Page 5 of Alfie: Part Two

Shan shook his head and started filling his plate. “As long as I don’t get more details, I’m just happy to welcome new grandchildren in the future.”

Ironically, my mom would fit in here. She’d been on my case before the divorce, wanting a third and fourth grandchild. I’d kept saying she should’ve had another kid if she wanted an army of grandbabies.

“Excuse me while I go check in on the kids,” Emilia said stiffly.

“We have a nanny for that, baby,” Finn laughed.

She shot him a glare before she stalked off.

My bad! It hadn’t been my intention to take down the queen, however temporarily.

“She’s my favorite again,” Finn chuckled around a mouthful of chips. “You’re a close second, Alfie.”

“That can’t be good,” I drawled, smirking. “By the way, should we be worried about Kellan?”

“Nah.” Finn waved that off.

Shan checked his watch. “I’ll give him another five minutes. He ran in right before you arrived, so…”

“For the third time,” Finn added.

In other words, they’d stayed at the pub late last night.

I bit into my chicken quesadilla and immediately had to take a bigger bite to catch the melted cheese running out. My fucking God, this was good. The chicken had a nice kick to it too.

“So, anyway…” Finn twirled the finger of doom, indicating he wanted to circle back to something. “You and your man. It would really work better for me if you got your shit together and remarried. Exes are unreliable.”

My eyebrows went all the way up there.

“Finnegan, for chrissakes,” Shan chastised. “Alfie’s marriage is none of your damn concern.”

Finn strongly disagreed. “It is when a love-sick Son is running his mouth to a possibly scorned former spouse who then feeds leads to the cops. It’s not rocket science, Pop. The reason we walk free is because we know when to keep our mouths shut.” He shifted his gaze to me. “Your ex may very well be trustworthy, but I can’t know that for sure, and I gotta draw the line somewhere. If you’re married, there’s increased protection by law—but most importantly, hopefullyloyalty. In your case, I don’t know what you have. I don’t know what you share with him, if anything.”

I set down my quesadilla and cleared my throat, and I wiped my fingers on the napkin. To be frank, I understood his concerns, so I was gonna be honest.

“We have a peace treaty as co-parents,” I said. “For the sake of his sanity, and in exchange for his silence, I share minor shit.”

He leaned back in his seat and lit up a cigarette. “Give me an example of minor.”

I nodded, thinking about the other night when West had to take the kids. “All right. The night we got called in for the shit about Tony and Colby. I had to drop Trip and Ellie off at West’s first, and when I came back, I had Colby with me. Naturally, I had to tell him something.”

He inclined his head.

“I told him the bare minimum,” I said. “I’ve admitted I’m basically Kellan’s PA, and most of what I do is making calls and answering texts. And then, as he got to experience, shit happens occasionally. So I told him I put together teams for work gigs, and sometimes we gotta go in to fix mistakes.”

“Did you use that term, or did you say deliveries?”

I squinted, honestly not remembering. “Does it matter? It might’ve been deliveries.”

He nodded once and flicked ashes on the ground. “In short, you gave him enough intel to get a case started against you,” he said. “If he goes to the Feds, they’ll wanna map out your routines and habits. If you let your ex-husband know you’re handling some of our deliveries, that’s an excellent piece of information the authorities are gonna wanna know.”

I automatically sat up straighter, and I felt the need to defend myself—and West. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“How do you know?” He put emphasis on pretty much every word. “Youse’re divorced, and you’re clearly still hung up on him, but does he feel the same way? What happened last night? I don’t think you’re the reason you’re not getting back together.”

Fuck. I could really use a shot of indifference right now. Instead, I was feeling unsettled and flustered. And I didn’t fucking do flustered.

“I don’t know how to sum up almost a decade of history, Finn,” I replied. “But if I didn’t feel I could trust West, I wouldn’t have shared anything at all. And let me be clear—I don’t share shit about anyone else. No dates, no locations, no names outside the family, nothing incriminating?—”

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