him to the table under one arm. Hell yes, she still loved him, and she planned to fight for that love.
Fifteen minutes later, Michael stuffed the last forkful of waffle into his mouth and licked his lips.
Devon pointed to the napkin in his lap, hanging toward the floor. “Use that, and then get dressed and brush your teeth. You’re going to visit Dr. Elena today.”
She studied her son’s face for any anxiety, or any more anxiety than he’d been exhibiting since the murder, but he just dragged the napkin across his mouth and dropped it on his plate before pushing back from the table.
Kieran started running water in the sink for the dishes and squirted a line of yellow liquid into the stream from the faucet. “I need to brush my teeth, too. I’ll meet you in the bathroom, Michael.”
“Go now.” Devon flicked her fingers at him. “I’ll take care of the dishes.”
As Kieran turned to follow Michael, Devon put a hand on his forearm. “Maybe you should think about keeping some of your stuff here so we don’t have to keep running over to your parents’ place every morning.”
The muscles in his arm tensed, creating rippling cords beneath her fingers. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Last night…”
“Last night you had a nightmare.”
“I almost strangled you. God knows what I would’ve done to Michael if I’d come upon him in his bed.”
She swiped her fingers through the air as if wiping away his words. “I don’t believe you’d harm either one of us.”
He reached out and the suddenness of the movement caused her to flinch backward. With his eyelid half closed he traced a line on her throat. “But I did harm you.”
“You stopped when you woke up. It’s not something you would do in a conscious state.”
“You don’t know that. Hell, I don’t know that.”
Her pulse pumped beneath the pad of his finger, sending hot-blooded anger coursing through her veins. She shoved her index finger against his solid chest. “I do know that. You may have lost your memory, Kieran, but I still have mine. You wouldn’t hurt anyone you lov…cared about. It’s not in you.”
They stood almost nose to nose, in each other’s face. A muscle twitched in his tightened jaw, and Devon could almost hear his teeth grinding.
“You don’t know what’s in me anymore, Devon. I’m a changed man.”
“In your mind.” She rapped on her head with her knuckles. “Stop saying it, stop trying to convince yourself. You’re the same man. You did what you had to do to survive.”
“If you knew…”
A high-pitched scream cut off Kieran’s words, and they both jerked their heads around at the same time.
Michael, framed in the kitchen entryway, hands pressed against his ears, screamed again, his mouth a gaping hole in his face.
The sound plunged a dagger in Devon’s heart and she spun around and fell to her knees in front of him. She gathered him in her arms. “It’s okay, Michael. Everything’s okay. Kieran and I were just talking.”
“Oh, great.” Kieran lunged for the kitchen faucet, almost slipping on the water that had dripped to the floor from the overflowing sink.
Devon left him to clean up that mess while she carried Michael to his bedroom to clean up another kind of mess. How could they be so insensitive to argue in front of him? He’d just discovered his father, and now he had the tension of arguing parents. He didn’t need tension right now.
She sat on the edge of his bed and snuggled him into her lap. At least he’d dropped his hands from his ears. “It’s okay. Kieran and I were just talking about something important. We’re not mad at each other.”
“Daddy.”
Devon’s heart almost stopped beating in her chest. She swallowed a huge lump in her throat. “That’s right. Daddy.”
“Did I hear my name?”
Kieran stepped into the room, dwarfing the pint-size furniture, a wet dish towel bunched in his hands. “Sorry your mom and I got carried away. Grown-ups do that sometimes. You can talk to Dr. Elena today about how that made you feel.”
Michael shook his head from side to side.
Kieran sat next to Devon on the bed, and the mattress dipped, forcing her and Michael to slide toward him.
“You know, you can tell Dr. Elena everything. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to see her right after you, and I’m going to tell her everything that’s bothering me.”
“Your eye?” Michael pointed to his own eye.
“Yep. I’m going to tell her about my eye and about all kinds of other things.”
Tears pricked behind Devon’s lids as she met Kieran’s gaze above Michael’s head. He was going to try to get his nightmares under control. Maybe Michael had reminded him that he needed to make the effort instead of just accepting that he was some kind of monster.
Kieran sprang off the bed. “We’d better get going if we want to make it to Dr. Elena’s office on time.”
Devon swung by Kieran’s place, and a smile curved her lips when he jogged down the porch steps with a black duffel bag slung over one shoulder.
She popped her trunk from inside the car, and he loaded the bag in the back.
Cruising into downtown, Devon parked the car on the other side of the office buildings, away from the burned- out restrooms. If Michael associated Elena’s office with the bombing of the bathroom, he didn’t show it.
They climbed up the back stairs and pushed through the office door. Elena waved them in while she continued talking to a man, his shoulder propped up against the inner office door. When he turned, Devon recognized him as Elena’s date from last night.
He gave a brief nod and turned back to Elena. “I’ll see you later.”
He sidled out of the room without acknowledging them further, most likely trying to honor the confidentiality of Elena’s doctor-patient relationship. Guess the cat was out of the bag now that at least one of them was Elena’s client.
“Nice to see you again, Michael.” Elena smiled at Michael and jerked her chin at the closed door. “That was Sam from last night. He moved into the office a few doors down… Accountant.”
“My session with Michael is one hour today, so you can wait in here or take a walk.”
Kieran grabbed a magazine from the rack and settled into a chair. “We’ll wait in here today.”
Devon took a position in the corner of a love seat and said, “We’ll be right out here, Michael.”
Elena ushered Michael into the office while Devon slid a magazine from the table and flipped through it for several minutes. She glanced up several times, but Kieran seemed intent on his wildlife magazine.
Finally, she tossed the magazine onto the cushion beside her. “So, do you think he’s telling her all about his awful parents and how they were arguing this morning?”
Without looking up from his reading material, Kieran said, “I hope so. That’s the point, isn’t it?”
Devon chewed on her bottom lip. “We weren’t even raising our voices, were we? It didn’t seem that bad to me.”
“For us it was a tense discussion. For Michael-” he shrugged “-who knows what was going through his head?”
Kieran still had his nose buried in the magazine, so Devon tried reading hers again, her ears tuned to every sound from Elena’s inner sanctum. She and Kieran had decided to wait for Michael in the office today, but being right outside that door made her more nervous than being away from the office.
The outer door inched open, and Kieran jerked his magazine down to peer over the top.
With her heart pounding, Devon raised her brows at him, as he patted the inside pocket of his jacket where he’d stowed his weapon. The door slowly eased open. Sam poked his head through the crack and Devon released a pent-up breath.
“I’m sorry. I think I left my card key to the tenant underground parking garage in here.”
“Is this it?” Kieran peeled a white, plastic card from the glass-topped table next to him and held it up between two long fingers.
“Thanks.” Sam stepped forward and took the card. “I was hoping it was out here. I need to get my car out of the garage, but of course I wouldn’t have disturbed Dr. Estrada while she was with a client.”
After he snapped the door behind him, Devon shrugged. “Well, I guess he knows which one of us is Elena’s
