Keeper of the Light

“Ah, yes,” Mary said. She sounded like one of the Kennedys, the way she strangled most of her words.

“My family has a lot of money.” Annie rolled a berry between her thumb and forefinger. “My father is a heart surgeon. People come from all over the world to see him.”

There was pride in her voice. And something else. A wistfulness, perhaps.

“I haven’t seen him or my mother for a while, though.”

“Why is that?”

Annie shrugged. “Well, they’re incredibly busy. My father with his practice, my mother with her volunteer stuff and garden club and things. They never had much time for a kid. I was the only one, but even so, I think I was an afterthought. They just threw money my way from time to time. They had so much money they didn’t know what to do with it. I could have anything I wanted. Anything material, at any rate.” She looked out at the horizon. “I’m not going to raise my son that way. Not on your life.”

Annie visited Mary often after that first meeting, sometimes bringing her adorable baby son along with her, sometimes not. Mary looked forward to her visits, and she found herself listening for the sound of Annie’s little red Volkswagen out on the dirt road, or searching for it when she was high up in the tower. Annie brought her things—bread or cookies she’d baked, or sometimes full meals that she’d make for Mary while cooking for her own family. Mary chided her. “You shouldn’t spend your money on me, child,” she’d say, but Annie said it wasn’t polite to turn down a gift or mention what it might have cost the giver. Although Annie had come from money, she didn’t seem to have it now. Her husband had to work long hours, she said, often at night, driving out to the mainland farms to doctor cows and horses and goats. There was little work to keep him gainfully employed on the Outer Banks themselves.

It was only a few weeks after Mary first met Annie that the Park Service started talking about taking over the operation of the Kiss River Lighthouse. Rumors flew around Kiss River. They would pave the little sand road, people said. They would turn the keeper’s house into a tourist attraction.

For the first time in her life, Mary had trouble sleeping. She knew what was coming, and she wasn’t surprised when someone from the Park Service came to tell her that her services would no longer be needed. As a matter of fact, the man said, Mary would have to leave. They would help her relocate, he continued, but by that time Mary had shut the door in his face.

Annie got wind of it and was off and running before Mary knew she was involved. She had petitions signed, and dragged the newspapers into the fracas. She even showed up on Mary’s doorstep one day with a television crew. She left no stone unturned, no politician unharassed in her rigorous, though often disorganized, crusade. By the time it was all over and Mary was granted permission to stay in one half of the keeper’s house, everyone in the Outer Banks knew Annie’s name as well as hers.

“Come on, now, Mary. Into your chair. Time for dinner.”

Mary felt someone tugging at her arm. She opened her eyes to see Gale, one of the young girls on the retirement home staff, holding her cane in front of her. She looked out at the street.

“Is the young man still here?” she asked. Then she remembered watching him get into his car and drive away.

“No, Mary. Your visitor left an hour ago.”

“He’ll be back,” Mary said, rising to her feet, wincing as her left foot hit the floor and sent the pain up into her hip. “He’ll be back, all right.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Alec could have taken his film into the studio anytime that week, but he waited until Saturday. It wasn’t until he’d pulled into the parking lot that he admitted to himself the reason for his delay: he wanted to see Olivia Simon again. He’d found himself talking to her in his head all week, telling her things about Annie other people were no longer interested in hearing. He could always talk to Tom Nestor, but Tom’s grief was still as real as his own, and that bothered Alec. He had never particularly liked sharing Annie with Tom.

Olivia was at the work table where he was accustomed to seeing Annie. Her head was bent low, and she was wearing Annie’s old green safety glasses. It had given him something of a jolt, seeing her in those glasses for the first time last week, but he could think of no good reason why she shouldn’t use them.

She was holding the soldering iron and a coil of solder. Tom leaned close to her, guiding her fingers, giving her encouragement. Cigarette smoke snaked into the air above Tom’s head. He had never smoked in here when Annie was alive.

Tom looked up as Alec closed the front door.

“Howdy, Alec,” he said.

Olivia lifted her head from her work and smiled.

“Hi.” Alec walked over to the table and peered down at the pieces of glass. “What are you working on?” he asked Olivia.

She handed him a sheet of graph paper, and he studied the design drawn in felt tip pen—a rectangle with a crazy quilt of shapes inside it, each labeled a different color. He smiled at its simplicity, and at the pleasure in her face.

“She’s a natural,” Tom said, nodding toward her, as Alec placed the paper on the table again.

“I’m a novice,” Olivia corrected him, and neither Tom nor Alec was about to argue the point.

Alec tapped her lightly on the shoulder and she looked up at him, the green of the oversized glasses a near match for her eyes. “Let me buy you lunch,” he said. “A real one. No indigestion this time.”

She seemed to weigh the invitation for a moment, then nodded. “All right.”

Alec went into the darkroom and began developing the black and white film he’d used the Sunday before. He thought of the little stained glass panel Olivia was working on. Annie’s first panel had been large and elaborate—two sheep standing in a meadow composed of five different greens. She had always refused to waste her time on anything just for the practice. If her first effort didn’t produce something she could display with pride, there would be no second attempt.

He met Olivia in the parking lot at noon. “Are you in a hurry?” he asked as she got into his Bronco. “We can drive up to Duck and eat on the sound if you have the time.”

“That’s fine.” She buckled her seat belt across the lap of her white cotton pants, and for a few seconds he was mesmerized by the delicacy of her hands, the whiteness of her fingers, and the smooth, rounded tips of her short nails. He remembered what she’d told him about holding Annie’s heart in her hand, and he could barely tear his eyes away as he started the Bronco and pulled it out onto the road.

“I haven’t been up this far,” she said when he took the right fork in the road, heading toward Duck.

“Really?” That seemed ridiculous. “It’s just a few miles from where you live, and you’ve been down here…how long?”

“Nearly a year,” she admitted. “I started working the day after we moved here. We had a new house to fix up, and there simply hasn’t been any time for us to explore the area.”

She spoke as though she and her husband were still together. Maybe in the week since he’d seen her things had changed. Maybe he’d moved back in.

They got a table on the deck outside the tiny restaurant. They were directly over the water, and a few fat geese looked up at them expectantly as he and Olivia took their seats.

They both ordered crab salad. Alec was relaxed, a different person than he’d been a week earlier. He remembered ordering their sandwiches in the deli, his body coiled and tense, ready to bolt. He’d been afraid to hear Olivia talk about the night Annie died, but it had helped him immeasurably to listen to her describe what happened, to hear her talk about feeling the same desperate need to keep Annie alive that he had felt.

He ordered wine, but Olivia did not, patting her stomach by way of explanation, and he remembered the baby.

“How are you feeling?” he asked. She looked healthy, except for the nearly translucent whiteness of her skin, which he assumed was natural for her.

“I’m all right,” she said. “A little tired. I worry about how the baby’s being affected by the stress I’m under.”

“You husband’s still gone?”

“Yes.” She looked down at her hands in her lap, probably playing with her ring as she had the week before. “I never imagined going through a pregnancy alone, much less raising a child by myself.” She smiled up at him. “I have nightmares that it might be twins. That’s all I’d need.”

“Are there twins in your family?”

“I’m one.”

“Really? Identical?” He tried to picture two of her.

“No. He was a boy.”

“Was?”

“He died a few years ago.” Olivia brushed her hand through the air, obviously whisking that topic away. “Anyway, I’d get this feeling every once in a while that there were two of them in here and it made me panicky. But I heard the heartbeat at my doctor’s appointment this week, and there was just one.”

They were quiet while their food was set in front of them. A ray of sunlight shimmered in Olivia’s dark, arrow-straight hair.

“How are things with your husband?” he asked when the waitress had left their table.

Olivia lifted her fork. “Not good,” she said. “He seems completely disinterested in me. I called to tell him I love him—as you suggested—and he said I shouldn’t bother, that he’s not worth it.” She tried to smile, but didn’t quite succeed.

“Maybe he feels guilty about the affair.”

He saw her start. “He didn’t have an affair. I told you it was more of a fantasy.”

“Sorry,” he said.

She took a bite of her crab salad, chewing and swallowing before she spoke again. “He worked with her, and then he became obsessed with her, talking about her all the time. He’d compare me to her, and I didn’t compare too well.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“She was married and not the least bit interested in him.

He admitted that it was completely one-sided.” She spoke forcefully, as if she were trying to convince herself as much as she was him. Maybe more. “Nevertheless,” she continued, “I didn’t measure up to his image of this woman, so when she…so even though he couldn’t have her, he still left me.”

Alec frowned. Her husband sounded like a jerk.

“She was all he’d talk about, and I put up with it. I thought I shouldn’t overreact, I should let him talk and get it out of his system, but he never did.”

“Did he leave so he could get closer to her? I mean, forgive me, Olivia, but maybe he wanted to have an affair with her and didn’t feel right about it while he was still with you. So he…”

Olivia shook her head. “She moved away before he moved out.”

“Where did she go? Could he still be in touch with her?”

She suddenly laughed, then covered her mouth with her hand. “No, I’m sure he isn’t.” She picked at the crab salad with her fork. “She’s in California.”

“California’s not on another planet. What makes you so sure he’s not still communicating with her?”

“He would have told me. He never hid his feelings from me, although at times I wished he had.” She looked across the table at him. “She was a better person than me in some ways,” she said. “Ways that were important to my husband.”

Alec sat back in his chair. “Hey, listen,” he said, “the man’s obsessed. Irrational. Don’t get sucked into thinking he’s right. He never really knew her. If he’d ever had the chance he probably would have figured out she was a shrew.”

She lowered her head, and he saw a small, glistening tear-drop on her lower lashes, watched as it fell to her lavender blouse, where it made a dark round spot above her breast.

He leaned toward her. “Olivia?”

She raised her napkin to her eyes, glancing at the other diners. “I’m sorry,” she said softly, “I’m sure you didn’t invite me to lunch so that I could embarrass you.”

He pulled his chair closer to the table. “I didn’t invite you to lunch to upset you, either.” His knees touched hers beneath the table, and she pulled back slightly.

She began slowly shredding her napkin into long, ragged strips. “I just don’t understand it,” she said. “He was so wonderful before he met her. Our marriage was really good, excellent, and then suddenly it fell apart. I keep waiting for the old Paul to come back, but it’s as if he died.”

Alec shook his head. “Probably just hibernating. Stay in his life until he wakes up, Olivia. Remind him how good things used to be.”

She had stopped crying, but her nose was still red and it made her look helpless. Nothing like the woman he’d met the week before, the woman who had meticulously described her attempt to save Annie’s life.

“I’ve been trying to be a little more like her,” she said. “Like the other woman.”

Alec frowned again. “It’s Olivia he fell in love with, right? It’s Olivia he had the healthy relationship with, not this—” he wanted to say bitch, but he did not quite feel comfortable using that word in front of her “—this woman who brings out the craziness in him.”

She folded her arms across her chest, her hands balled into tight, white fists. “I was infertile,” she said. “I think that’s when it changed. When his feelings changed. I had surgery, but it was too late to snap him out of it.”

“Maybe if you told him about the baby?”

“Then I’d never be sure if it was me or the baby he wanted.”

There was a sudden bleating sound from her purse, and she reached in to turn off her beeper. “Is there a phone here?” she asked.

“I’m sure they’ll let you use the one inside.”

She stood up, straightening her spine and giving a slight toss to her shimmery dark hair as she walked into the restaurant, once again the competent doctor.

He picked apart his uneaten slice of bread and was feeding chunks of it to the geese by the time Olivia returned to the table and took her seat again.

“Do you have to go?” he asked.

She shook her head. “They can handle it without me.” She looked down at her shredded napkin, frowning, as though she had no idea how it had gotten there. She scooped the shreds and deposited them on her plate, giving him a rueful smile. “I’m sorry, Alec,” she said. “Next time I start babbling about my problems, shove a cork in my mouth, okay?”

“I don’t mind listening,” he said, dropping the last piece of bread into the water. The geese fought over it, noisily. “Your circumstances are very different from mine, but the bottom line is that we’re both alone. I know how that feels.”

She played with the straw in her iced tea, now that her napkin was no longer available. “When I start missing Paul, I think about you without Annie—without the possibility of Annie—and I…” She hesitated, shook her head. “I miss touching. I don’t mean sex, exactly, but just…holding hands, just that intimacy with another person. You don’t know how good you’ve got it till it’s gone.”

He nodded, and she leaned back in her chair and dropped her hands to her lap again.

“I’ve started getting massages just so I can feel someone touching me,” she said.

He smiled at her candor, and he understood what she meant. He wondered if she went to a man or a woman, or if it would matter, or if he should get a massage himself. How would it feel, paying someone to ease the pain of a body suffering from neglect?

They stopped for the light at the corner of Croatan and Ash on the way back to the studio, and Alec pointed down Ash toward the sound. “See the third cottage on the right?” he asked. “That was where Annie and I first lived when we moved here.” The small cottage stood on stilts above the sand. It was blackened with age; it had been black even when he and Annie lived there. “We didn’t have much money, as you can tell.”

Olivia was quiet as the Bronco began moving again, slowly, through the heavy summer traffic. “I started working at the shelter after the night Annie died,” she said finally.

He glanced over at her. “Why?” He hated that place.

She shrugged. “Well that was the first I’d become aware of its existence. My husband was gone and I had the time.” She looked over at him. “The staff still talk about Annie.”

He smiled. “Do they?”

“They adored her. They talk about how she was always full of ideas and how everyone depended on her creativity. The place is falling apart without her. At least that’s what they say.”

“Like my house,” he said, almost to himself.

He pulled into the studio parking lot. Olivia unbuckled her belt, but turned in her seat to face him. “What was she really like, Alec? When they talk about her at the shelter she sounds like she should be canonized.”

He laughed. “I doubt they canonize atheists.” He turned the air conditioner up another notch. “She had very strong values and she put her money where her mouth was, literally. She donated practically all the money she made to various causes. Animal rights, AIDS, the homeless, the right-to lifers.”

“The right-to-lifers?”

“Oh, yeah. She was a rabid antiabortionist. I made donations to Planned Parenthood to try to nullify her effort.” He smiled at the memory. “Made her mad as hell.”

“I’m surprised she’d be antiabortion. She sounds so liberal.”

“She was about most things, but she was also very pro-family.” He looked up at the studio windows. “People talk about her like she was perfect, but she wasn’t. She was human. She’d get moody sometimes.” He felt a little guilty, tarnishing Annie’s image in Olivia’s mind, but those strange periods of melancholy were as much a part of Annie as her altruism. It was a moodiness that came and went in waves. He never understood it, and she never seemed able to explain it to him. She would withdraw from him, from everyone. It’s my dark side, she’d tell him, and he could almost see the black shroud settling over her shoulders, over her head. He learned quickly there was nothing he could do to turn the tide of those moods. All he could do was wait for them to pass on their own. It bothered him enormously that she had died in the midst of one, that she had died troubled.

“I’ve come to admire her.” Olivia sounded almost shy. “Now that I know how challenging it is to work in stained glass, I look at her things and I’m in awe.”

He was touched. He looked up at the studio and could just make out one of Annie’s few remaining stained glass panels, a design of beveled glass. “She was an extremely talented artist,” he said. “I think she could have gone a lot further if I hadn’t dragged her out of school to get married.”

“Where was she going?”

“Boston College.”

“Really?” Olivia looked slightly stunned. “That’s where my husband went. He graduated in seventy-three.”

“That would have been Annie’s class,” Alec said. “Next time you speak to him, ask him if he knew her. Her maiden name was Chase.”

Olivia was quiet for a moment. “Well,” she said finally, reaching for the handle of the door. “Thank you for lunch.”

He stopped her with his hand on her arm. “Do you have many friends here?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Just at work.”

He pulled out his wallet and removed a business card. He turned it over and wrote down his home phone number. “Keep me posted on how things go with your husband,” he said, handing it to her.

“Thanks.” She started to step out of the car.

“Olivia?”

She turned to look at him.

“I want you to know how glad I am that you were the doctor in the emergency room that night.”

She smiled. “Thank you,” she said. She got out of the car and closed the door softly behind her. He watched her step around the front of the Bronco, brushing a strand of her sleek, dark hair from her face.

Her husband was a fool.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was the fourth time Olivia had stopped in to look at the crib. She’d intended to go directly home after Alec dropped her off, but the little shop was right across the parking lot from the studio and it had a lure on her she could feel from a mile away.

The crib was a white Jenny Lind, and she could picture it in the small third bedroom of the house. It would look wonderful, that clean white against the sunny yellow wallpaper she had already picked out. She wished she could buy the crib now, today, but there was still the chance that Paul might stop by the house for something. She didn’t want him to learn he was going to be a father from the sudden appearance of a crib rather than from her.

She was still clutching Alec’s business card when she returned to her car. It was soft as felt from months of being carried in his wallet. She slipped it into the back of her own wallet, gnawing on her lip. She had lied to him. Omitted things. She hadn’t told him that Paul was the author of that article on Annie in Seascape. What choice did she have? She couldn’t take the chance of telling him, of having him realize it had been Annie that Paul worshiped.

