Chapter One

 

“THERE’S A PLACE  in France, where the naked ladies dance…”

“Oh, gross! I hate that song!”

“There’s a hole in the wall, and the boys can see it all…”

“Shut up! That is so disgusting—”

“And the cops don’t shoot, ’cuz they think it’s kind of cute…”

“Daddy, make Sean shut up! That’s such a totally disgusting song! Daddy!”

“When the dancers kick, every man will grab his—”

“Okay, okay,” Dennis broke in. He hadn’t been listening too closely to the lyrics Sean had attached to the classic snake-charmer tune, but he suspected something bad was about to emerge from his son’s mouth, and if that happened, something even worse—a blood-curdling scream—would emerge from his daughter’s. “Nobody wants to know what happens when the dancers kick,” he told Sean. “What everybody wants to know is, where the hell are your pj’s?”

The twins shrugged, not bothering to pretend they cared. The room they were supposed to be settling into was cluttered with suitcases, tote bags, packed cartons, empty cartons, and cartons lying on their side, disgorging their contents across the floor. The room measured fourteen by sixteen feet, yet only about three square inches of floor showed beneath the massive detritus of two seven-year-old lives.

Dennis had been combing through the twins’ assorted junk for the better part of an hour, and he still hadn’t found their pajamas. “I give up,” he said with a sigh. “Your mother must have packed your pj’s somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I know where.”

“I think you shouldn’t swear so much, Daddy,” Erin scolded, her hazel eyes round and earnest.

“I don’t sleep in pj’s,” Sean added, poking through a pile of assorted clothing. “I sleep in my swimsuit.”

“That’s disgusting.” Erin sent an indignant frown her father’s way. “I really don’t want to share a room with him, Daddy. He’s so gross. Did you hear the song he was singing? It has a very bad word in it. Did you hear? He was going to say—”

“I heard, I heard. Where are your pj’s, Erin?”

“I don’t need pj’s. I need a room of my own.”

“Yeah, you and Virginia Woolf.” Dennis rummaged through a half-filled carton, but found only an assortment of sweatshirts featuring the logos of every Super Bowl sponsor since 1975, along with a horrifying number of unmatched socks.

“At Mommy’s house I had my own room,” Erin reminded him. “I don’t see why I have to share a room with Sean.”

“Mommy’s house had more bedrooms,” Dennis explained, ignoring the sting of his conscience reminding him that Erin could easily have her own bedroom in Dennis’s apartment if he were willing to vacate his study and convert it into a room for her.

After all, it wasn’t Erin’s fault that her mother had decided, after her boyfriend took a job with a high-tech company out in Seattle, that she wanted to move there with him and get married. Nor was it Erin’s fault that Dennis had claimed he would rather accept full custody of the kids than let his ex-wife move them three thousand miles from Arlington, Connecticut, where Dennis lived. Nor was it Erin’s fault that Dennis’s ex-wife had said okay, called her lawyer, and asked him to do the paperwork that would transfer custody to Dennis.

He’d been elated, even if he suspected that she’d agreed to give him the kids for selfish reasons. She’d said something about how she wanted to start fresh, and starting fresh didn’t mean dragging a pair of seven-year-old kids—who referred to her new life partner as Mr. Potato-Head, for some reason—across the country, away from the town where they’d been born and their father still lived.

Whatever her motives, Dennis had been delighted to go from a weekend Daddy to the real thing, full-time, seven days a week. But now, four hours after Dennis had driven with the twins to the airport to wave their mother off, reality was kicking in. Reality was that he owned an elegant penthouse co-op high above downtown Arlington, with spectacular views of the mountains to the north and west, and with two bedrooms and a study. Reality was that if he didn’t convert his study into a third bedroom, Erin and Sean were going to have to share sleeping quarters.

He really didn’t want to give up his study. It served as his at-home office. It was his retreat. His personal think tank. Did not wanting to give up that room mean he didn’t love his children?

“I don’t want to sleep with him because he’s disgusting,” Erin explained with self-righteous fervor. “Plus, he belches.”

“So do you,” Sean retorted. “Only thing is, I can belch louder. You’re just jealous.”

“I will not share a room with him, Daddy!”

“Sorry, sweetie,” Dennis murmured, abandoning his excavation of sweatshirts and widowed socks and straightening up. “If I could give you each your own room—” if I were willing to sacrifice my study “—I would. For now, how about if I make a dividing line down the middle of the room?” He shoved one of the cartons to the center of the room, then lined up another carton next to it, and another. “See? We could divide the room in half, and each of you can have your own half.” One of the cartons tilted slightly. Lifting it, he discovered a Hot-Wheels car underneath. He nudged the car out of the way and set the box back down. Then he gestured at the two beds, on opposite walls. “This half is yours, and the other half is Sean’s.”

Erin contemplated the arrangement, not quite convinced. “He can peek over the top.”

“Who’d wanna look at you?” Sean countered, then belched very loudly.

Erin cringed. “Eeeeuw! Daddy—”

“All right. House rule: no belching,” Dennis declared.

