Page 39 of The Devil Gets His Due

An image of him comes to mind, though, from one of those nights we were together. He was pushing my hair away from my face, about to kiss me, and looking at me like I was the moon and the stars. I think it might have been our wedding.Huh.

“And now they’re talking about Daphne at full volume and she’s sitting right beside them. How is she not hearing this? The duke should run. She needs serious cardio and is deaf in one ear.”

I groan aloud. If he’s this bad withBridgerton,I can’t imagine what he’d say about365 Days. “Stop shitting on it and let me enjoy the fantasy of being courted by the perfect man.”

“Sohe’sperfect? How is the duke different from me?”

I bark a laugh. There is an entire universe between Simon, the Duke of Hastings, and Graham Tate. “He’s aduke.”

“I’d actually figured that out on my own.”

“He’s—”Cranky, commanding, intense, smug, fierce, handsome, amusing, intelligent. All words someone other than me might use to describe Graham, too, dammit. “British.”

His lips twitch. “Yes, there’s not much I can do about that part.”

“It’s sort of a dealbreaker, unfortunately.”

He laughs. To be honest, he has a pleasant laugh. I’ve dated men who make a noise that sounds like laughter but doesn’t feel like it. When Graham laughs, it’s like I’ve caught it in my own chest, some kind of minor virus that leaves me happy for the rest of the night.

If we weren’t going to be forced to share a child, he’s someone I might be friends with.

We’re at the final scene: Daphne and the Duke’s first dance, under the stars. Fireworks explode, the music swells…and Graham speaks.

“Those fireworks are going to destroy that lawn. Seriously. That grass is never coming back.”

22

GRAHAM

Imeet Keeley in the lobby of Julie’s office. It’s not her first sonogram, but it’s the first I’ll be present for, and I’m strangely nervous, though I’m not sure why.

“What do you want, anyway?” she asks as we wait. “A boy or a girl?”

“I don’t care as long as it’s healthy,” I tell her, though that’s not totally true. The real answer is that I want whatever won’t set my mom off, and there’s no way to know what that will be. The stuff that happened when Colin was a baby is always with us, somehow. “What about you?”

“I’d prefer a girl, but given my family curse, I guess I shouldn’t. Good news for you, or bad news depending on how much involvement you hoped to have with this kid: the O’Keefe women die really young.”

I swallow. She told me this before, though she doesn’t remember it.“If you hate me,” she’d said, “at least you won’t be stuck with me for long.”

I thought it was a joke at the time, and she’s still saying it like it’s a joke, but I’m starting to wonder—it’s a weird joke to make repeatedly.

“Just because your mom died young doesn’t meanyouwill.”

She laughs. “What if it’s my mom, my aunt, my grandmother, her sister, and my great-grandmother? Does that change your thoughts on the odds?”

She’s scrolling through something on her phone as if what she’s just said doesn’t matter. I reach for her arm to get her attention. “Did they all die of the same thing?”

She glances at me and away. “Everyone but my great-grandmother has died of cancer.Everyone. It’s the bit your internal medicine doc will gloss over: that you might just be genetically fucked and then all your efforts to stay healthy will be for naught.”

Her name is called and we rise to follow the nurse back to a room. “No offense, Keeley,” I say, “but I’m not sure you can claim you’re making a lot of effort.”

“Exactly. Because I watched my mother making green juice every morning and only eating salad, and look where it got her.”

I wonder how much of Keeley’s attitude toward life—her live-for-the-moment, who-cares-about-a-savings-account brand ofjoie de vivre—is related to this curse she seems to believe she’s under. And if that’s true, has having a kid changed it?

We are taken to a different room than usual, and this time there’s no undressing. Keeley simply reclines on a table and tugs her shirt up when Julie enters the room. Even the sight of her bare stomach is a wonder to me, with that unmistakable swell just beneath her skin.

Julie squirts a gel on Keeley’s stomach and starts moving a wand back and forth. An image appears on the screen—at first, it’s nothing discernible, just a mass of white and black, and then: a child. A child with long thin arms and legs, a nose—a single hand, fully formed.

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