When she got home, she made a batch of cookies—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d baked—and changed into a blue flowered blouse Paul had always loved on her. She studied her map at the kitchen table, checking it against the address he’d given her, while the house filled with the smell of oats and brown sugar. She carried the cookies out to the car and drove the ten miles to South Nag’s Head.

It was close to six when she pulled up in front of his house, a small gray cottage one block from the ocean, in the midst of the tourists and their summer rentals. It was new. She could smell the cedar siding as she stepped onto the front deck and knocked at the door. She had to knock a second time before Paul opened it.

“Olivia,” he said, not bothering to mask his surprise.

She smiled. “I wanted to see your new house.” Her tone was that of an intimate friend. Curious. Caring. “And I made some cookies for you.”

He stepped aside to let her in. “You baked? I didn’t think you knew how to operate an oven.”

His house felt like a shrine to Annie. Each of the four large windows in the living room was adorned with a stained glass panel—two of the silk-clad women, and two underwater scenes filled with tropical fish and fluid strips of blue and green in that distinctive Annie O’Neill style. Tom Nestor had explained that technique to her at length—twice—and she still could not begin to understand how it was done.

“Your house is very nice, Paul,” she said.

There were four skylights in the cathedral ceiling above them and they let in a welcome pool of clear white sunlight.

“Thanks.” He walked over to the dining area and began straightening the already neat piles of paper on the dining room table, the table she had long considered her own. He seemed flustered at having her there, and she felt as though she’d walked in on him with another woman. In a way, she had.

“I’m interrupting your work,” she said. His portable computer was also on the table, and it was apparent he’d been in the throes of something when she arrived.

“No, that’s all right. I’m ready for a break. Have a seat.”

She lowered herself into one of the familiar dining room chairs.

“I’ve got some iced tea. Or would you rather have wine?”

“Tea would be great,” she said. She watched him disappear into the kitchen, knowing she was keeping things from him as well. She could hardly tell him she’d had lunch with Alec, and she certainly wouldn’t ask him if he’d known Annie went to Boston College. She could imagine his reaction if that was something he hadn’t known. He’d torment himself over what might have been. She didn’t want to feed his fantasy of Annie any further.

He returned to the dining room and set her iced tea on the table, but he didn’t sit down, and he had brought nothing to drink for himself. He stood near the computer, hands in his pockets.

“Have a cookie.” Olivia gestured toward the plate.

Paul lifted the foil and raised a cookie to his mouth. “No arsenic in them I hope.” He smiled, and for a moment she was struck by his hazel eyes, by the warmth his smile gave them. Seeing that charm in his face made her realize how long it had been since she’d felt any affection at all from him. She wished she knew how to seduce. She had never learned—had steadfastly avoided learning—those skills.

She forced her eyes back to the table. “What are you working on?”

Paul glanced at one of the stacks of paper. “I joined the Save the Kiss River Lighthouse Committee. We’re putting together an educational brochure to generate interest in saving the lighthouse.”

He had always had a weird fascination with that lighthouse. The day they arrived in the Outer Banks, before they had even gotten all the boxes in the house, he went to see it. Olivia stayed home and unpacked, a little annoyed at being left to do the work by herself and disconcerted by the fact that he hadn’t invited her to come along. That day had been the beginning of the end.

“It was bizarre, Olivia,” he said now. “I walked into this meeting and who should be the chairman of the committee but Annie’s husband.” He looked at her and she knew he was checking to see if this was a safe topic. She could not be sure of her own expression. Alec was chairman of the lighthouse committee? Paul was working shoulder to shoulder with him? She thought quickly. Should she tell Paul that she knew Alec? Then she’d have to tell him about the stained glass lessons, the two lunch dates. She felt herself getting wrapped more tightly in the web of lies.

“I wanted to get up and leave,” he continued, waving the cookie in the air, “but I was trapped. I’d practically begged to be allowed to join, but the last thing I expected was to find Alec O’…” He stopped and grimaced. “I’m sorry. I’m sure you don’t want to hear any more of my Annie crap.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “You can talk about her. I know you need to. I know there isn’t anyone else you can talk to about her.” He probably felt the way she had earlier that afternoon when she’d bent Alec’s ear about him. She finally understood Paul’s need to spill it all out.

He sat down across the table from her, staring at her, and his eyes had reddened. “Why would you do that?” he asked. “Why would you sit here and let me ramble on about someone who destroyed your marriage?”

“Because I still love and care about you.”

He turned his face away from her. “I can’t talk about her to you anymore. It was never fair of me to do that.”

Olivia stood up and walked over to his chair. She knelt next to him, resting her hand on top of his, but he stiffened and drew his hand away.

“Don’t,” he said.

She sat back on the carpet. “Do you remember when we used to take those long walks together early in the morning?”

He frowned at her. “Why are you bringing that up?”

“It’s one of my favorite memories, walking with you through Rock Creek Park, holding hands. Buying bagels with cream cheese and scallions at Joe’s little deli and…”

“And your beeper going off half the time.”

She leaned back against the wall, defeated. “Did it seem like that often?”

“At least.”

“I’m sorry. If I’d known what it would cost me, I would have done something about it.” She had thought he’d admired her for her diligence. A workaholic, he used to call her, although he had always made it sound like a term of endearment rather than a complaint. Certainly he understood the forces that had made her that way. He understood them better than anyone. Even in high school and college, she’d intentionally lost herself in work, leaving herself no time for a social life. Work had kept her safe from the flirting she had never been able to master, the casual sex that was entirely out of the question. By the time she met Paul and discovered she felt safe with him, her work pattern was firmly in place and there seemed to be no reason to change it. Now she could see her mistake. She’d taken him for granted. She had given Paul so little of herself that he needed to turn to a fantasy to feel whole, and he’d found the fantasy superior to his marriage.

“It’s my fault.” She rested her head on her arms. “It’s my fault everything fell apart. I miss you so much, Paul. I would do anything if you’d come back. I’d quit my job. I’d work as a waitress. I’d shell shrimp. Shuck oysters. Just weekdays. No evenings or weekends.”

She heard him laugh and when she looked up he had taken off his glasses. His eyes were still rimmed with red, but there was a smile on his face.

“Liv,” he said, a tenderness in his voice she had not heard in many months. “I’m the one who’s screwed up here, not you.”

“Nine years,” she said. “You seemed happy. You seemed content.”

He nodded. “I was very content. It was good. It was nearly perfect. I’ve changed, Liv, and I’m sorry.”

She thought of the crib, of the heartbeat that had filled the examining room in her doctor’s office. “We could see a counselor,” she said. “There must be a way we can work it out.”

He shook his head and stood up, holding out his hand to help her up from the floor. He let go as soon as she’d reached her feet, and he started walking in the direction of the door, obviously telling her she had stayed long enough.

“Thank you for the cookies,” he said, opening the door.

She felt a wave of desperation as she stepped out onto the deck. She turned back to look at him. “I meant what I said, Paul. About changing. About quitting my job if that’s what it takes. Maybe I…”

He stopped her with another shake of his head. “You should have your own lawyer, Olivia,” he said, and then he closed the door softly between them.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

July 1991

“Where did you get that?” Clay looked across the breakfast table at his sister. Alec glanced up from the newspaper to see what he was talking about. Lacey wore a headset attached to a small red transistor radio which rested next to her plate. It was the first time he’d seen it.

“Jessica gave it to me for my birthday,” Lacey said, her voice flat. She picked up the radio from the table and attached it to the waistband of her shorts as she stood up, leaving half of her frozen waffle on the plate.

Alec frowned. “For your birthday? Which birthday?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Lacey grabbed her book bag from the counter. “I’ve gotta go.”

“Lacey, wait a second.” Alec stood up as Lacey slipped out the screen door. He heard the slap of her tennis shoes on the driveway as she ran out to the street to wait for the bus. It was her first day of summer school.

He looked at Clay, who stared back at him, his fork poised in the air. “We missed her birthday,” Clay said.

“We couldn’t have. It’s the first, right?”

“Right. And today’s the second.”

Alec felt as though someone had socked him in the gut. “Damn.” He sat down again, closing his eyes, pressing his fingers to his suddenly aching temples as he thought back to the day before. Lacey had been quiet at breakfast, and he’d been absorbed in a report on the erosion at Kiss River. He’d barely taken his eyes off it during the entire meal. She’d been up in her room when he got home last night. She said she wasn’t hungry, so he and Clay ordered a pizza and ate it by themselves in the kitchen. Lacey didn’t come out of her room the entire evening. He’d been surprised by that. She spent a lot of time in her room these days, but it was odd for her to completely disappear for the night.

“Dad?”

Alec opened his eyes at the sound of his son’s new, adult-sounding voice. He sat back in his chair with a sigh. “I don’t believe I did that,” he said. “Did I miss yours too?”

Clay smiled. “No, Dad, I’m October, remember?”

Alec ran his hand over his chin. He needed a shave. “We’ll have to celebrate it today,” he said. “I’ll pick up a gift for her. Will you have time to get her something, too?”

Clay nodded.

“What can I get?” He looked helplessly at his son. “What does she want these days?”

“Mom always got her an antique doll.”

“Yeah, but she’s fourteen now.” He had no idea where he could find one, anyway. Annie usually picked up the dolls sometime during the year and tucked them away for Lacey’s birthday. Besides, they were Annie’s special gifts. Annie died when Lacey was thirteen, so Lacey should have thirteen dolls.

After Clay left, he stopped by Lacey’s room. It was not nearly as messy as it had been before her whirlwind cleaning spree on the day of Clay’s graduation, but the clothes and papers were starting to mount up again. This room had become her refuge.

She’d come home late the other night, rushing past him to get to her room. But the glimpse he got of her was enough to tell him something was wrong: her blouse was misbuttoned, her face tear-streaked. He stood outside her door for several minutes, listening to her crying, before he knocked and went in. The room was very dark and he had to feel his way to her bed. He sat down on the edge and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw that she was on her side, facing the wall. She was sniffling as quietly as she could, trying to hide her tears from him.

“What’s wrong, Lace?” he asked.

“Nothing.” He had to lean close to hear her.

“Has someone hurt you?”

She made a sound of disgust. “God, you are so warped.”

Alec pressed his hands together in his lap. “Maybe it would help if you saw a counselor, Lace,” he said. “Would you like that? You’d be able to talk about whatever’s on your mind.”

She didn’t answer.

“Would you like to see a counselor, Lace?” he repeated.

“No.”

“Could you tell me what’s bothering you then?”

“I already told you, nothing.”

“Sweetheart.” He touched her arm and she snapped her shoulder away from him, a wounded sound escaping her lips.

“Would you please go away?” she asked.

He stood up and walked to the door. “I love you, Lace,” he said, before closing the door on her silence. He waited in the hall outside her room, and sure enough, her tears started again, worse this time, as though he had somehow increased her pain.

Now as he stood in the doorway of her room, he wondered how he could make everything up to her. The dolls stared back at him reproachfully, and the leather-clad, bare-chested young men on the walls leered. Well, he’d really given her something to cry about now.

He bought her a cake, chocolate with white frosting. He had the woman in the supermarket bakery write Happy Birthday Lacey, in blue letters amidst the sugar flowers on the top. He looked in the clothing store she used to shop in with Annie. The racks of shorts and T-shirts, skirts and dresses, overwhelmed him. He did not know her size. He no longer knew her taste. He finally settled on a gift certificate from the record store—he didn’t even know what kind of music she liked anymore—and feeling reasonably satisfied with himself, drove home to make her favorite chicken enchiladas for dinner.

The notecard in Annie’s recipe box offered him little guidance. Annie had obviously made up most of the enchilada recipe as she went along, and the little that was there was in her scratchy handwriting. He’d become good at deciphering it over the years, but just about all he could make out on this particular card was down in the lower right hand corner. Lacey’s fave! she’d written.

He called Nola. “Would you believe I forgot Lacey’s birthday?”

“I know, hon. Jessica told me.”

“I should have written it on the calendar. My memory’s not the greatest these days.”

“Don’t beat up on yourself, Alec. She’ll get over it.”

“I wanted to make those enchiladas Annie used to make. Lacey loves them, but Annie’s recipe is illegible. Do you have it?”

“Sure do. Let me come on over and help you.”

“Well, no, please. Don’t do that. Could you just read it to me?” Nola lived on the other side of the cul-de-sac and it would take her only a minute to come over, but that was the last thing he wanted. He wondered if she was aware of how carefully he avoided being alone with her.

There were more steps than he’d anticipated in making the enchiladas. He burned his fingers shredding the chicken, and destroyed four of the tortillas before he managed to get a system going for dipping them in the sauce and folding them quickly around the filling.

Lacey came in the back door at five-thirty and he wrapped his arms around her, hugging her close to him before she had a chance to object. She felt thin and stiff. The headset she wore was cool against his cheek and he could hear the faint rocking beat of the music. “I’m so sorry, Lacey,” he said. “The days just got away from me.”

She pulled away without looking at him. “It’s no big deal.”

She took the headset off and set it on the counter.

“Call Clay for dinner, okay?” he asked. “I made your favorite. Enchiladas.”

She glanced at the oven and headed toward the stairs.

“These are good, Dad,” Clay said, digging into the cheesy mass on his plate. The enchiladas did not taste like Annie’s and he wondered what he’d done wrong. Lacey hung her head over her plate, twisting her fork in the cheese, making a mess.

“Not like Mom’s, though,” Alec said, acknowledging his failure before either of them could.

“Mom put those little cans of green chilies in them.” Lacey didn’t lift her head.

“Ah,” Alec said. “I’ll know better next time.”

“Don’t bother,” she said, her voice sarcastic. Cruel.

Clay raised his eyes to Alec, incredulous. “You’re a bitch,” he said to Lacey, and Alec quickly shook his head at him.

“Let’s just get on with dessert,” he said. “I didn’t make it so maybe it’ll be a little better than dinner.”

The cake was waiting for him on the dining room table, and as he lit the fourteen candles it occurred to him that Annie would never have had a birthday celebration in the kitchen as he was doing. He hadn’t given it a thought. He and the kids had not eaten dinner in the dining room once since Annie died.

He carried the cake and its flaming candles into the kitchen, singing.

“Please don’t sing,” Lacey said as Clay joined in, prompting Clay and Alec to sing louder. Lacey clamped her hands over her ears. “Don’t!” she said. “I hate it!”

Alec saw the tears in her eyes and stopped singing, signaling to Clay to do the same. “Okay,” he said. “Enough of the entertainment.” He set the cake on the table and handed Clay the knife while he got the wrapped gifts from one of the cupboards. He placed them on the table in front of Lacey and felt suddenly mortified. There was a box from Clay—water shoes—and the thin envelope from himself. That was it. Annie always had dozens of things for her, for any of them. The table would be piled high with gifts wrapped in paper she had made herself. A day late and he still had not managed to do this right.

Lacey went through the motions. She genuinely liked the water shoes; he could see that in her face, and he was grateful to Clay for knowing his sister as well as he did. She thanked Alec for the gift certificate and then began idly poking at her cake. He felt desperate to make her happy.

“I have a check for you too, Lace,” he said, although he had not thought of one until this minute. “Fifty bucks. You can spend it on whatever you want.” Annie would have killed him. She would have laid him right out on the kitchen floor and kicked the life out of him.

All I ever got growing up was money, she’d said to him once, when he’d suggested giving money to the kids as a Christmas gift. That’s absolutely all I ever got, when what I really wanted was my parents. I would have traded everything I owned, every cent they ever gave me, if they’d just once said, “We love you, Annie. No matter what you do, no matter what you look like, you’re our child and we love you.”

“This is the first birthday in my entire life that I didn’t get a doll,” Lacey said. She was not looking at either of them. She poked her fork up and down in a pink sugar flower.

“Well, I figured you’re fourteen now,” Alec said. “Pretty old for a doll.”

She shrugged. “Mom said she’d get me one each year till I was twenty-one.”

“She did?” Alec asked, truly surprised.

Lacey looked up at him, meeting his eyes for the first time in what seemed like months, and he cringed at the hurt in her face. “When I have kids, I’ll never forget their birthdays.”

“I didn’t actually forget it, Lacey. I know your birthday’s July first. I just didn’t realize that it was already July.”

“So you thought maybe it was just June twenty-ninth or thirtieth, then, right? You must have been planning what you would get me. I just bet you were.” She got up from the table. She was starting to cry and trying to hide her face from him, letting her hair fall forward to cover her eyes.

Alec stood up too and reached for her shoulder. “Sweetheart…”

She jerked away from him. “I bet you know the exact date your stupid lighthouse was built, don’t you? I bet you have some gigantic anniversary celebration planned.” She took off out the back door.

“You have school tomorrow, Lace,” he called through the screen. “I don’t want…”

“Fuck you!” she shouted over her shoulder, words that shut him up, that sent a pain into his chest where the enchiladas lay like concrete behind his breastbone. He wanted to go after her, tell her he wouldn’t stand for her to talk to him that way, but Annie would never have made an issue out of it. Besides, Lacey had come entirely too close to the truth. The construction of the Kiss River Lighthouse began on April 5, 1869, and was completed five years later. The lantern was lit for the first time on September 30, 1874, and for this year’s anniversary of the first illumination they were indeed planning an enormous celebration. He had already ordered the cake.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was not exactly impulse that made Alec stop by the Kill Devil Hills Emergency Room. He’d been planning to do it for a few days now, but it wasn’t until he pulled into the parking lot, his heart rocketing a little from the memory of the last time he’d been there, that he knew today was the day.

