My hands started shaking while I was bathing the most feared man in Boston’s mother.

Not because I was afraid of him.

Not because there was a gun outside the bathroom door, or because half the men on the Mercer estate looked like they had forgotten how to smile years ago.

My hands shook because it was the anniversary of my mother’s death, and I had spent the entire morning pretending I was fine.

Evelyn Mercer sat in the deep porcelain tub with a towel draped carefully over her chest, her silver hair pinned away from her face. A stroke six weeks earlier had weakened the right side of her body, but it had done nothing to weaken her pride.

She noticed the tremor in my fingers immediately.

“Claire.”

“I’m fine.”

“That is what women say when they are very obviously not fine.”

I smiled despite myself.

Evelyn lifted one eyebrow.

“Do not give me sad eyes,” she said. “I had a stroke. I did not become a decorative pillow.”

“I wasn’t giving you sad eyes.”

“You were.”

“Maybe compassionate eyes.”

“Worse.”

I laughed softly and poured warm water over her shoulder.

The laugh almost broke me.

Exactly one year earlier, I had been sitting beside my mother’s hospital bed as her breathing slowed.

I remembered holding her hand.

I remembered trying to pray.

I remembered discovering afterward that grief did not arrive like a storm and then leave.

It moved into your body.

It waited.

Sometimes it hid in your shoulders.

Sometimes behind your ribs.

Sometimes in your hands while you were helping someone else’s mother bathe.

Evelyn’s weaker hand slipped against the edge of the tub.

I caught it.

“Easy.”

“I hate this,” she whispered.

The humor vanished from her face.

For the first time that morning, she looked eighty years old.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I do.”

Her eyes searched mine.

I swallowed.

“My mother needed help near the end.”

Understanding softened Evelyn’s expression.

I steadied her hand between both of mine.

Then, without thinking, I whispered the same prayer I had spoken through countless impossible nights.

“Lord, stand in the space where my hands cannot hold what I cannot hold.”

Evelyn closed her eyes.

I did too.

And what I did not know was that her son was watching us.

Vincent Mercer sat twenty yards away in his private office, staring at a security monitor that had been installed after a former caregiver had tried to steal from his mother.

He saw my hands shake.

He saw me wipe a tear before Evelyn could notice.

He heard the prayer.

And according to what he told me much later, the moment those words reached him, a man who had built his life around never being surprised went completely still.

Because he had heard them before.

Twelve years earlier.

From a stranger he had never forgotten.

I knew none of that.

All I knew was that I had six weeks of work ahead of me and a mortgage that did not care about grief.

I had accepted the private caregiving job because Evelyn paid more than three ordinary clients combined. My mother’s final medical bills had gutted my savings, my little house in Briar Glen needed a new furnace, and the engagement I had thought would become my future had collapsed nine months before my mother died.

At thirty-eight, I had become very skilled at beginning again.

I was not interested in romance.

Especially not romance involving Vincent Mercer.

Everyone in eastern Massachusetts seemed to know something about him.

Some said he owned shipping companies.

Some said he owned politicians.

Some whispered that men who crossed him tended to leave Boston quickly, assuming they were lucky enough to leave at all.

I did not ask which stories were true.

I was there to take care of his mother.

Nothing more.

The first time I met him, he entered Evelyn’s bedroom while I was checking her blood pressure.

He was forty-nine, tall, broad-shouldered, with dark hair beginning to silver at the temples.