Then Came November

By Thomas Mulroe

Author of the 'Sand Between the Toes' Series

A new holiday novel about family, fate and forgiveness in the tradition of Richard Paul Evans--his latest 'A Winter Dream'--reminding us that even those with everything may need what money can't buy: a second chance...

A holiday novel of hope, love, and redemption.

"Readers will relate to these characters, be moved to tears and laughter by them, and most importantly, be inspired by them...a journey you should definitely take."

Catherine McCarthy needs the ultimate second chance in T. Patrick Mulroe's 'Then Came November'--find out why and if she will get one...
T. Patrick Mulroe's 'Then came November' is like the warm embrace of returning home for the holidays--along with the often cold reality of the trials and complications that visiting family for the yearly celebration might at times include...
Is it possible to go home again? Catherine McCarthy will find out this holiday season...

Spend the holidays with a family you will never forget...

Christmas gathered in Maeve McCarthy's Cape Cod home each year is part of the glue that binds this family together. Amidst the festive packaging, savory baked goods, crackling fire in the kitchen's wood burning stove and colored lights there are small secrets about to be exposed that threaten the familiar joy of this family's tradition. Spanning from December through the following December, get to know this New England Clan as they move through the months of a year which will change all of their lives forever...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Mulroe
• Release date: Nov 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301990504

Thomas Mulroe

Passion and Vulnerability are constant themes in T. Patrick's novels. Often these themes come in the form of a ruptured family,dangerous attractions, inconvenient pregnancy,misguided abduction,angry encounters resulting in murder or obsessive love. Recently T. Patrick Mulroe identified himself to a group he was speaking to as a storyteller. This is the reason he writes--to tell a story. The books T. Patrick Mulroe writes are filled with real humans who often make mistakes or allow their passions to lead them down the road less taken. Through his fiction T. Patrick Mulroe combines his love of people and stories. More than anything else T. Patrick tries to create CHARACTERS a reader will never forget...and a STORY that keeps them turning the page.

Book preview

Prologue

While my husband lay dying I was in another man’s arms—his brother’s. On the day my husband was buried I was in bed with his brother, knowing everything lovers thirst after. Lying beside my brother-in-law, closing my eyes feeling more alive than I have ever felt in all of my thirty-four years of life, I knew all of the things love means for a heart to ever know. Morning came, finding him running down the backstairs as I greeted well-wishers drenched with heavy concern for me at the front door. My husband was dead. The world we had created together was gone. The thought of it was unbearable. While my husband lay dying I was in his brother’s arms, making love to him the way I have never made love to anyone in all of my entire life on the day that we buried him.

People ask me how I am doing. I say that I am doing fine. But in this life I move through I am at a table for one in a world where the norm seems to be service for two. To say that my husband is not on my mind would be a lie, but saying that his brother is no longer in my heart would be unspeakable.

Outside the house that I am unable to go back into for Thanksgiving I stand in the cold. He is inside. If heated faces inside should set eyes upon us together it would be over. He is still inside without me. I am no longer welcome in this place that I have called home. Watching him inside with the rest of our family, I tell myself that I am doing fine. I will be fine. This side of the glass is where I am now. I remember being on the other side of the window.

Part One:

Last Christmas

Catherine__________

Before there was scandal, prior to the heat of summer brought about by the angst of a spring born out of the dead of winter, there was Christmas. These days humiliation over the lusting that sabotaged my life this year follows me like a shadow. Winter bore heartache that bloomed into despair by spring, leaving me seduced by adultery come summer. Then came November. But first, there was last Christmas.

Nestled on the sofa of the condo on Charles Street, Beacon Hill, I watched Jack finish decorating the tree that he had dragged in the day before. Framed by the large four-paned windows of the turret-like space the white bulbs reflected off of the glass and shimmered against the wood floor. Jack bent his tall, lean, body now in his dark jeans and black sweater. Beyond him and the tree the lights of Boston’s skyline glistened in the falling snow like a scene from an urban holiday village.

Downstairs the door at the top of the stoop was graced with the largest wreath we had been able to find, red dogwood branches bundled in a box on the first step. It would be impossible to leave in the morning but we would. The long holiday weekend would not be the same if we did not go down Cape in the morning. Christmas would not happen anywhere else but in Maeve McCarthty’s home on South Street in Hyannis, all of us gathered in her parlor before Midnight Mass at Saint Xavier’s across the street.

Jack was in the bathroom of our master suite. He was making me wait for him. This had become our tradition. Ten years earlier we had argued, our first married Christmas, over the lights for the Christmas tree. Jack liked the old fashioned colored bulbs. I liked white lights. As a compromise we agreed to take turns each year. The first year we had agreed on white lights. Jack put colored lights on the tree. I sat in bed angry, ignoring him pretending to read. He came out of the bathroom naked, wearing only a string of white lights he plugged in. After that he did it each year. I sat in bed waiting for him.

My husband was my better half. He never acknowledged the fact but his family knew it. They could tell the moment they met me. I had come to work on Cape Cod as domestic help, one of many Irish flooding the tourist towns each summer. The summer I came to work in America I rented a room from Jack’s mother, Maeve McCarthy. She rents out the three second floor rooms of her home in Hyannis. The rent was cheap with a minimum use of the kitchen for coffee and a snack at lunch or late at night. I lived there for nearly two months before I met Jack.

At the time Jack lived in Boston, selling high end properties all over the city. He came down Cape the summer I had come from Ireland. His mother introduced us as I was heading out into the backyard for the bike Maeve allowed me to use to get back and forth to the motel I was working for in Yarmouth. Jack was dashing, pale with dark curly hair. By the end of his week down Cape we went to Four Seas Ice Cream in Centerville, ending the night on the flying horses on Main Street in Hyannis. In the fall I stayed in Hyannis instead of returning to Ireland, getting married to another man after I stole a woman’s fur coat from Midnight Mass.

In bed the night before we headed down Cape for the holidays last Christmas I hungered for Jack’s naked body. It was leaner than usual, a fact he attributed to