The waiting room was packed, and he wondered if Olivia would be able to get away. He was pleased to see all those people, though. They gave the emergency room an entirely different appearance from the night Annie died. He would hardly know he was in the same place.

He approached the reception desk, where a balding, barrel-chested man was bullying the frightened young receptionist.

“I’ve been waiting a goddamn hour!” The man pressed against the desk, jutting his chin toward her. He held a blood-smeared rag to his forearm. “You could bleed to death waiting to be seen here.”

The receptionist stuttered as she tried to explain the reason for the delay, and the man interrupted her with expletives and threats. Alec thought, unhappily, that he should probably intervene. He was trying to figure the best course of action when Olivia appeared at the young woman’s side. For a second, Alec didn’t recognize her. She looked different here. It was not just the white coat. She seemed taller, her eyes greener, the lashes long and black. She didn’t notice him as she leaned across the reception desk toward the man.

“I’m sorry you’ve had to wait,” she said. “But this isn’t McDonald’s.”

Alec grinned, and the man opened his mouth to say something, but Olivia cut him off.

“There are people ahead of you with injuries more serious than yours,” she said. “We’ll get to you as soon as we can.”

Something in her voice shut the man up. He turned, grumbling to himself, and took his seat again, and then Olivia noticed Alec. She frowned. “Are you all right?”

He was surprised by the question. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine.” He leaned across the desk to speak without being overheard. “Are you free for dinner?”

She smiled. “You really want to take me to a restaurant after I cried in my crab salad?”

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

“Well, why don’t we pick up some Chinese and take it over to my house? I get off at seven.”

Obviously her husband had not moved back in. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll get it and meet you there. What would you like?”

“You choose.” She jotted down directions on a piece of paper and handed it to him.

He walked back to his car. She was in her element in there. There was a confidence in her that had been entirely absent in the restaurant in Duck. He wished he could watch her work. He wanted to see how she would treat that man’s bleeding arm, how she would talk to him while she worked. He wanted to watch her brain and her body work in harmony. He knew how that felt—he could still remember—although it had been so long now. Suddenly, he missed the sensation of touching a living being, of using his hands to heal. He was healing the lighthouse, he told himself, working to save it, but he knew it was not the same. No matter how warm the day, how intense the sun, the lighthouse still felt cool and lifeless beneath his hands.

As soon as she left the ER, Olivia regretted her impulsive decision to ask Alec over. She wanted to see him, she wanted to talk to him again, but at her house? The house Paul still paid half the mortgage on? Paul might even be there. Not likely, but not impossible either. This was the first time she had driven home from work with the hope that he had not decided to stop over.

Alec was waiting on the front deck of her house, a paper bag cradled in his right arm. She parked next to his Bronco in the driveway and got out of her car.

“Smells good,” she said, reaching past him to unlock the door. She stepped into the living room. “Come in.”

Sylvie meowed at them as they crossed the room to the kitchen. Alec set the bag on the table and reached down to pick her up. “She’s a pretty one.” He held Sylvie in the air in front of him and she batted at his nose with her paw. “How old is she?” He cuddled the cat against his chest. Olivia could hear her purring.

“Six,” Olivia said. “Her name’s Sylvie, and ordinarily she hates strangers.”

“Mmm.” Alec smiled and set Sylvie down on the floor again. “Just don’t tell her I’m a vet and we’ll get along fine.”

Olivia took two plates out of the cupboard, wishing she could shake her uneasiness. She busied herself with silverware, napkins, watching him out of the corner of her eye as he removed the cartons from the bag. He had on jeans and a white and blue striped short-sleeved shirt. His arms were tan and tightly muscled, and they were covered with smooth, dark hair. He smelled subtly of aftershave, and his hair was damp from a shower, or maybe the sound. He was an undeniably masculine presence in her house, and she could not remember the last time she’d been alone with a man other than her husband. What if Paul walked in right now? She listened for the sound of his car in the driveway as she set the plates on a tray. What if he walked in and found her entertaining Annie O’Neill’s husband?

“This is Annie’s.” Alec touched the stained glass peacock feather hanging in the window over the sink.

“Yes,” she said. “I bought it the first time I stopped in the studio.” If Alec knew it was Annie’s, Paul would certainly know as well. She would have to move it someplace where he would be unlikely to see it if he came over. “Let’s eat out on the deck,” she said, lifting the tray. She led him out the sliding glass doors to the covered back deck overlooking the sound.

“This is very nice,” Alec said, setting the cartons down on the glass-topped table. He stood up straight and put his hands on his hips as he took in the view. “My house is on the sound, too.”

Olivia sat down and started opening cartons. “I was shocked when we came down here and discovered we could afford something like this, right on the water. I felt as though I’d found my spiritual home.” She smiled ruefully. “I was so optimistic that this was where we would settle down and raise our family.”

Alec sat down across from her. “How are the twins?” he asked.

“What?” Olivia had not heard anyone ask that question in a very long time, and yet immediately she was transported back to the tiny, one-bedroom house she grew up in. She could hear people asking her mother, how are the twins, and her mother’s slurred reply.

Alec nodded toward her middle.

“Oh.” Olivia laughed. “Please, Alec. Twins I don’t need.” She opened the carton of rice, her fingers shaking.

“Are you okay?” Alec asked. “Or are you just hungry?”

He had graciously given her an out for her nervousness and she opted not to take it. “It feels strange having you here,” she said. “Like I’m doing something wrong.”

“Oh.” He stopped a spoonful of rice midway to his plate. “Would you like me to go?”

“No,” she said quickly. “I was just wondering how I would ever explain this to my husband if he decided to pick tonight to stop over.”

Alec shrugged and passed her the carton of rice. “We’d just tell him that we’re two lonely people who get together from time to time to ruminate over our losses. Does he come over often?”

“Hardly ever.” She spooned rice onto her own plate. “There’s something I have to tell you about him.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, first of all, you’ve met him. His name is Paul Macelli and he’s working on your lighthouse committee, although I didn’t know that the last time I saw you.”

Alec set his fork down and stared at her. “Paul? The journalist? He’s your husband? God, I didn’t picture your husband anything like Paul.”

“What do you mean?”

“I figured your husband would be someone…I don’t know, brawny. Dark-haired. In need of a shave. A Neanderthal type. A little mean-spirited and thick-skulled. Someone stupid enough to leave someone like you for a fantasy.”

Olivia laughed.

“Paul seems very…cerebral.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Very sensitive. He interviewed the old lighthouse keeper and sent me an essay of sorts on what he’d learned. It’s…I don’t know…moving. Captivating. I expected something interesting, but dry, you know, just a few paragraphs to get the facts across. He’s very talented.”

She smiled. “I know.”

“He’s quiet, though. Reserved.”

“Not always.” She could imagine, though, how reserved Paul would be around Annie’s husband. “There’s something else,” Olivia said. She would say this carefully. She did not want Alec to be able to put the pieces of this puzzle together. “Did you know he wrote that article on Annie in Seascape Magazine?”

“He did? I never even noticed the guy’s name. I know Annie had a few interviews with him…that was Paul?”

“Yes.” She tensed. Please don’t figure this out.

“It was a terrific article. I was a little worried about how it would come out, because Annie just wasn’t herself last fall. She was in one of her down moods.” Alec shuddered. “I hadn’t seen her quite that withdrawn in a long time, so I was relieved when I read the article and saw that he’d managed to capture the real Annie.” He took a swallow of tea, then looked up at her, a puzzled expression on his face. “Why didn’t he tell me he wrote it?”

“Well, it’s like you said. He’s reserved. Modest.” She ate a little of the spicy hot Hunan chicken. “He and I wrote a book together,” she said. “Do you remember that terrible train wreck in Washington back in 1981?”

“When most of the cars went into the Potomac?”

She nodded. “That was how we met. Paul worked for the Washington Post and he was covering the story in the ER at the hospital where I was a resident.”

She hadn’t even noticed Paul, but he had certainly noticed her. He’d introduced himself to her when the crisis was over, two full days after it had begun. He was in love with her, he said. She was so coolly confident, so skillful with the patients, yet compassionate with the families. He showed her the articles about the crash in the Post, the factual articles other reporters had written, and the articles he’d written himself about the amazing young female doctor in the ER. She was taken aback by his romantic idealism, but she could not deny the thrill of knowing he had observed her being herself and had fallen in love with her.

“So, a few years later we decided to write a book about it,” Olivia continued. “We followed the wreck from different perspectives—the passengers and the rescue workers and the hospital staff. It turned out pretty well. We did the talk show circuit and won a couple of awards.”

“I’d like to read it.”

She got up and walked into the living room, where she pulled her worn copy of The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit from the bookshelf. She carried it back to the deck and handed it to Alec.

“Oh, my God,” he said as he studied the cover. It was an aerial view of the wreck, taken from a great height so that at first it was difficult to see that between the two cherry blossom-covered banks of the river lay a wreck that had taken forty-two lives. He opened the book and read the jacket, then turned to the back page to read the little blurb about her and Paul.

“He’s had a book of poetry published?” Alec asked.

“Yes. It’s called Sweet Arrival.”

“Sweet Arrival.” Alec smiled. “What’s that refer to?”

“Me.” Olivia blushed. “He said his whole life fell into place when I came into it.”

Alec looked at her sympathetically. He reached across the table and softly squeezed her hand, his gold-braided wedding band catching the light from the kitchen. Then he returned his eyes to the book jacket. The small black and white picture of her and Paul was upside down from Olivia’s perspective. Their smiles looked like frowns.

Alec shook his head. “That must have been a nightmare. How do you do that kind of work without falling apart?”

“You get used to it. Hardened a little, I guess. I cry at sad movies and that sort of thing. And sometimes in restaurants over lunch, but I almost never cry at work.” She looked down at the book cover where it rested next to Alec’s plate. “I did cry a little the night Annie died, though.”

“Why?” Alec asked. “With all the horrendous things you’ve seen in emergency rooms, why would that get to you?”

“It was you,” she said, telling him only half the truth. “Your eyes. You were so devastated. I was just losing Paul, and…I don’t mean to compare what I was going through to what you went through…but I felt your sadness. For the longest time I couldn’t get your face out of my mind.”

Alec looked down at his plate. He started to lift his fork to his mouth, then rested it on the table, raising his eyes once more to Olivia’s. “Do you remember my daughter?” he asked.

Olivia smiled. “She tried to beat me up.”

“Did she? I don’t remember that.” He turned his head to look out at the sound. “She’s changing. I didn’t notice it because I’ve just tuned my kids out since Annie died. My son’s done all right. He’s working and getting ready to go to Duke in the fall. But Lacey…” He shook his head. “She’s started smoking—I guess that’s no big deal. Most kids her age try it. But she cries so easily now. The other night she came home in tears with her blouse buttoned wrong. I don’t want to read too much into…”

“How old is she?” Olivia interrupted him.

“Thir—fourteen. Just.”

Olivia set her own fork down and folded her arms across her chest. “It’s a vulnerable age for a girl,” she said. “Especially one without a mother.”

“Well, I’m trying not to be too naive. She’s always been a very good kid, very responsible, and I’m sure she’s not having sex or anything but…”

“Maybe against her will.” She spoke carefully.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she was crying. Disheveled. Maybe someone…I don’t mean she was raped out on the street, but you know how boys can be and maybe she was at a party, and someone…took advantage of her.”

Alec’s eyes had widened. “You’re certainly reassuring.”

“Sorry. Working in an ER gives you a warped view of the world. Why don’t you talk to her about it? Be straightforward.”

“She won’t talk to me. I tell myself it’s typical adolescent stuff, but Clay never acted this way and I’m not sure how to handle it. Annie and I just let them be. There were no rules they had to follow. We trusted them, and they were basically perfect.”

“What do you mean, no rules?”

“No curfew, no restrictions. They made their own decisions about where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do.” He pushed his plate to the center of the table. “Even when they were little, we let them decide what to wear and what to eat. Annie was big on making them take responsibility for themselves, and they did a good job of it. But now Lacey sits at the table with a radio headset on. I want to say, take that radio off and listen to me, damn it.” He struck the table with his fist. “And don’t curse at me. Talk to me. But Annie would never have made those kinds of demands on her. I can’t figure out what Annie would have done if Lacey had acted up like this when she was alive.”

Olivia sat back in her chair. “Maybe it doesn’t matter what Annie would have done,” she said. “Do what Alec wants to do. Tell her she can’t listen to the radio at the table. Tell her…”

“I can’t. I’m afraid of losing her, too. I…” He shut his eyes for a second, and then stood up. “Excuse me.” He set his napkin on the table and walked into the house.

Olivia closed up the cartons and moved them to the tray, thinking just as he had done: what would Annie do now? Annie would never have let a distraught guest leave the room without following him to make sure he was all right. She left the food on the tray and walked into the kitchen. Alec was at the window, staring out at the sound. She rested her hand on his bare arm. “Alec?”

“I’m afraid of my daughter,” he said. The sound was reflected in his eyes, turning the pale blue a milky gray. “I’m afraid to look at her because every time I do I see Annie.” He glanced down at Olivia, and she lowered her hand self-consciously to her side. “She was with Annie that night at the shelter,” he said.

“I didn’t know that.”

“She was helping in the food line. She was right next to Annie when she was shot. She saw it happen.”

“That’s how she knew there was so little blood,” Olivia said. “I always wondered about that. How horrible for her, Alec.”

“I could have lost her, too. I’m so aware now of how quickly you can lose someone. If I get too close to her or to Clay and something happened to them…I couldn’t go through it again. And if I try to figure out a way to discipline her, I’m afraid she’ll hate me. She already seems to.” He lifted his hands to the counter, and looked once more at Olivia. “I completely forgot her birthday. One hell of a dad, right?”

She felt a sudden, wrenching twist of sympathy for Lacey. Most of her childhood birthdays had been forgotten, but at least she’d had Clint to share the hurt with. “Well,” she said. “I guess she’s learning that you’re human.”

Alec turned away from the window and leaned back against the counter. “What were you like at her age?” he asked.

“Oh.” She felt herself color. “You can’t use me as a comparison. I wasn’t particularly…normal.”

He laughed. “You want to explain that?”

“Just being a twin and all.” She knew it was the “and all” that told the story, that had made her unlike other girls her age. She wanted to tell him. She had the feeling he would understand, and her heartbeat quickened at the thought of sharing her past with him. She opened her mouth to speak, but just then he sighed and stretched, shaking away the last few minutes, and Olivia quickly pulled herself back to the present.

“I’d better go,” he said. “Let me get the book.” He walked back to the deck and returned with the copy of The Eastern Spirit she’d given him. She walked him to the door, a little shaken at how close she’d come to telling him things about herself no one knew. No one except Paul.

Exactly what would Alec say to Paul at the next lighthouse committee meeting?

“Alec,” she said, “I’d rather Paul didn’t know about us being friends.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“I don’t want to complicate things.” They were complicated enough as it was. “Can we just say that you and I met to talk about what happened in the emergency room that night? Let him think that’s all there was to it?”

He frowned. “I’m a terrible liar, Olivia. It’s not like we’re having an affair.”

“I’d just rather he didn’t view you as a rival. The two of you have to work together, remember?”

He nodded. “All right.”

After he left, Olivia loaded the dishwasher and began sweeping the deck. She had to keep busy or the memories would seep in. They would stay for days once they started, and already the memory of her tenth birthday was taking shape in her mind. That was when she finally came to the realization that her mother was incapable of keeping the days straight. She couldn’t stay sober long enough to cook a meal, much less to remember a birthday.

Clint had made Olivia a card in school during the morning of their tenth birthday, and when he brought it over to her on the playground at recess, some of the kids starting taunting him, as they always did when one of the “slow-learners” stopped by. One of the boys, Tim Anderson, grabbed the card from his hand.

“Look at what the retard brought Livvie,” he said, waving it in the air. A few other boys gathered around Tim to read the card as Clint stood nearby, his face open and trusting. Olivia ached for her brother. She knew what the card would look like: the p’s in happy would be backwards; birthday would be misspelled. He’d probably drawn a picture of a cake as he’d done the year before. It would look like the drawing of a five-year-old.

She tried to grab the card from Tim’s hand.

“Love,” Tim mocked. “He signed it love Clint. Is he your boyfriend, Livvie? He’s a retard.” With that the boys jumped on Clint, four of them, pinning him to the ground and pounding on him with their fists while Clint struggled helplessly to get free. Olivia watched the ineffectual flailing of his hands around the heads of his assailants. She beat at their backs with her fists, screaming for them to leave him alone. She kicked at their legs, their sides, until Mrs. Jasper came out of the building. She walked toward them briskly, clapping her hands, crying “Children! Stop it this instant!” Upon hearing her voice, Tim and his cohorts immediately scattered and Olivia dropped to the ground next to her brother. His nose was bleeding and his face was red and streaked with tears.

