for a story. “And if he cared that much for your safety, he would have understood you breaking the code.”
She nodded. “Probably. But I didn’t think so back then. Back then, I figured he would have been happier for me to die than reveal a source.”
“Josie!” He reached for her, to offer assurance. He knew what it was like to feel like a disappointment to one’s father. But when his arms closed around her, he wanted to offer more than sympathy. He wanted her … as he always did.
“But I realized that he wouldn’t have cared about the code. He would have cared only about keeping me safe when I had CJ,” she said. “CJ!”
She said his name with guilt and alarm, as if something