“I’m a Budweiser frog,” Sean boasted, discovering a pair of swimming trunks in a suitcase. “That wasn’t a belch. That was me croaking. Bud.”

Sean croaking Bud sounded an awful lot like a belch to Dennis. “If you’re a frog, I’m going to make you sleep in the bathroom. Now guys, come on. It’s nine o’clock, you have school tomorrow, and you should be in bed.”

“How is the bus going to find us?” Erin demanded. “Our old bus stop was near Mommy’s house.”

“I’ll drive you to school,” Dennis promised. His apartment building was located in a different primary-school district from the one the children used to live in, but he had decided to keep them at their old school for continuity’s sake. The least he could do to make the transition easier for them was to chauffeur them to school in the morning. He’d already hired a part-time nanny named Betty Grover to pick them up at school at three in the afternoon, bring them home and remain with them until he got home from work.

“I can’t find my night gown,” Erin announced. “Can I sleep in one of your T-shirts, Daddy?”

“My shirts will be too big,” he warned, knowing he would let her sleep in all his T-shirts at the same time if it would make it easier for her to share the bedroom with her brother. “Which one do you want?”

“The gray one with the Blood Of Sean on it.”

Dennis stifled a shudder. He’d been wearing that shirt a few months ago, when Sean had spouted a nosebleed. Once the nasal Red River had subsided, Dennis had tried to wash the stains left behind on his shirt, but several runs through the washing machine had failed to erase them completely. He’d intended to throw the shirt away, but the kids wouldn’t let him. “It’s important,” they’d insisted. “It’s got the Blood Of Sean on it.”

He’d tossed it on the top shelf in his closet and hoped the kids would forget about the Blood Of Sean. Obviously, Erin hadn’t forgotten.

Sighing at her elephantine memory, he left the chaos of their bedroom and trudged down the hall to his own room. He hadn’t yet closed the drapes, and the wall of windows framed a lovely view of the night sky above the city’s sparkling lights. He would have appreciated the scenery, except that the night sky and the lights reminded him that it was well past nine o’clock. When the kids used to come to his place on a Saturday night, it didn’t matter if they stayed up past their bedtimes—which they usually did. But on a Sunday night, with everyone’s alarm clock set for seven a.m., this wasn’t good.

He hurried into his walk-in closet, groped around the shelf until he found the gory gray shirt, and carried it back to Erin, who slipped it over her head with a laugh that would have sounded joyful except for the cackling-witch undertone. “Look, Sean!” she gloated, nearly tripping on the hem of the shirt, which tickled her bare toes. “I’m wearing the Blood Of Sean.”

Sean didn’t seem envious. In his electric-blue swim trunks, he looked more ready for a day at the beach than a night in dream-land.

“Okay,” Dennis announced. “Brush your teeth, guys. Do you have your toothbrushes?”

“No,” they chorused, barreling past him to get to the bathroom.

He surveyed the turmoil, the cartons standing like a cardboard Wall of China down the center of the room, the Barbie with her head twisted backwards—Exorcist Barbie? he wondered—on the dresser, the glow-in-the-dark yo-yo on the chair, the Slinky slithering out from under Sean’s bed and the countless Beanie Babies scrimmaging on the floor in front of the closet. Dennis appreciated the way the bean-bag animals blocked the closet door, preventing him from opening it and going into cardiac arrest when he saw the bedlam inside. He owed those Beanie Babies his life.

Where the hell had his ex-wife packed the twins’ toothbrushes?

It didn’t matter; they kept spare toothbrushes at his place for their weekend visits. But still… He felt disoriented and dazed—and appallingly disorganized.

He was a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer with a firm grip on life. He prided himself on being smart, shrewd, capable, and generally all-around brilliant. Perhaps a tad arrogant—but his arrogance had a foundation in truth. He was a Powerhouse, a Master of the Universe, the sort of attorney for whom clients gladly paid many hundreds of dollars an hour, confident that they were going to get their money’s worth out of him.

How could acquiring full custody of his precious, beloved, adorable twin offspring overwhelm him? Just because their mother hadn’t packed their pajamas and toothbrushes in an accessible place…

The children exploded out of the bathroom, apparently racing each other back to bed. “He belched, Daddy, he belched!” Erin reported in her loudest tattle-tale whine.

“That wasn’t a belch. It was gag-gling.”

“He was gagging, Daddy!”

“I was gag-gling. You know, where you take water in your mouth and you put your head back and you spit it up like a water fountain? That’s called gag-gling.”

“He is so disgusting! Daddy, when can I have my own room?”

“That wasn’t belching. This is belching,” Sean clarified before ripping loose with a burp loud enough to register on the Richter scale.

“Daddy!”

“I was only demonstrating!”

“Daddy, make him stop!”

Dennis closed his eyes and cursed. Smart, shrewd and brilliant? Heaven help him if his adversaries in court ever found out that Sean and Erin Murphy, seven years old and cuter than sin, could reduce the smartest, shrewdest, most brilliant attorney in Arlington, Connecticut to a state of sheer panic.

“Daddy, don’t curse so much,” Erin chided.

Yeah, he added silently: sheer panic and way too much cursing. That was what his world was coming to.