Mrs. Jasper smoothed her skirt over her legs and knelt down on the other side of Clint. She pulled a lacy handkerchief from her skirt pocket and pressed it to his nose. “There, dear,” Mrs. Jasper said. “Are you all right?”

“Yeth,” Clint answered, with his little lisp.

Olivia spotted the card he’d made for her a few yards away and ran over to pick it up. It was crushed almost beyond recognition, but she could still make out the birthday cake with its ten candles. Clint had colored it green.

“They’re such bullies,” Mrs. Jasper was saying to Clint, as Olivia knelt beside them again.

“Avery’ll beat ’em up.” Clint sat up, still holding the bloody handkerchief to his nose.

Olivia looked toward the corner of the playground where the older kids were playing dodgeball. Her brother Avery had the ball, and she watched as he threw it hard at one of the girls who jumped out of the way just in time. Yes, Avery would take great pleasure in beating up Tim Anderson. He would use any excuse at all for a fight.

Mrs. Jasper looked at Olivia. “Maybe Clint should go home for the rest of the day. Shall I call your mother?”

Olivia shook her head, aware that Mrs. Jasper knew the futility of calling Mrs. Simon. “I’ll walk him.” Olivia held out her hand to her brother and he locked his blue-stained fingers with hers. Blueberry season was long over, and the few dollars the Simon children had earned picking the berries had already been spent. Still, it would be weeks before the stain left their fingers.

She walked Clint home, hoping their mother had passed out on the sofa by now, because Olivia knew what she would say when she heard Clint had gotten beaten up again. She’d shake her head, her thin, uncombed hair sticking up in dark tufts from her head. “God must’ve screwed up the day he made you two, Livvie,” she’d say, as though Clint couldn’t understand how she was insulting him. “Gave you Clint’s brains on top of your own, so it’s up to you to take care of him.”

Their mother was on the sofa, her doughy face pressed into the soft cushions. The bottle lay on its side on the floor next to her. Olivia tucked Clint into his bed, one of three in the cramped bedroom she shared with her brothers. Clint was worn out from his ordeal and fell asleep quickly, the blood scabbed and scratchy-looking around his nose. Back in the living room, Olivia picked up the bottle from the floor next to the sofa and put it as high as she could reach in the kitchen cupboard so her mother would have to hunt for it when she woke up. Then she left the house, thinking she would have to make Clint a card, too, when she got back to school. She knew it was all either of them would get.

Olivia stopped sweeping the deck to listen. Someone was in the house. She peered through the sliding glass doors into the living room, but it was too dark to see. Had she forgotten to lock the front door after Alec left?

“Olivia?”

Paul. She let out her breath as he stepped onto the deck. She was annoyed he thought he could simply walk into this house at any time, but she was too relieved to see him to say anything that might put him on the defensive. “You startled me,” she said. If he had come over twenty minutes earlier he would have gotten quite a surprise himself. She thought of the peacock feather in the kitchen. She would have to keep him from seeing it.

“Sorry. I knocked, but you probably couldn’t hear me out here.” He sat down at the table and looked up at her. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “If you’re willing.”

“Of course I’m willing.” She rested the broom against the house and sat down across from him.

“Did you mean it when you said I could talk to you about Annie?”

She didn’t let the disappointment show in her face. “Yes.”

“I need to. You were right when you said there was no one else I could talk to. No one who cares about me as much as you do.” He tapped his fingers nervously on the table. “This isn’t easy, but ever since you stopped over and you were so…kind, I just thought maybe I should try telling you the truth.”

Olivia locked her hands together in her lap. “I thought I knew the truth.”

He shook his head. “You know most of it. You know I fell in love with someone I couldn’t have, and that I sort of got crazed in that process. But what you don’t know is…” He looked up at the wooden ceiling and took in a deep breath. “Oh, Liv.” He shook his head at her. “I’m so sorry. When we got married I couldn’t imagine doing anything like this. Anything that would hurt you.”

“You slept with her.”

Paul licked his lips. “It was just one time,” he said. “Right before Christmas. I felt as though I had to, as though…”

“More than you had to honor your vows to me?” She thought the pain in her chest might kill her. He’d made love to both of them. He’d compared them, and Annie had emerged victorious.

“I should have left you earlier,” he said. “I didn’t feel good about it, but I convinced myself that you were somehow to blame, with your late hours and…” He stopped talking and looked out into the darkness again.

“And what?”

“Just the kind of person you are. A little rigid, while Annie was so free-spirited and full of life and…”

“Stop it!” Olivia stood up. “You must think I have no feelings at all.”

He looked up at her and continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “I just got swept up into it. She was such a good person.”

“Oh yes, she sounds wonderful. She was cheating on her husband, Paul. How good is that?”

“It was my idea, not hers. I pushed her. I mean, I didn’t rape her, she wanted to do it, but…”

“Paul, I said I’d listen, but I can’t. It just hurts too much.”

He stood up and, to her surprise, took her in his arms. She didn’t fight him. She couldn’t. It had been too long.

“I still care about you, Liv,” he said. “But she destroyed me. I wish to hell that we never moved here. I wish I’d never met her.”

He smelled warm and familiar, yet all she could see when she closed her eyes was the image of him in bed with Annie. She pulled away from him with a whimper. “Go home, Paul,” she said. “Go back to your little shrine.”

He hesitated for a moment before turning to leave. Olivia waited until she heard his car pull out of the driveway. Then she walked into the kitchen and removed the peacock feather from the window. She took it outside to the end of the pier, lifted it over her head in the darkness, and brought it down hard on the piling, listening with enormous satisfaction to the breaking of the glass.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Paul ran into Alec in the supermarket—literally—their carts colliding as he turned the corner by the dairy case. Alec broke into a smile when he saw him, and Paul nearly groaned with dismay. He was trapped.

“Paul!” Alec gave him a hearty handshake. “You’ve been on my mind a lot lately.”

“I have?”

Alec leaned on his cart as though he was settling in for a long discussion. “The lighthouse material you sent me is terrific. I talked to Nola about it, and with a little more information we can put together a booklet rather than a brochure. The printer’s agreed, and we’ve figured out a way to distribute it nationally.”

“Fantastic,” Paul said. He rearranged the packages in his cart to avoid looking at Alec.

“I have an idea for your next interview with Mary Poor,” Alec said. “Get her to talk about herself. People used to call her the ‘Angel of the Light.’ I have a few old articles about her I can send you so you’ll know what to ask her, in case she turns out to be the modest type. Then maybe later in the summer we can get her to give a few of us a tour of the keeper’s house. Does she seem up to it?”

“A tour of the house?” Paul moved his carton of vanilla ice cream from one side of his cart to the other. “I’m not sure,” he said. “She was sitting in a rocking chair when I spoke with her, so I don’t know how well she gets around.” He was not at all certain he could handle another interview with the old woman, much less a tour of the house. How much could his nerves take? He had gotten sick after the first interview, had to pull off on a side street in Manteo to throw up in the gutter.

“Well, we’ll see,” Alec said. “By the way, why didn’t you tell me you did that article in Seascape on my wife?”

Paul tried to read his tone. Alec was smiling; there was nothing accusatory in his face. It was more that he thought Paul was being modest. “Oh, well. I didn’t know what kind of memory that would be for you.”

“It was a very nice tribute to her. She loved it.”

Paul smiled himself. He’d never known that. She had never said that to him. “Thanks,” he said. “That means a lot. How did you figure it out?”

“Your wife was the doctor on duty the night Annie died. I guess you knew that, huh?”

Paul froze. “Yes.”

“So, I’ve spoken with her—with Olivia—a few times to understand exactly what happened that night. You know, I just needed to sort it out in my head.”

“Right.” How much had Olivia told him? Paul’s palms began to sweat on the bar of the shopping cart.

“Olivia’s been very helpful to me,” Alec said. “It helps knowing she was the one treating Annie.”

“Yes, I…it must.”

“Did you know that you and Annie were in the same class at Boston College?”

How the hell did Alec know that? “Uh, yes. It came out during the interviews.”

“You didn’t remember her from back then?”

“There were a lot of students in that class.”

Alec looked down at his grocery cart and Paul followed his eyes to the frozen foods, cans of vegetables. “Annie would have a fit if she could see this,” Alec said, nodding toward the cart.

“Well, I’ve gotten into the frozen stuff myself, lately,” Paul said. “Speaking of which, we’d better get going before everything thaws.” He started to push his cart past Alec.

“Right,” Alec agreed. “Oh, by the way, I’m reading The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit.”

Paul turned back to look at him. “How…?”

“I’d mentioned something about how well you wrote to Olivia, and she thought I might like to take a look at it. That’s when you two met, huh? It must have been something, watching her in action.”

“Olivia?” he asked, stupidly, the memory jarring him. She had been young and pretty, caring and efficient, and he had been genuinely smitten. He had seen something in her that made him think, yes, she could be the one to help him forget, and for the longest time she had unwittingly done exactly that.

Alec rested his elbows on the bar of the shopping cart again. “As I’m reading about the train wreck, though, it makes me realize how poorly equipped our little emergency room is to handle a major trauma,” he said. “Like a gunshot to the heart.”

Paul was disturbed by Alec’s candor. Did he think they were friends? “I guess that’s true.” He glanced toward the inviting open aisle behind Alec’s head, then looked at his watch. “Well, I’ve got to get this stuff home,” he said. “I’ll see you at the next lighthouse meeting.” He pushed his cart away, cringing, knowing that his exit had been totally graceless.

Something seized him as he pushed the cart past the meat aisle. A sort of panic. He could not focus his eyes on the list he’d written an hour earlier. He stared down at the steaks and chops and bloody roasts. He abruptly took his hands from the cart, did an about-face, and walked out of the store, picturing his ice cream melting through the seams of the carton, dripping into a pool on the floor.

He got in his car and drove the two blocks to the beach at Nags Head. It was still early, just seven-thirty in the evening, and the beach was nearly empty. A few fishermen stood close to the water and occasionally a couple walked past him, hand in hand. He sat down in the sand and waited for the tension to leave his body.

Alec had spoken to Olivia. At length. Obviously, though, she had not told him anything earth-shattering or he never would have treated Paul with such goodwill, such respect. God. He had spent so much of his time and energy hating that man. Half his life.

A young couple and their dog ran along the water’s edge, laughing. The woman’s long hair was a true brown, and yet in the fading sunlight Paul could almost kid himself into thinking it was red.

Boston College. There were a lot of students in that class. Alec had bought it. Paul shook his head. How could Alec believe that anyone could have been on the same campus with Annie Chase and not have known her?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Paul had been cast as the lead in Boston College’s freshman production of Angel Street. He had been an average student in high school, disdaining math and science in favor of literature and poetry and the endless melodrama of his own imagination. He’d also been president of the drama club, and he had a natural talent for which he was awarded a scholarship to B.C. His family would not have been able to afford to send him to a good school any other way, although his father’s Philadelphia fireworks business had done well during Paul’s high school years, and his mother had tucked away nearly every cent she’d earned as a maid. Still, there were six Macelli children—Paul and his five sisters—and they were all bright, all ambitious. They would all want to go to school.

His was the first role to be cast in Angel Street. He could tell, as Harry Saunders watched him read for the part of Jack Manningham, that no one else would have to bother reading. So he sat, relaxed and relieved, next to Harry in the front row of the auditorium, while other anxious freshmen read for their parts.

Annie Chase auditioned for the part of the flirtatious maid on a whim. She’d come with a girlfriend and had agreed to try out in order to give her friend courage. She skittered up the stairs when it was her turn, and her hair seemed to fill the stage. Harry, who’d been slouching in his seat, leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees.

“Go ahead, please,” he said, and she read a line or two in a throaty voice before she began to laugh. It was a giggle, really, a sound only Annie Chase could make, and its rippling, ringing tone was a surprise given the huskiness of her voice. Everyone in the theater turned to look at her, their own faces slowly breaking into grins. Paul smiled himself. He glanced at Harry, who was nearly laughing.

“Do you want to try that again, Miss Chase?”

“Sure.” She read again, this time making it nearly to the end of her soliloquy before the giggles got her, and although she seemed like a young girl clearly out of control, and although the reading itself had not been anything outstanding, Paul was not surprised when Harry cast her in the role. Neither was he displeased.

“She’ll grab the audience,” Harry said, speaking to Paul as though he were a colleague. “She’ll grab them and she won’t let go. We just have to get her—and that hair—under a little bit of control without taking the life out of her.”

Harry needn’t have worried about that. It was impossible to sap the life out of Annie Chase. She sparkled, she bubbled, she drew people to her like a minstrel on a busy street.

He fell in love on that stage at Boston College. Annie came late to rehearsals and no one seemed to mind. It was as if they were all waiting, holding their breath for her arrival, letting the smiles spread across their faces when she finally bounded onto the stage.

He had to kiss her. It was in the script, and for several nights before the first time, he lay awake imagining that kiss. He wished he didn’t have to do it in front of Harry Saunders and the rest of the cast. He wanted to kiss her in private.

When the afternoon of the kiss finally arrived, he made it quick and light.

“Again,” Harry said from the front row. “Longer this time, Macelli.”

He kissed her longer, trying to keep his wits about him, and when he pulled away from her she was grinning.

“You’re not supposed to smile, Annie,” Harry said. “You’re supposed to look seductive.”

She giggled. “Sorry.”

“You two better practice on your own till you get it right.” Harry gave Paul a knowing nod.

So they practiced. They met in his dorm room or hers, reading their lines, working up to the kiss and away from it, the rest of their lines anticlimactic. When they had finished rehearsing for the day, he would read her his poetry if they were in his room, or look at the jewelry she was making if they were in hers. She’d form gold and silver into intricate shapes for earrings and pendants and bracelets. He loved watching her work. She’d tie her hair back in a leather strap which was rarely up to the task, and her long red tresses would spill out bit by bit as she worked with the glittering metal.

Paul felt the addiction taking hold of him. He’d known her for just a few weeks, but she was constantly on his mind. He’d call her, ostensibly to read through their lines, but they wound up talking about other things, and he treasured every word he got from her, playing their conversations over and over again in his mind as he lay in bed.

Then the gifts began. On opening night, she surprised him with a gold bracelet she’d made for him. The following day, he found a basket of pine cones outside his door, and the day after that, she arrived in his room carrying a macramé belt.

“I stayed up all night making this for you,” she said.

She pulled the belt he was wearing out of the loops of his jeans and began fitting the new belt through. It was slightly too wide, and the pressure of her fingers as she worked with the belt made him hard in an instant. He turned away from her, embarrassed.

She looked up at him from her seat on his bed.

“Paul,” she said, her dark blue eyes big and sad. “I don’t get it. Don’t you want me?”

He looked down at her, startled. “I…yes. But I didn’t think you…”

She groaned, curling her fingers into the pockets of his jeans. “God, Paul, I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out how to make you fall in love with me.”

“I’ve been in love with you for weeks,” he said. “Here. I can prove it.” He pulled out the top drawer of his desk and handed her a poem, one of many he’d written about her in the past few weeks. It made her cry.

She stood up to kiss him, a far longer, far steamier kiss than the one they’d shared on stage. Then she walked over to his door and turned the lock. He felt his knees start to buckle and wondered how he would get through this. “I’ve never made love before,” he admitted, leaning awkwardly against his desk. He’d had a number of girlfriends in high school, two in particular, who were drawn to his sensitivity and his poems, but he was still very much a virgin.

Annie, however, was not.

She smiled. “So that’s it,” she said, as though that explained everything. “Well, I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen, so you don’t have a thing to worry about.”

Her words shocked him at first. Disappointed him. But then he felt relieved, because as she began kissing him, touching him, it was quickly obvious that she did indeed know what she was doing.

“You are to do absolutely nothing,” she said. She undressed him to his boxer shorts and rolled him onto his stomach. Then she straddled him and began a long, deep massage, her hands soft and cool at first, heating up as she worked them over his skin. She rolled him onto his back and took off her T-shirt and bra. Paul reached up to touch the creamy white skin of her breasts, but she caught his hand and set it back down at his side.

“You may look but you may not touch,” she said. “I told you, you have to just lie here. Tonight is entirely for you.”

She made love to him the way she did everything in her life—generously, putting his pleasure ahead of her own.

In the weeks that followed, he realized that she could give endlessly, but she could not take. When he’d try to touch her during their lovemaking, she’d brush his hand away. “You don’t need to do that,” she’d say, and he soon realized that she meant it, that she’d be overcome with discomfort, thrown completely out of equilibrium, when he tried to turn the tables and give to her, in bed or out.

He bought her flowers once, for no particular reason, and her smile faded when he gave them to her. “These are way too pretty for me,” she said, her cheeks crimson. Later that day, she gave the roses to another girl in the dorm who had admired them.

He bought her a scarf for her birthday, and the next day she took it back, slipping the twelve dollar refund into the pocket of his jeans. “Don’t spend your money on me,” she said, and she would not listen to his protests. Yet her gifts to him kept coming, and he grew increasingly uncomfortable accepting them.

One day he and Annie were eating lunch in the cafeteria when they were joined by a pretty brunette Annie had known in elementary school. “You were the nicest girl at Egan Day School,” she said to Annie. Then she turned to Paul. “She was by far the most popular kid in the entire school. She was one of those girls you wanted to hate because she was so popular that she left no room at all for the competition, but she was so nice you just couldn’t help but like her.”

That night Annie lay next to him in his bed and told him how she had earned her popularity. “I have an enormous allowance,” she said, her voice oddly subdued, almost flat. “I bought the other kids candy and toys. It worked.”

He pulled her closer. “Didn’t you think you were likable just as you were?”

“No. I thought I was an ugly little girl with terrible red hair. My mother fussed with my hair every morning, and she’d say how horrible it was, how bad I looked. I’d end up crying practically every day on my way to school.”

“You’re so beautiful. How could she do that to you?”

“Oh, well.” Annie swept her arm through the air. “I don’t think she meant to hurt me. She just…I guess she has her own problems. Anyhow, I really panicked when I got to high school and there were zillions of new kids to meet. I knew candy and toys weren’t going to work anymore. I had to find some other way to get people to like me.”

“Did you find a way?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“I found a way to get the boys to like me, anyhow.”

“Oh, Annie.”

“Don’t hate me.”

He stroked her cheek. “I love you. You don’t have to do that anymore. You’ve got me.”

“I know.” She snuggled close. “Hold me tighter, Paul.”

He did, loving that she would confide in him, and he thought the time was right to ask her the question that had been on his mind since the first time they’d made love.

“Something bothers me, Annie,” he said. “Do you ever come when we’re making love?”

He felt her shrug. “No, but it doesn’t matter. I’m content just to be close to you and see you enjoying yourself.”

He was disappointed. Embarrassed. “I must be doing something wrong.”

“It’s not you, Paul. I never have.”

He leaned away so that he could look at her. “You’ve made love since you were fifteen and you’ve never…?”

“I truly don’t care. It’s never been important to me. I’d see a guy and want to hold him, to feel good that way, warm and loved. If sex was what I had to do to get that, so be it.”

He pulled her close again. “If you really want to make me happy, Annie, then let me make you feel good for a change.”

“You do,” she said. “You make me feel wonderful.”

“You know what I mean.”

She shrank away from him. “I figure it must not be possible for me,” she said. “I think it would have happened by now.”

He was unwilling to talk to his friends about something so personal, so he spent the next afternoon in the library hunting for a solution to Annie’s dilemma. He found a book filled with advice and illustrations which he couldn’t bring himself to check out from the wizened old gentleman behind the desk. So he sat in a secluded corner and read it, from cover to cover.

That night in her dorm room, he sat down on her bed and patted the space next to him. She joined him, wrapping her arms around him and planting a wet kiss on his neck.

“I read a sex manual today,” he said.

“What?” She jerked away from him. “Why?”

“Because it’s your turn tonight.” He reached for the hem of her T-shirt, but she stopped him.

“No,” she whined.

“Annie.” He held her by the shoulders. “Do this for me if not for yourself, all right?”

“What if it doesn’t work? You’ll be disappointed in me… You’ll…”

“I’m not going to be disappointed in you or stop loving you or anything else you’re worried about. It’ll be fine. But you have to relax.”

She bit her lip. “Turn off the light,” she said.

He did as he was told, and then returned to the bed where he undressed her, rather methodically, and sat behind her with his back against the wall.

“What are we doing? Aren’t you going to take off your clothes, too?” she asked.

“Nope.” He spread his legs wide and pulled her back against his chest. The illustration from the manual was burned into his brain. All day he’d thought of how it would feel to hold Annie this way, to touch her, to finally feel her respond. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her shoulder. She was shivering.

“This is nice,” she said. “You could just hold me like this. I’d rather do this than…”

“Shh. Rest your legs against mine. That’s it.”

“This is stupid. I feel ridiculous.”

He stroked her arms, her shoulders. “You have to tell me what feels good,” he said, moving his hands to her breasts. “Let me know if anything hurts.”

“That doesn’t hurt.” She giggled and seemed to relax in his arms, but she went rigid once he lowered his hands to her thighs.

“Come on, Annie, relax.”

“I’m trying. I just don’t like all the attention being on me. I don’t see why… Oh.”

His fingertips had found their mark. Annie drew in her breath and her legs suddenly opened wider, pressing hard against his own, her hands grasping the denim that covered his thighs. He slipped a finger of his left hand inside her and she shuddered.

“This feels good to me, too, Annie,” he said, encouraging her, but it was unnecessary. She was letting herself go, letting herself take. When she came, he had one sudden pulse of terror that she might be faking, but then the waves of contractions circled his finger, and he felt her go limp.

That night was a turning point for them, not just that it made sex better—she continued to refer to sex as a “by-product” of being close—but that it shifted their relationship to a different plane, one in which Annie allowed things to be done for her. The addiction, though still an addiction, was mutual now.

His family adored her. He and Annie visited Philadelphia twice that year, and Annie slipped right into that female dominated household as easily as if she’d been born into it.

“Your family’s so warm, Paul,” she told him. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

She would not take him to meet her own parents, however, even though they lived no more than a half hour’s drive from school. After much arm-twisting on his part, she finally agreed to take him home with her on her father’s fiftieth birthday. “You talk about him all the time,” he said. “I want to meet him.”

She did talk about her father a great deal, her voice often swelling with her pride in his accomplishments as a physician. She worked for a month on his birthday gift—gold cufflinks she had designed herself—showing Paul the progress she was making on them each time he came over.

Paul held the small package containing the cufflinks on his lap as he and Annie turned onto the tree-lined street leading to her house. She had been quiet during the entire trip, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel of her red convertible.

“What time is it?” she asked, as they passed one enormous mansion after another.

Paul looked at his watch. “Ten past four.”

“Oh, God. My mother will throw a fit.”

“We’re not that late.”

“You don’t understand. She has this thing about time. When I was little and she promised to take me someplace, she wouldn’t do it if I was even a minute late getting ready.”

Paul frowned at her. “You’re kidding.”

She shook her head. “Let’s tell them your last name is Macy,” she suggested.

“Why?”

“Just for fun.”

He stared at her, confused. “It’s not my name,” he said.

She stopped at a stop sign and looked over at him. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Paul, but my parents are very prejudiced.” She lowered her hands to her lap and began kneading them together. “Do you understand? I mean, unless you’re just like them, they… They’ll like you better if they think you’re…”

His cheeks burned. “Do you want me to lie about what my parents do for a living, too?”

She looked down at her hands. “This is why I didn’t want you to meet them.”

“I won’t lie, Annie.” Back then he never did. She said nothing, pressing her foot once more on the gas pedal.

“I thought you loved me,” he said.

“I do. I just want them to love you too.” She turned into a long driveway, and he caught a glimpse of a Tudor-style house far down the expanse of manicured lawn before it disappeared behind a row of pines. “They have my life planned out for me, Paul,” she said. “I’m supposed to be majoring in something useful—we had a terrible fight when I told them I wanted to be an artist—and I’m supposed to marry one of the eligible sons of their elite little circle of friends. Do you understand now why I didn’t want to bring you here?”

Yes, he understood, but she was a little late in telling him her reasons.

An elderly woman dressed in a dark uniform and white apron let them in. She kissed Annie’s cheek and led them into the living room. “Your mum and dad will be down shortly, dear.” The woman left the room, and Annie smiled at him nervously. He shivered. The living room was huge and cold, like a cavern.

“You get used to it,” Annie said. She was perspiring despite the chill.

Her father walked into the room first. He was a thin, good-looking man, tan and fit and stern. His thick hair was mostly gray. He bussed his daughter’s cheek.

“Daddy, this is Paul,” Annie said, avoiding the surname issue altogether.

“Paul…?” Dr. Chase shook his hand.

“Macelli,” Paul said, the name sounding suddenly dirty to his ears. He shook the man’s hand with a sense of defeat, imagining that he was already being ruled out as a serious candidate for the hand of his daughter.

Annie’s mother made more of an attempt to feign warmth, but Paul felt the coldness in her hand when she touched her fingertips to his. She was a plain-looking woman, perhaps even homely, despite the heavy use of cosmetics. Her red hair was drawn back under serious control into a bun.

He could barely eat the slab of roast beef a second servant put on his plate after they’d sat down to dinner. He didn’t balk at the probing questions about his family, however. Instead, he began to enjoy them, making it clear to Annie’s parents that they had the son of blue-collar workers eating off their fine china, perhaps even sleeping with their daughter. He talked at length about the fireworks business and he told them about the time his mother cleaned the house of the mayor of Philadelphia.

During dessert—a birthday cake in the shape of a tennis racket—Annie presented her father with the set of gold cufflinks. “Why, thank you, princess.” Dr. Chase leaned over to kiss Annie’s cheek and then set the box next to his plate. Paul had the feeling the cufflinks would find themselves in the back of a drawer somewhere, if not in the trash.

“Annie’s jewelry instructor says she’s the best student he’s ever had,” Paul said.

“Paul.” Annie blushed.

Dr. Chase looked up from his cake. “Well, Annie’s quite bright when she puts her mind to it,” he said. “She could be anything she wants to be. She has the brains to do a lot more than twist little pieces of metal into jewelry.”

Paul glanced at Annie. He saw the shine of tears in her eyes.

Dr. Chase set down his fork and looked at his watch. “I’m going to have to run, kids.”

“But Daddy,” Annie said, “it’s your birthday.” Her voice came very close to breaking. Paul heard the splintery little catch in the huskiness, but her parents didn’t seem to notice.

Her father stood up and leaned over to kiss the top of her head. He nodded toward Paul. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Macelli. I’m sure we’ll all think of you the next time we see a good show of fireworks.”

Paul and Annie left shortly after dinner, and Annie was crying by the time they reached her car.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” he said.

“It’s not you,” she said. “I always leave there in tears.”

“I hate them. I’m sorry, Annie, but they’re abominable.”

“Don’t say that, Paul, please. It doesn’t make me feel any better. They’re all I’ve got. You have your sisters and everyone, and I’ve got them. Period.” She opened her car door and looked up at the house. “He never has time for me. He didn’t when I was little and he doesn’t now.”

They spent the summer after their freshman year in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Paul living with a friend he’d known from high school, Annie with two girls from Boston College. Paul worked as a waiter during the day and in the summer stock production of Carousel at night, while Annie worked in a gallery, where she learned the basics of stained glass. It was a wonderful summer, both of them doing things they loved and spending their free time together. They were just nineteen, but Paul felt a maturity in their relationship. They talked about the future, about having children, little red haired Italians they would name Guido and Rosa to torment her parents. “Guido and Rozer,” Annie would say, in her Boston accent, which sounded strange to Paul’s ears now that they were no longer in New England.

They took leisurely strolls around the little town of New Hope. Annie fell in love with a small blue cloisonné horse she found in one of the shops. Although she stopped by the shop to look at the horse every few days, Paul knew she would never buy it for herself. So when he had finally made enough money, he bought it for her as a surprise. It cost him nearly every spare cent he’d earned, and at first she wanted to take it back. He insisted she keep it, though, and she wrapped it in a soft cloth and carried it around in her pocketbook, taking it out to show anyone she met. She named it Baby Blue, after a Dylan song.

Her parents visited her in mid-July, and for three days he didn’t see her. He finally went to the gallery where she worked, and he knew right away that she wasn’t herself. She had circles under her eyes; her giggle was gone. He hated the way her parents poisoned her.

“They want me to change majors,” she said.

“To what?”

“Something more useful than art.” She straightened a picture on the wall. “If I don’t change majors, they won’t pay for me to stay in school. But I can’t give up art. I’ll have to lie to them.” She looked at him. “I lied to them about you, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told them I’m not seeing you anymore. I never did tell them you were here. They’d never let me stay here if they knew.”

“But what about the future? What happens when we want to get married?”

Annie nervously wrapped a strand of her hair around her finger. “I don’t know. I can’t worry about that right now.”

“Would they disinherit you if you married an Italian?”

“I wouldn’t care if they did,” she snapped. “It’s not money I want from them, Paul. Don’t you know that by now?”

It was true she didn’t care about money for herself. She made her own clothes out of what looked like rags to him. She bought cheap shampoo that left her hair smelling like laundry detergent, and Paul could not go into the laundromat without thinking of her hair. Money was important to her only because it allowed her to help other people. She’d lay awake for hours at night, trying to determine who could use her money the most. At the end of the summer, she took the money she’d earned from her job at the gallery and threw a party for the kids at a nearby hospital.

Annie went off the pill just before they returned to school in the fall. She’d been taking it since she was fifteen. “It’s bad to be on it for so long,” she said. “I’m going to try this new sponge thing. It’s more natural.”

“I could use rubbers,” Paul volunteered.

“No, you may not,” she said. “You wouldn’t enjoy it nearly as much.” He knew better than to try to argue with her. Thus started Annie’s long line of peculiar birth control methods, and there were times he secretly prayed they would fail. He loved the thought of having a child with her, of strengthening the bond that already existed between them.

When they returned to school, Paul moved into her dorm, one floor below hers. The placid tenor that had marked their relationship in New Hope followed them back to Boston and lasted nearly until the end of the year. That was when her parents received some forms from the school and discovered that Annie was still very much an art major. When they called her at the dorm to confront her with the lie, it was Paul who answered the phone in her room. He unwittingly identified himself, thinking it was one of Annie’s professors calling. By the time Annie called her parents back that evening, they were in an advanced stage of fury. The phone battle went on for a good hour before Paul left the room, unable to tolerate Annie’s meek apologies. A few hours after she’d gotten off the phone with them, her mother called back. Her father’d had a heart attack, she said. He’d collapsed shortly after talking with Annie and was now in the hospital. The doctors were not certain he would pull through.

She wouldn’t let Paul go home with her, and she was gone a full week. She didn’t return his calls, although he wasn’t at all certain his messages were being delivered.

She was different when she came back to school. There was a distance between them which she wouldn’t acknowledge, making it impossible for him to fight. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Paul. I’m out with you, aren’t I? I’m talking to you.”

They went through the motions of their relationship—talking, going to the movies, eating together in the cafeteria, making love—but a part of Annie was missing.

Finally one night, very close to the end of the school year, Paul blocked her exit from his dorm room. “You can’t leave until you tell me exactly what’s going on in your head,” he said. He sat her down on his bed, while he sat on his desk, far enough away from her that she would not be able to seduce him into touching her to avoid talking.

“My father almost died, Paul.” She played with the silver bracelet on her wrist. “I caused it by making him angry at me, and I don’t know how much longer I’ll have him. He’s so frail now. I can’t bear seeing him like that. He said a lot of things to me in the hospital. He said he loves me… Well, not those words exactly. But he said I’m the most important thing in the world to him. He actually said that.” Her eyes misted over. “He said he doesn’t understand why I set my sights so low, that it disappoints him so much. ‘Art’s nice, honey,’ he said, ‘but you’ll never be Picasso.’ So I’m going to change my major. I’ve already filled out the forms.”

“Change to what?”

“Biology.”

“Biology. You have no interest whatsoever in biology.”

She shrugged. “I think I could get into it. It would prepare me for nursing or maybe even medical school. Some career where I could help people. And my father would be so proud of me.” She looked down at the bracelet again. “I’m going to give away all the jewelry I made.”

“Annie…”

“My father said you’re trying to pull yourself up in the world through me, but that you’ll only succeed in dragging me down with you.”

He wanted to throw something against the wall. “Do you believe that crap?”

“Of course not, but I feel like I’m killing him, Paul.”

“He’s trying to kill you. He’s trying to make you a little clone of his goddamned fucked self.”

She pressed her hands to her ears and he sat down next to her, pulling her close to him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Look, when you see your father, you get under his spell or something. It’ll pass in a little while and you’ll feel okay about yourself again. And about me. We’ll be in New Hope again this summer and…”

She shook her head. “I’m not going to New Hope this summer.”

He froze. “What do you mean?”

“I need to be by myself for a while. I need to think everything through.”

“Will you stay with your parents?” He could not bear the thought of her spending two months with them. She would be entirely brainwashed by the end of the summer.

“No,” she said. “I thought I’d travel down the coast. From here to Florida.”

“What do you mean, from here to Florida? Who would you go with?”

“Myself.”

“You can’t do that. What if your car breaks down?”

“I’m going to hitchhike.”

Paul stood up. “You have this all planned out, don’t you? You’ve been thinking about this for a long time and haven’t said a word to me about it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Annie, I can’t be apart from you for the entire summer.”

“Maybe it won’t be that long. Maybe the first week it’ll all come clear to me, and I’ll write to you every single day.”

He went to New Hope alone. He took a part in summer stock but was reviewed poorly, his first truly bad review ever. At first Annie sent him postcards daily from coastal towns in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland. She’d write volumes in the little space on the cards, her handwriting squeezed together almost unintelligibly, telling him about the beaches, the water, the arcades. She was meeting lots of interesting people, she wrote, which disturbed him. How many of those people were men? She’d sign the cards, I love you, though, and he tried to relax, to tell himself she would come back refreshed and free of her father’s shadow. Little boxes wrapped in brown paper arrived for him several times a week and inside he’d find shells, a starfish, a seahorse. Annie and her gifts.

Suddenly, though, the gifts stopped, along with the postcards. He was sick with worry. After five days without a word from her, he called her parents.

“She decided to stay in North Carolina awhile,” her mother told him.

“Well, I…I was hearing from her just about every day and then the cards stopped…and I just thought.” He grimaced. He could imagine Annie’s mother smiling with delight on the other end of the telephone. “Where in North Carolina is she?” he asked.

“The beach somewhere. I think they call it the Outer Banks down there.”

Two more weeks followed without a word from Annie. He was in pain. His body literally ached when he got out of bed in the morning. He couldn’t imagine she would leave him hanging this way, that she would cut herself off from him so completely. He read her last postcard over and over again, and the “I love you” at the end seemed just as sincere as it did in the first one. Maybe her mother was lying. Maybe Annie was in Boston. Maybe she wrote to him daily and her mother intercepted the letters.

Then the note came from Kitty Hawk.Dear Paul,I’ve written this letter in my mind a thousand times and it never comes out right, but I can’t put it off any longer. I’ve met someone down here. His name is Alec and I’ve fallen in love with him. I didn’t plan for this to happen, Paul, please believe me. I left B.C. with thoughts only of you, but also with the knowledge that things between us were not what they once were. I still love you—I think I always will. You’re the one who taught me that receiving could be just as much an act of love as giving. Oh God, Paul, you’re the last person in the world I would ever want to hurt. I doubt I’ll return to B.C. in the fall. It’s just as well we don’t ever see each other again. Please, please forgive me.Annie

He considered going to North Carolina to find her, claim her, but he didn’t want her on those terms. He became obsessed with thoughts of harming himself. He could no longer drive at night without being tempted to slip his car across the white line into oncoming traffic, and he’d sometimes sit for hours in his kitchen, staring at the blade of a steak knife, imagining how it would feel to draw it through the vein in his arm.

He quit the play and moved home for the rest of the summer, where his sisters clucked over him and his parents tried to force him to eat. They treated him like the sick, withdrawing addict that he was. Still, he could not stand it when his sisters called Annie a two-faced bitch.

He returned to Boston College a walking dead man. He tried out for the junior play, but Harry Saunders said he was “lifeless,” and cast someone else in the part Paul knew Harry had intended for him. He lost interest in acting altogether and switched his major to journalism. In November, one of Annie’s friends told him that Annie had married Alec O’Neill in North Carolina. O’Neill. He supposed an Irishman was preferable to an Italian in her parents’ eyes.

And in hers as well.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Alec was calling Olivia in the evenings. The first time he had an excuse. He remembered her saying that she’d appeared on talk shows after the publication of The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit. He could picture her on TV, poised and attractive and persuasive. Only in his fantasy, it was the lighthouse she was talking about.

“Would you ever consider taking on one of the speaking engagements?” he asked her that first night he called. The kids were out and he was sitting alone in the living room, watching the sun melt into the sound. “We get a lot of requests, and after the brochure is put together we’ll be inundated. There are too many for me to handle alone right now.”

“But I don’t know a thing about the lighthouse,” she said.

“I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

She hesitated, and he wondered if he was asking too much of her. “Why is the lighthouse so important to you, Alec?”

Alec looked across the room at the ten small, oval-shaped stained glass windows built into the side wall of the house. Their designs were barely visible in the dusky evening light. “That’s where I met Annie,” he said. “I worked there the summer after I graduated from college. Annie was traveling down the coast and we just happened to be at the lighthouse at the same time one evening. It became sort of symbolic to me, I guess.”

“Well, I’ll do it, Alec. As long as the time doesn’t conflict with my hours in the ER.”

“That’s great.” He ran his hand over the arm of the chair. “By the way, I bumped into Paul in the grocery store yesterday.”

“You did?” She sounded alarmed. “What did you tell him?”

“Oh, I just asked him a few questions about his fantasy life.”

She was quiet for a moment. “I hope you’re kidding.”

“Of course I’m kidding.” He frowned. “This really isn’t a joking matter with you, is it?”

“No.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We just talked about the lighthouse.”

He didn’t bother with an excuse when he called Olivia the following night. Or the night after that. On the fourth night, he got home late after driving Clay to Duke for a five-day orientation. It was ten-thirty, too late to call her, and he felt as though something was missing from his day when he got into bed. The emptiness of the bed overwhelmed him in a way it had not for several weeks, and he picked up the phone and dialed Olivia’s number. He knew it by heart.

She sounded sleepy when she answered.

“I woke you,” he said.

“No. Well, yes, but that’s okay.”

There was a silence, and an odd feeling passed through him that he was talking to her from his bed, and she from hers. He could picture her there. Silky-straight hair. Fair skin. Green eyes.

“I took Clay to Duke for an orientation today,” he said. “It seems strange not having him around the house.”

“Maybe this is a good time for you and Lacey to do something together.”

“Ha. Fat chance.” He felt a sense of dread about the next four days without Clay’s presence to ease the tension between Lacey and himself.

It took Olivia three nights of phone calls to persuade him. He stopped by Lacey’s room before breakfast that Wednesday morning. She was dressed for school in yellow shorts that were too short and a T-shirt from the sporting goods store where Clay worked. She was hunting on the floor of her closet for her other sandal.

He sat down on the corner of her bed. “Let’s do something tonight, Lacey,” he said. “Just you and me.”

She looked up at him. “Why?”

“Like we used to. Remember? We used to spend a lot of time together.”

“I’m going out with Jessica tonight.”

“You see Jessica every night. Come on. Give your old Dad some of your time.”

She leaned back against the wall next to her closet, the sandal in her hand. “What would we do?”

He shrugged. “Anything you want. You used to like to bowl.”

She rolled her eyes.

“We could see a movie.”

“I’ve seen every movie that’s playing around here. They never change.”

“Night fishing?” he offered. “You used to like that.”

“Yeah. When I was about eight.”

He sighed. “Help me out, Lacey. What can we do tonight?”

“I know.” She suddenly looked excited, and he leaned forward. “I could, like, go out with Jessica and you could stay home with your lighthouse pictures.”

He stared at her, hurt, and she sighed and set her sandal on the floor. “I’m sorry,” she said, defeat in her voice. “We can do whatever you want.”

He stood up. “Fishing then. I’ll make the reservations.”

She wore her radio headset in the car on the drive to the inlet. She slouched in the front seat of the Bronco, her feet against the dashboard tapping time to music he couldn’t hear.

They arrived at the inlet and Lacey got out of the car, fastening the radio to the waistband of her shorts. She walked ahead of him, and his fantasy of spending a quiet evening in the company of his daughter fell apart.

“Lacey?”

She continued walking. Whether she was ignoring him or truly couldn’t hear him with the headset on, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. She was cutting him out one way or the other.

He caught up to her, stopping her with his hand on her arm. “Please don’t take the radio on the boat,” he said. “Leave it in the car, Lace. Please.”

She muttered something under her breath, but returned to the car with him and left the radio on the front seat.

She was the only female on the boat. There were a dozen men from their early twenties on up, and they stared openly at Lacey when she boarded, forcing Alec to look at her with a more objective eye. Her clothes looked suddenly provocative. Her shorts were insanely short, her legs long and slender and remarkably tanned, given her delicate skin. She’d changed out of her T-shirt into some sort of tank top—a flimsy piece of white cloth with a scooped neck and a hacked-off length so that it didn’t quite reach the waistband of her shorts. The nipples of her small breasts were visible beneath the thin white fabric. She was carrying a blue windbreaker that he wanted to wrap around her.

One of the younger men smacked his lips and grinned at her as she hopped from the pier to the boat.

“I’m her father,” Alec said to the gawking young man. “Watch it.”

“Dad,” Lacey said. “See why I don’t want to go out with you? You’re so embarrassing.”

He found a spot for them at the side of the boat, near the cabin and away from the other fishermen, who occasionally turned from their posts for a beer or fresh bait and stared in Lacey’s direction. Was this what happened every time she went out on the street? If these guys were as blatant about it here, when she was with her father, what would they be like if he were not around?

Lacey baited her hook with a chunk of mackerel, effortlessly, as if she did it every day of her life.

“You were always better than Clay at this,” Alec said. “He could never bring himself to touch the bait.”

“Clay’s a wimp sometimes.” She sat down and leaned against the back of her chair.

Alec sat next to her and breathed in the scent of salt and seaweed as the coastline faded into the distance.

“Remember the one that got away, Lace?”

“Huh?”

“The blue you caught that jumped off the deck.”

She nearly smiled, turning her face away from him so he wouldn’t see. “A long time ago,” she said.

“It was huge. I helped you reel it in and you were so excited, but once we got the damn thing off the hook, back it went.”

“No one believed me,” she said quietly, but with a certain indignation. “And you said you’d gotten a picture of it and…”

“And the film got wet and didn’t turn out.”

She laughed, but caught herself quickly. “Well, I don’t think Mom ever believed it.”

“Yes, she did. She just liked teasing you about it.”

They were quiet for a few minutes. “I hate bluefish,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I hate fish.”

It grew dark quickly, and with the darkness came a sudden blustery wind. The sea began to kick up a little, the boat bouncing and rocking more than Alec would have liked. He and Lacey put on their windbreakers.

Lacey suddenly stood up. “I’ve got something, Dad.” Her pole was bending, the reel clicking rapidly as the fish carried the bait out to sea.

“Just hold on, Lace. Let it run. That’s it.”

She hung on to the pole, the tip of her tongue caught between her lips in concentration. “It stopped!” she said.

“Okay, reel in the line. Get the slack out of it. Do you want some help?”

“Uh uh.”

One of the young men came over and stood by her side. “Atta girl,” he said as she cranked the reel. “It’s probably gonna take off on you another time or two. Just…”

She yelped as the fish began stripping line from her reel once more, but it quickly tired of the battle this time, and she started reeling it in again, laughing.

Another of the men had come over to watch. “It’s a blue,” he said, as the fish thrashed wildly just below the surface of the water. “And a real beauty. Almost as pretty as the fisherman.”

Lacey managed to grin at him as she struggled with her pole.

“Fisherwoman,” the first young man corrected him.

“Right,” said his friend. “No doubt about that.”

Lacey blushed. Alec thought she looked like a trembling mass of erogenous zones.

The first fisherman reached over the railing with the net as Lacey pulled the bluefish from the water. “Eight pounds, I’d say.” He scooped the fish up easily and lifted it onto the deck.

“Don’t let it jump back in!” Lacey screamed, and she lowered herself next to Alec, holding on to the fish with a rag while he extracted the hook from its mouth. One of the young men lifted the lid of the cooler, and Alec dropped the fish inside. Then, with one last look at Lacey, the fishermen returned to their own poles at the stern.

Alec and Lacey baited their hooks again and took their seats. Lacey was smiling.

“That was good work, Lacey,” he said.

“We don’t have to eat it, though, do we?” she asked.

“No. We can give it to Nola. She loves bluefish.”

“Noler,” she corrected him and he laughed. Annie, with her Boston accent, could never master those open “a”s. “I’d like you to meet my friend Noler and her daughter Jessiker,” Lacey said, mimicking her mother’s husky voice.

“She wasn’t quite that bad,” Alec said.

“I’m just glad she didn’t name me Melissa or something.”

He smiled at a memory. “She wanted to name you Emma, but I refused. I told her I’d only go along with it if she could say the name for a week straight without turning it into Emmer. But of course, she couldn’t do it.”

“Emma. God, Dad, thanks, you saved me.”

The young man who’d called her a real beauty walked by, and Lacey turned to smile at him.

“I should tell them you’re barely fourteen,” Alec said.

Lacey shrugged. “Well, Mom was only fifteen the first time she…you know.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me.”

“She did?” Thanks, Annie.

“I mean, she said it wasn’t good to do it that young, but she turned out all right.”

“She was lucky she didn’t get pregnant. And there are diseases around now that she didn’t have to worry about back then.”

“I know all that, Dad.”

He couldn’t see Lacey’s face, but he could practically hear her rolling her eyes, and he waited a moment or two before he spoke again. “So, does that mean you’re planning to have sex next year when you’re fifteen?”

“God, Dad, that really isn’t any of your business.”

He stopped himself from telling her it most certainly was his business. This was too good. She was actually talking to him. He probably should say something about birth control. If he brought it up, though, wasn’t that tantamount to giving her the go-ahead?

“Jessica’s done it,” Lacey said suddenly, her eyes glued to the water.

“What?”

“God, I shouldn’t have said that. You won’t tell Nola, Dad, will you?” she pleaded. “Please don’t. Jessica would kill me.”

“No, I won’t.” Could he keep that promise? He would have to. He tried to picture sultry little Jessica Dillard in bed with someone and could not come up with a clear image. “Is she…being careful?”

“I guess.” Lacey sounded irritated by the question and he decided not to push her further.

They caught a second and third bluefish before the rocking of the boat took the pleasure out of fishing. Alec was relieved when the captain turned the boat around and headed back to shore. Most of the other fishermen had reeled in their lines and were sitting down. A few of them moved inside the cabin as the wind whipped up.

“You’re supposed to watch the horizon if you don’t feel well, right?” Lacey asked.

“You’re not feeling well, Lace?” He did not feel that well himself.

She drew her windbreaker tighter around her and shook her head. A rain was starting. He could see droplets of it fill her hair and sparkle in the light from the cabin.

Lacey suddenly moaned and stood up, grabbing for the railing. He stood next to her, lifting her thick hair away from her face as she got sick, and he remembered doing the same for Annie when she was carrying Lacey. A horrendous pregnancy, although she had always told Lacey it had been a delight-filled nine months, as though she was trying to change the memory of it in her own mind.

Alec took his handkerchief from his jeans pocket and wiped Lacey’s eyes and mouth. “Let’s move over here,” he said. They sat down on the deck, leaning against the cabin to give them some protection from the wind and rain. Her teeth were chattering and he put his arm around her, pleased that she didn’t protest.

One of the fishermen was getting sick somewhere on the other side of the cabin. Lacey whimpered at the sound of his retching, and leaned against Alec.

“Daddy,” she said, “I feel so bad.”

“I know, sweetheart.” He looked out at the horizon. Through the haze he could make out the string of lights along the shore and, to the north, the pulsing beacon of the Kiss River Lighthouse. “Look, Lace,” he said, “we’re almost home.”

She raised her head, but lowered it to his shoulder again, moaning, and he hugged her tighter. He was cold and wet and running the risk of Lacey getting sick down the front of his jacket, yet he had not felt this completely content in a very long time.

Lacey staggered to the car when they reached the inlet, while he carried the cooler of fish. He set it in the back of the Bronco and climbed into the driver’s seat. He looked over at his daughter. “Still a little green around the gills,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Mmm.” She leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes.

She was quiet during the drive home. She did not even bother with the headset, and the radio rested silently in her lap.

Once in the house, Alec set the cooler on the kitchen table and took a good look at his daughter as she pulled off her soppy windbreaker. Her face was white, the skin around her eyes puffy. “I guess fishing wasn’t the best idea,” he said.

She set her crumpled jacket on one of the chairs and opened the top of the cooler. “Well,” she said, lifting out the smallest bluefish, “Noler will be happy.”

He smiled. “I’ll take care of the fish, Annie. You go on up to…”

Lacey spun around to face him. “I am not Annie!” She threw the fish at him and it caught him on the cheek, cold and wet, before falling to the floor with a thud.

“I’m sorry, Lace,” he said.

“You make me sick!” She turned on her heel and stalked out of the room, her red hair flashing in the kitchen light.

She was already gone by the time he got up in the morning, and the house felt empty. He carried the fish over to Nola’s. She was out, but the house was unlocked and he put the fish in her refrigerator and left a note on the kitchen table. Blues in the fridge, he wrote, and imagined adding a second line—By the way, your daughter is having sex. How would he feel if Nola knew something like that about Lacey and didn’t tell him?

He was putting together some information on the lighthouse for Olivia when Lacey came home that afternoon. He heard the back door slam shut and the thumping of her footsteps on the stairs as she ran up to her room. He’d been rehearsing what he would say to her all afternoon, what Olivia had coached him to say during their phone call the night before: He’d enjoyed her company last night, he would tell her. Please don’t let his one mistake ruin it.

The door to Lacey’s room was open, and at first he thought there was a stranger in the room—a young girl with jet black hair, sorting through the top drawer of Lacey’s dresser.

“Lacey?”

She turned around to face him and he gasped. She had dyed her hair and cut it short, nearly to her scalp. In some places it looked practically shaved, the whiteness of her scalp clearly visible against the stark blackness of her hair.

“What did you to do yourself?” he asked.

She put her hands on her hips and narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t look a thing like her now, do I?”

CHAPTER TWENTY

“She cut off her hair and dyed it black,” Alec said.

Olivia rolled onto her side, moving Sylvie out of her way. She knew when the phone rang at ten-thirty each night who it was, and she was sure to be in bed by then. He was the one who said it first—that he liked talking to her from his bed, that his bed was the loneliest place in his house since Annie died. Yes, she agreed, she knew exactly what he meant. She felt close to him, talking to him in the darkness. His lights were off as well; she had asked him that the first night. She’d stopped short of asking him what he slept in, not certain she wanted to know.

“She’s tired of existing in Annie’s shadow,” Olivia said. She understood all too well how Lacey felt.

“It makes her look cheap,” Alec said. “I keep thinking of those men on the boat. She was enjoying their attention a little too much. She told me her best friend is having sex. Maybe she’s not as naive as I’d like to think. Annie was only fifteen her first time.”

Olivia frowned. “Fifteen?”

“Yes, but there were extenuating circumstances.”

“Like what?”

Alec sighed. “Well, she was raised with a lot of money but not much love,” he said. “I guess she tried to find it the only way she knew how. She was pretty promiscuous as a teenager—she loathed that word, but I don’t know what else you’d call it.”

Olivia said nothing. She wondered if Annie had still been looking for love the night she slept with Paul.

“So how old were you?” Alec asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

He laughed. “I guess that was pretty blunt. You sounded so appalled when I said Annie was fifteen, it made me wonder about you. You don’t have to answer.”

Olivia wrapped the telephone cord around her fingers. “I was fourteen the first time,” she said, “and twenty-seven the second.”

It was a few seconds before Alec spoke again. “I’ve opened a can of worms.”

“Well, I don’t talk about this much.”

“And you don’t have to now if you don’t want to.”

She rolled onto her back again and closed her eyes. “I was raped when I was fourteen by an older boy in my neighborhood.”

“God, Olivia, I’m sorry.”

“It left scars. It made me…apprehensive about sex, and I didn’t make love until I was twenty-seven. That’s when I met Paul.”

“There was no one in all those years you felt safe enough with?”

She laughed. “I didn’t exactly have to fight men off with a stick. I was a very nerdy adolescent, and not much better as an adult. I avoided the whole issue of men and dating by focusing on my studies or my work.”

“I can’t picture you nerdy. You’re so attractive and self-confident.”

“In the ER, maybe, but it’s not that easy for me to feel good about myself in the real world. Confidence is something I’ve always had to work at, and being dumped by my husband for a woman who is practically a figment of his imagination hasn’t helped.”

“I’m sorry I dredged up bad memories for you.”

“You didn’t. They’re always there in one form or another.”

“What did you parents do about the rape? Did you prosecute the guy?”

Olivia stared up at the dark ceiling. “My father was dead, and my mother was very sick—an alcoholic, actually—and she wasn’t capable of much by then. I didn’t tell anyone about it until I met Paul. You’re only the second person I’ve told.” She pulled Sylvie closer, until the cat’s soft head was against her cheek. “Anyhow, I left home after it happened and moved in with one of my teachers.”

“I had no idea you had such a difficult past.”

“Well, I owe a lot to Paul.” She had been able to tell Paul the entire story of her past, of the rape. She’d dated him for several months before she dared let him know the truth about her background, and during that time she’d seen him cry at sad movies and listened to him read poetry he’d written about her. She knew she could tell him anything.

He’d responded to her story with the compassion she’d expected. He was the gentlest of lovers, his patience infinite. He did as much as any man could to heal the scars of that day so long ago. In the process, he awakened something in her. Your lascivious side, he called it, and she knew he was right. She felt a wild need to make up for the time she’d lost, and Paul obliged her most willingly, nurturing that newly discovered part of herself.

But now he’d told her that he’d made love to Annie, a woman with twenty-five years’ worth of lovemaking experience behind her. She was so free-spirited, he’d said. So full of life.

“Alec,” Olivia said, “I need to get off.”

“I’ve upset you.”

“No, it just makes me remember what a caring husband I used to have.”

“I don’t understand his problem, Olivia. I feel like calling him up and telling him he has a beautiful wife who loves him and needs him and…”

She sat up. “Alec, you wouldn’t.”

“I think he’s out of his mind. He doesn’t know what he’s got and how quickly he could lose it.”

“Alec, listen to me. You only know my side of the story. You don’t know what our marriage was like from Paul’s perspective. It wasn’t right for him or enough for him or—I’m not sure what. But, please, please, don’t try to interfere.”

“Relax. I’m not going to do anything.” Alec was quiet for a moment before he spoke again. “When Paul finally gets his wits about him and comes back to you, do you think he’d mind if you talked to me from your bed every once in a while?”

Olivia lay back on her pillow again, smiling. “I hope I have that problem to worry about one of these days.”

“I hope you do, too.”

“I’d better get off.”

“Olivia?”

“Yes?”

“Nothing. I just like saying your name.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

He hung up the phone after talking with Olivia, knowing he would not be able to sleep. He got out of bed and pulled on the blue shorts he’d worn that day, zipping them up as he walked from the bedroom out to the second-story deck. He sat down on the glider, pumping gently with his bare feet, making the glider coast a little. The sound was dark. The water lapped gently against the beach in his back yard, and a damp breeze brushed over his chest and arms.

He needed to get Olivia and Paul back together again, quickly, before he told her anything more loaded than he liked the sound of her name. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was doing something wrong, something inappropriate, just by talking to her from his bed. But he knew the reason for his guilt.

The call had come on a Sunday morning, a couple of years ago. He’d been sitting out here on the glider, reading the paper and drinking coffee from a mug when he heard Annie answer the telephone in the bedroom. She spoke quietly into the phone, her voice unusually subdued, which made him turn his lead to listen, but he couldn’t make out her words and he returned his concentration to the paper. After a few minutes she came out onto the deck and sat down next to him on the glider.

“That was the bone marrow registry,” she said. “I’m a perfect match for a little girl in Chicago.”

She had registered as a donor several years earlier and Alec had thought little of it at the time. Just another one of Annie’s good deeds. He had never expected it to amount to anything. From what he’d heard, it was extremely rare to find a match for bone marrow outside of one’s own family. Apparently, though, it was not impossible.

He set down the newspaper and took her hand, drawing it onto his thigh. “So what does that mean exactly?” he asked.

“I’ll have to go to Chicago. The surgery’s scheduled for Tuesday.” She wrinkled her nose, and when she spoke again her voice was small, hesitant. “Do you think you could go with me?”

“Of course.” He let go of her hand and smoothed her hair over her shoulder. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

“You bet.” She stood up and bent over to kiss him. “I’ll start breakfast.”

She was quiet for the rest of the day, and he didn’t press her to talk. He sensed she was grappling with something that she needed to work out on her own. At dinner that night, she told the children as much as she knew about the little girl who would surely die without her help. Lacey and Clay were eleven and fifteen, and they listened carefully, with serious faces. They would stay at Nola’s, Annie told them, and she and Alec would be home Wednesday night.

“How do they get the bone marrow out of you and into the girl?” Lacey asked.

“Well,” said Annie, her face animated, “first they’ll put us both to sleep so we don’t feel any pain. Then they’ll make a little incision in my back and take the marrow out with a needle and that’s that. The doctor said I’ll have a stiff back for a few days, but that will be the worst part. And I’ll be saving the little girl’s life.”

That night she could not sleep. She tossed and turned, finally working her way into Alec’s arms. “Please hold me,” she said.

She trembled as he pulled her close to him, and when she rested her head on his bare shoulder, he could feel the warm dampness of her cheek and knew she’d been crying.

He held her tighter. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m so scared,” she whispered. “I’m so scared I’m going to die during the surgery.”

He was alarmed. It was so unlike Annie to give a thought to herself. He leaned away from her, trying to see her eyes in the darkness. “Then don’t do it,” he said. “You don’t have to do it.”

“I do.” She sat up, facing him, her hand on his chest. “It’s a child’s only chance.”

“Maybe there were other matches.”

“They said I was the only one.”

“Christ. Nothing like a little guilt trip.”

“The feeling is so strong.” She shivered. “As though I’m definitely going to die. It would be punishment for all the bad things I’ve done.”

He laughed and lifted her hand from his chest to his lips. “You’ve never done a bad thing in your life.”

“I can’t stand the thought of not getting to watch Lacey and Clay grow up.” She began crying in earnest, and he knew her imagination was taking over as it so often did, tormenting her with the worst possible fantasy. “I’d never get to hold my grandchildren. I want to grow old with you, Alec.” She was pleading, as though there was something he could do to assure her of a perfect future.

“I want you to back out of this, Annie.” He sat up too, holding her hands, squeezing them between his palms. “Blame it on me. Tell them…”

“I can’t. The little girl needs…”

“I don’t give a damn about the little girl.”

She snapped her hands away from his. “Alec! How can you say that?”

“She’s anonymous. I don’t know her and I never will. You, on the other hand, I know very well, and you’re too frightened. It’s not good for you to go into surgery feeling this way.”

“I have to do it. I’ll be all right. I’m just…” She shook her head. “You know how nuts you can get in the middle of the night.” She lay down again and snuggled next to him, and it was another minute before she spoke again.

“Let me just ask you something, though,” she said. “Hypothetically.”

“Mmm?”

“If I died, how long would you wait before you started going out with someone?”

“Annie. Cancel the damn surgery.”

“No. I mean it, Alec. Tell me. How long?”

He was quiet for a moment, aware of how quickly he could lose her. She could, in a perfectly voluntary surgery, leave him forever. He pulled her closer. “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be with anyone else,” he said.

“You mean, sexually?”

“I mean period.”

“Well, God, I wouldn’t want you to be alone forever. But if I did die, would you wait a year please? I mean, that’s not too long to grieve for someone you completely and thoroughly adore, is it? That’s all I ask. Then you can do whatever you like, although it would be nice if you could think of me from time to time, and find your new woman lacking in almost every way.”

“Why not in every way?” he asked, smiling. “Go for broke, Annie.” He raised himself up on his elbow and kissed her. “Maybe we’d better make love one last time since you already seem to have a foot out the door.” He slipped his hand to her breast, but she caught his fingers.

“You didn’t promise yet, Alec,” she said. “Just one year. Please?”

“I’ll give you two,” he said, certain then that it was a promise he would have no trouble at all keeping.

She felt better in the morning, a cheery optimism replacing her maudlin mood. Alec, however, felt worse, as though she had transferred her fear to him. By the time they boarded the plane for Chicago on Tuesday, he was sick with nervousness. He sat with his head flat against the seatback, trying to ignore the nausea pressing in on him, while Annie held his hand and rested her head on his shoulder. She read him the article she’d torn from the Beach Gazette that morning, the article describing her trip to Chicago, yet another one of Annie O’Neill’s saintly deeds.

She had to stay in the hospital the night before the surgery and Alec took a room in the hotel across the street. He watched television the entire night. If he fell asleep he might miss the alarm, and Annie would be taken into the OR before he’d have a chance to see her.

He walked over to the hospital before dawn and went into her room as soon as they would let him. She looked beautiful, her hair falling around her shoulders, a smile of contentment on her face.

“Oh, Alec.” She reached for his hand. “You didn’t sleep.”

“Yes, I did,” he lied.

She shook her head. “You have circles under your eyes. You look awful.”

He tried to smile. “Thanks.”

The nurse came in, telling them it was time for Annie to be wheeled to the operating room. Alec leaned over to kiss her, leaving his lips on hers for a long time. When he pulled away she whispered, “Don’t be scared.” They wheeled her out of the room and he struggled to keep his tears and his terror in check as he watched her disappear down the hall.

The surgery went smoothly, and Annie was practically euphoric by the time he saw her back in her room.

“My first thought when I came out of the anesthetic was, ‘I’m alive!’” she told him with a tired smile. “I was sick as a dog. It was wonderful.”

Sitting on the plane was not easy for her. She fidgeted, adjusting her seat belt in an effort to get comfortable, but she didn’t utter a word of complaint.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, when they were somewhere over Virginia. “There are some changes I want to make about us.”

“Like what?” he asked.

“We need more time together.”

“Fine,” he said.

“I propose that we meet for lunch one day a week.”

“Okay.”

“A two-hour lunch,” she said. “In a motel.”

He laughed. “I see.”

“I really need this, Alec.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “We never get time away together, without the kids around. It’s so important. It’s more important than you know, than I can possibly explain to you.”

They met on Fridays, from twelve to two, in any motel that would take them. In the winter it was easy to find a room, but during the summer, they paid an exorbitant price for the privilege of two hours in a prime-season motel. By that time, though, Alec knew those couple of hours were worth any amount of money. The intimacy they shared in the motel rooms spilled over to the other days of the week, and he saw a change in Annie. Her occasional moodiness, her periods of withdrawal, completely disappeared. Amazing that two hours a week could change so much.

“I’ve never been happier in my entire life than I’ve been this past year,” she told him. They’d been meeting for well over a year by then, and her contentment was so complete that when the depression took hold of her late in the fall, it was impossible to miss. She grew nervous. Jumpy. She was tearful when they made love on those afternoons in the motel room, quiet as they ate the lunch she’d brought. She avoided his eyes when she spoke to him. Sometimes she’d cry for no reason at all. He’d find her weeping in the bathroom as she soaked in the tub, or he’d wake up in the middle of the night to hear her crying softly into her pillow. It seemed far worse than the other times, or maybe it was just that it had been so long since he’d seen that misery in her.

“Let me in, Annie,” he’d say to her. “Let me help.” But she seemed no more aware of the reason for her distress than he was, and so he settled for holding her close to him, for trying to still her trembling with his arms.

Then suddenly, she was gone. In the hospital that Christmas night, he’d remembered his promise to her and it had seemed ludicrous to him that she’d asked him to grieve for only one year. He couldn’t imagine ever being interested in another woman. A year seemed no longer than one rotation of the lighthouse beacon.

Until he met Olivia, a woman as unlike Annie as a woman could be. She’s a friend, he told himself now as he coasted gently on the glider. She’s married to another man and carrying that man’s child.

Maybe he should call her earlier in the evening, before he got into bed, the bed that still seemed filled with Annie’s presence. Maybe he shouldn’t call her at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Tom Nestor helped Olivia load the bags of magazines and paperbacks into the trunk of her car after her lesson that Saturday. The Manteo Retirement Home wasn’t far from the Battered Women’s Shelter, and since she was volunteering there tonight, she thought it was about time she made good on her promise to get the magazines out of the studio.

“Thanks for doing this,” Tom said.

“I meant to take them long before now,” Olivia said as she got in behind the steering wheel.

“Hey, Olivia,” he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze through the window. “The panel’s a real peach.”

She smiled at him and then glanced down at the panel she’d finally completed that morning, a geometric blend of colored and clear glass that was pretty enough to hang in one of her windows—one of the windows Paul would be unlikely to see if he stopped by the house.

She drove into Manteo and parked across the street from the retirement home, directly in front of a small antique shop. Her eyes were drawn to the sidewalk in front of the little shop, where three antique dolls dressed in satin and lace sat on three splintery old wicker chairs. This must be where Annie had bought her daughter’s birthday gifts. She would have to tell Alec.

She got out of the car and shaded her eyes to look at the retirement home. It was a lovely old house, painted sky-blue with sparkling white trim. A broad porch ran its entire width. From the street, Olivia could see that several of the front windows were filled with stained glass panels, no doubt made and donated by Saint Anne.

She lugged the bags out of the trunk of the Volvo and walked across the street and up the sidewalk to the house. Although she’d been out of her air-conditioned car for only seconds, she was already perspiring. It was the hottest day of the summer so far and there was no breeze at all.

About a dozen sturdy-looking white rocking chairs lined the porch, but only a couple of them were occupied—one by a shriveled old woman who looked too frail to be sitting out side in the heat, the other by a white-haired woman wearing sneakers and holding a newspaper on her lap.

“Hello, there, young lady,” the woman in sneakers said as Olivia started up the steps. “You’re bringing us some magazines?”

Olivia set the bags down on the top step and shaded her eyes again. The woman sat clear-eyed and stick-straight in the rocker, but this close up, Olivia could see she was quite old, her face lined and leathery. Someone had carefully trimmed and shaped her short white hair.

“Yes,” Olivia said. “Is there someone inside I should leave them with?”

“Sandy’s in there.”

“Eh?” The second woman leaned forward, and the woman in sneakers spoke loudly into her ear.

“She’s brought us magazines, Jane, you know, like Annie used to do?”

Jane gave a slight nod before leaning back in her chair again and closing her eyes.

“You knew Annie?” Olivia stepped under the porch roof, out of the sun.

“Indeed I did.” The woman held out one long-boned hand to Olivia. “I’m Mary Poor, keeper of the Kiss River Lighthouse.”

Olivia smiled and shook her hand, struck by the strength in the woman’s slender fingers. “I’m delighted to meet you, Mrs. Poor. My name’s Olivia Simon.”

“Olivia. Pretty name. Kind of old-fashioned.”

“I think you know my husband, Paul Macelli,” Olivia continued. “He interviewed you about the lighthouse.”

Mary Poor narrowed her eyes at Olivia. “He’s got you running around, doing Annie’s old chores?”

Olivia was speechless for a moment, trying to figure out which of them was confused. “No,” she said finally. “I’m taking stained glass lessons from the man Annie used to share her studio with and…”

“Tom, am I right? Tom what’s-his-name. Wears his hair like a girl.”

“Yes, that’s right. Tom Nestor. Do you know him?”

“Oh.” Mary smiled, displaying lovely straight teeth for a woman her age. “I met him once or twice,” she said. “So it’s Tom who’s got you doing Annie’s work.”

Jane started to snore softly from the chair at Mary’s side.

“Well, no,” Olivia said. “I saw the pile of magazines, and Tom told me that Annie used to bring them over here, so since I’m volunteering at the women’s shelter, I figured I could…”

“You’re working at that hell hole?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Oh, no, child, you shouldn’t be there.” Mary patted the arm of the empty rocker next to her. “Sit down,” she said.

Olivia looked at her watch. She was running late, but she was curious about this old woman. She sat down in the rocker.

“You’re a pretty girl,” Mary said.

“Thank you.”

“You remind me of my daughter, Elizabeth. She had your color hair—dark and silky—and eyes like yours, with a little sad look to them.”

Olivia leaned away from her. She did not want sad-looking eyes.

“You don’t look a thing like Annie, though.”

“I know,” Olivia said. “I’ve seen pictures of her.”

“I bet you’re not like her in any way at all.”

Olivia felt insulted, and Mary did not miss her look of dismay. She hurried on.

“And that’s just fine, child,” she continued. “You be you, let Annie be Annie. Would you have done what she did? Jumped in front of a woman about to get her head shot off by her husband?”

Olivia had wondered about that herself. “Well, I like to think I…”

“The hell you would. Instinct takes over and you fight for yourself, for your own hide. And that’s the way it should be.” Mary licked her lips and looked out toward the street, toward the little shop where the dolls sat baking in the sun. “Annie was a really fine girl,” she said, “but she could be a fool sometimes.”

Olivia did not know what to say. She stared at the newspaper in Mary Poor’s lap, folded to the crossword puzzle, which had nearly been completed.

“That husband of yours,” Mary said.

“Paul?”

“Paul. He’s a very high-strung sort, isn’t he? You need to feed him kale with sea salt and lemon.”

Olivia laughed.

“Kale with sea salt for those nerves of his. And you tell him it’s about time he came back. I have plenty more I can tell him and Lord knows how much longer I can keep it straight in this old noggin.” She touched her fingertips to her temple.

“You seem very lucid to me, Mrs. Poor.” Olivia stood up. She bent down to pick up the bags, nearly straining her back with the weight of them.

“You make this the last time you bring magazines by here, all right?” Mary said.

Olivia frowned. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I thought…”

“You can come visiting anytime, child, but not doing Annie’s chores for her.”

Mary leaned back in the rocking chair after the girl had gone and closed her eyes. She had done enough of the crossword puzzle for now, and she knew that Jane would be asleep until suppertime. She should take a little rest herself, but her mind kept returning to the girl’s face. Had she really looked like Elizabeth? Probably not. To be honest, she could barely remember Elizabeth’s face at all. It was frozen in her memory at the ages she’d been in the few pictures she had of her. Three, eight, fifteen. That last picture had been taken the day before she ran away. She remembered well how she’d looked the very last time she’d seen her, though, two years ago, when she’d been lying in a casket. Mary never would have recognized her. Elizabeth had been fifty-eight years old, gray-haired and waxy-pale.

A friend of Elizabeth’s in Ohio had sent Mary the letter, telling her that Elizabeth had collapsed at work and never regained consciousness. Mary wanted to go to the funeral, she told Annie. She needed to pay her last respects.

Annie drove her, and it took them a very long time to get there. Days, perhaps. Mary wasn’t sure. She slept most of the way, while Annie sang along with the radio. Mary would catch bits and pieces of her songs, amused by the energy she put into them, as though she were on stage. It made Mary chuckle to herself. Then she’d feel a little guilty at the comfort she took in being with Annie, while her own daughter had died a stranger to her.

Annie took care of her on that trip, and for once Mary needed Annie’s care more than Annie needed hers. Away from Kiss River for the first time in many years, Mary suddenly felt every bit her age—eighty-seven and one half years old. Almost as devastating as seeing the unfamiliar, lifeless body of her daughter was the sudden awareness of her frailty. She was confused, uncertain of the hour or the day. Sometimes uncertain of the year. In the restaurants, she stared at the silverware, trying to remember how to hold a fork, how to cut her meat. During the night in the hotel, she woke Annie half a dozen times to ask her why there were no bursts of light coming through the window.

The strangers she met at the funeral treated her like a very old woman, sometimes talking past her as if she were not there. Annie became her eyes and her ears and her memory. Mary would catch her dear young friend looking at her with a worry in her face she had never noticed before. Annie wept at Elizabeth’s funeral, and Mary knew it was not Elizabeth she cried for, but her. She wanted to assure Annie that she was all right, that Annie did not have to fret about her. But the truth was, away from Kiss River she was a very old woman.

She was relieved to be back at Kiss River after that long and taxing journey. She stepped stiffly out of Annie’s car and felt immediately rejuvenated by the cool, salt-filled air. She wanted to climb to the top of the lighthouse, but Annie dissuaded her. Annie made dinner for her before going home to her own family, fussing over her as if she were a helpless child.

Mary had only been back at Kiss River a day and a half when she fell. Looking back later, she wished she could say there’d been an obstacle in her path that night, but the truth was she was simply walking across the kitchen floor when she lost her balance and went down. Pain shot through her hip and arm, and her cheek smacked hard against the tile. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t lift herself a fraction of an inch from the floor.

For two days and two nights she did without food or drink. She messed herself. The floor grew as cold as the ground outside, while the fire in the living room turned to ashes and a cold front swept across Kiss River. Mary slipped in and out of consciousness, struggling to keep her mind working by remembering the names of the dozens of men who had worked at the lifesaving station over the years.

On the third night, Annie arrived. Mary heard her key in the front door. She heard her step into the living room, and she tried to call out to her, but her throat was too dry. Annie called her name as she moved from room to room, and Mary heard her gasp when she finally entered the kitchen.

“Oh, my God,” Annie said, dropping next to her, the soft fabric of her skirt brushing over Mary’s face. Did she have someone with her that night? Yes, of course. Mary remembered Annie speaking to the stranger who hung back in the shadows of the cold living room, telling him to call an ambulance. Then she lifted Mary’s head into her lap and rocked her, as she must have rocked her children when they were younger.

“Oh, Mary,” she whispered, her hair like a red veil in front of Mary’s eyes. “You’ve gone and done it this time, precious. They’ll move you out now for sure.”

Mary hoped she would die right then. She squeezed her eyes closed and tried to force her soul from her body, but her effort only resulted in a deep and painless sleep. And when she woke up to the smell of antiseptic and sterile air, she knew she had left Kiss River forever.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Paul knew he should have backed out of tonight’s meeting. He’d been sitting in his car on the tree-lined street in front of Alec’s house for several minutes now, his windows rolled up and the air conditioner blowing in his face as he summoned up the courage to go inside. The first few meetings at the Sea Tern had been uncomfortable enough. He didn’t know why Alec had suddenly suggested the committee meet here.

On the outside, the house was utterly Annie—yellow, with white trim, and surrounded by trees hung heavy with Spanish moss. It was a decade old—he knew that she and Alec had it built when Alec’s practice was finally solvent. A couple of brightly colored sailboards were propped against the side wall, and he could see a fish-shaped windsock flying from the pier around back. The house was on the sound, on a little cul-de-sac of water, just as Annie had described it to him. The sunsets, Paul. The colors. They would make you want to write. They’d make you want to cry.

Paul started at a sudden rapping on his car window, and he turned to see Nola Dillard standing inches away from his face. He rolled the window down.

“Coming in, hon?” she asked. She was on foot. She must live close by.

He opened his door and joined her in the street, where her perfume masked the scent of the sound, and the setting sun played on the false gold of her hair. “I wasn’t sure I had the right house,” he lied.

“This is it, all right. You can tell by the sailboards if nothing else.”

They were greeted at the door by a German shepherd on three legs.

“This is Tripod,” Nola said.

Paul patted the dog’s head. A dog and two cats, Annie had told him. Not much for a vet.

The personality the house exuded on the outside spilled over into the living room. Annie’s touch was everywhere. The furniture was not the usual sturdy beach variety of the Outer Banks, but rather an overstuffed and eclectic collection of chairs and sofas upholstered in bold floral prints. The floor was nearly covered by patterned rugs, haphazardly layered on top of one another to form a comforting patchwork. Paul felt as if he’d walked into Annie’s arms.

“Don’t they have a wonderful view?” Nola was still at his elbow, pointing toward the huge window that looked out over the sound. The sunset was beginning to paint the sky, but Paul’s attention was drawn to the adjacent wall where ten small, oval windows were scattered from floor to ceiling, each filled with an intricately detailed scene of a woman in a flowing dress. One held a parasol, another walked a greyhound, a third held a bloodred rose to her nose.

“Oh, my God,” he said. He had not known, she had never told him, that these windows existed. “These are extraordinary.”

“Mmm,” Nola agreed. “She was a very talented lady.”

He could have spent the rest of the evening in front of those ovals of glass, but Nola took his arm and steered him toward the kitchen.

“Let’s say hello to Alec,” she said.

The kitchen was again pure Annie. The floor and cabinets and countertops were white, but the walls were nearly entirely made up of windows, and the windows were filled with stained glass, so that even in the muted evening light, the room was awash in soft pastels.

Alec leaned against the counter by the sink, uncorking a bottle of wine. He smiled when he saw them. “Hi, Nola, Paul.” He rested his hand briefly on Paul’s shoulder.

“The bluefish was divine,” Nola said. She kissed Alec on the cheek, touching his chest lightly with her hand in a way that gave Paul gooseflesh. Was there something between them? How could Alec have lost Annie such a short time ago and even let another woman near him? Nola, though, was looking at Alec with clear adoration that Alec seemed not to notice. Paul supposed he was the type of man some women would find attractive, with his piercing blue eyes and dark hair, and the smile that came as a surprise just when you thought he was incapable of any levity whatsoever.

He’s so sexy, Annie had said during the first interview. Paul had taken her words as a warning, an indication that he didn’t stand a chance with her this time around. He wondered later if she had only been trying to warn herself.

Alec arranged some wineglasses on a tray and handed the bottle to Paul. “Want to pour for me?”

“Sure.” Paul tried to get the same level of energy into his voice that Alec had in his, but failed. He took the bottle from Alec’s hand and began to pour, but his eyes were drawn to the decorative white shelves between the counter top and the cabinets. There, directly in front of him, was the small blue cloisonné horse he had bought Annie in New Hope. He spilled some of the wine on the tray and set the bottle down until he could pour it without his hand shaking.

Baby Blue. She had kept it all these years.

“Can you bring the tray out?” Alec asked, as he and Nola carried corn chips and salsa into the living room.

“Sure,” Paul said again. He separated the glasses on the tray so they wouldn’t rattle against each other when he lifted them.

He took a seat facing the wall of oval windows, but the light outside was quickly fading and from this distance he could not make out the scenes. Besides, he had to pay attention to what the others were saying. He had suddenly become the topic of their conversation.

Alec took a swallow of wine and lifted the file of material Paul had put together on the history of the lighthouse.

“Great work, Paul,” he said. “You’ve more than earned your keep on this committee.”

The others agreed, Brian Cass adding that they just needed a bit more information on Mary Poor to make it complete.

“I have a few things I need to get done for the Gazette,” Paul said. “But I’m hoping to get over to Manteo one day in the next week or so.”

“No rush,” Alec said. He took a deep breath and set down his glass. “Well, maybe I’d better wait till you’ve all had a bit more to drink before I move on to the next topic.” He picked up another file. “I’m afraid this is it, folks. The Park Service has made their final decision.”

“Oh, God,” said Sondra. “They’re going to move it.”

Alec nodded, and Walter Liscott groaned and buried his head in his hands.

“Read it, Alec,” Nola said.

Alec opened the file. A track would be built, he read, the work to begin in late August and completed next spring. The lighthouse would be lifted up and onto the track and moved a quarter mile inland. Paul could not picture it. He could not imagine the spit of land at Kiss River in unrelenting darkness.

Walter stood up. “It’s insanity!” he said. “It’s a godawful jackass scheme!”

“It does sound impossible,” Sondra said.

Brian Cass shook his head. “As far as I’m concerned, the historical significance of the lighthouse is down the tubes if they move it.”

“What about the sea wall?” Walter gestured wildly. “Why the hell…”

“Walter.” Alec’s voice was calm, reasonable. “That argument’s moot. This is what we have to live with.”

Walter stared at Alec for a moment. “I’m sorry, Alec. I’m going to have to take myself off this committee. I can’t be a party to that lunatic idea.”

He started toward the door, but Nola stood up and grabbed his arm. “The engineers have been working on this for years, now, Walter. You know that. You know they wouldn’t recommend moving it if they had the slightest doubt it would…”

“A bunch of little boys with a great big erector set,” Walter said. “They’re just playing. They’re experimenting with something they have no right to tamper with.” He turned to leave.

“Walter,” Alec said. “We don’t want to lose you. If you have a change of heart, please don’t let pride get in the way of coming back.”

Walter muttered something to himself and walked out the door.

The room was suddenly very still. An outboard motor started up somewhere on the sound, and the three-legged shepherd yawned and rolled over at Alec’s feet.

“Well,” Alec said finally. “Anybody else want to leave?”

Sondra Carter folded her arms across her chest. “I want to, but I won’t.”

Alec continued the meeting, talking about a few speaking engagements he had lined up. Then the committee went over a couple of fund-raising ideas, but energy lagged as the reality of the Park Service report settled over them like a lead blanket.

The meeting ended abruptly at nine, and Paul found himself reluctant to leave. He hung back from the rest of the group, cleaning up a salsa spill from the coffee table, carrying the wineglasses into the kitchen. He set them carefully in the sink, his eyes fastened on the blue horse, as he listened to Alec bidding good-night to his other guests. Paul walked back into the living room, getting as close as he could to the oval windows, but it was too dark outside. It was nearly impossible to make out the designs.

“Annie finished them even before the house was built.”

Paul turned to see Alec in the doorway. “It must have taken her forever,” he said.

“Not really. Once she got a design down, she was pretty fast. Come outside. You can see them much better from there this time of night.”

Paul followed Alec out the front door and around to the side of the house. They stood next to each other in the sand, Paul shaking his head in spellbound wonder. The windows were breathtaking.

“The thing that strikes me about her work is the realism,” he said. “You’d swear these women were real, that their dresses would feel soft and silky if you touched them.”

“That was her specialty,” Alec said. “I don’t think that even Tom, the guy she worked with, ever mastered the technique she used.”

Paul looked over at Alec, whose cheeks were splashed violet and gold from the window closest to his face. “Does it bother you to talk about her?” he asked.

“Not at all. She’s one of my favorite topics.”

Paul ran his fingertips over one of the windows, watching the color bleed onto his skin. “The night Olivia came home and told me Annie O’Neill was dead…I just couldn’t believe it. She was so alive. She was wonderful to interview.” He thought of the tapes he could not bring himself to listen to.

“It was unbelievable all right,” Alec said.

“I guess you know Olivia and I are separated.”

“Yes, she told me.” He glanced at Paul. “Do you know that’s not what she wants?”

“I know.” Paul stared at the image of a white-gowned, raven-haired woman about to take a bite from an apple. “It was completely my fault, what went wrong. Completely my doing. I felt certain when I left that it was the right thing to do, but now…I miss her sometimes, although I still have my doubts we could ever make it work again.”

“At least you have the choice. I envy you for that.” Alec gazed down at the sand for a few seconds. Then he chuckled and looked up at Paul. “I have this almost uncontrollable urge to lecture you,” he said. “You have a wife who’s pretty and smart and alive and I get the feeling you don’t realize how lucky you are and how quickly you could lose her…and I’m sorry. I don’t have any right to tell you your business.”

“Its okay,” Paul said. “I guess I’d feel the same way in your shoes.”

Alec slapped at a mosquito on his arm. “Let’s go in,” he said.

“Well, I should really get going.” Paul’s tone was unconvincing. As much as he hadn’t wanted to walk into Alec’s house earlier that evening, now he didn’t want to leave.

“Come on in for a while,” Alec said. “It’s not that late and my kids are out. I can use the company.”

“I saw pictures of your kids at Annie’s studio,” Paul said, as they walked into the house. “Your daughter looks practically identical to her.”

Alec laughed. “Not anymore. She cut off her hair and dyed it black.” He stepped into a room off the living room. “Come in here,” he said.

Paul walked into a small den. A computer rested on the desk facing the front window, and a broad work table like the one at Annie’s studio took up half the opposite wall. The walls were covered with photographs, most of them family shots, taken on the pier, on the deck of the house, on the beach. Annie looked happy in every one of them without exception, the core of her family, and Paul felt a sudden self-loathing for trying to hurt that, for playing to her weakness.

He stared at a picture of Annie’s children. Lacey and Clay. “She cut off that beautiful hair?” he asked, shaking his head.

“’Fraid so.”

Paul moved to another picture and this one gave him a start. A tanned white-haired man in tennis clothes standing next to a homely red-headed woman. “And who are these people?” he asked, although he already knew the answer.

The phone on the desk rang. “Annie’s parents,” Alec answered, as he picked up the receiver. He said a few words into the phone and Paul began to feel intrusive. He waved to Alec and mouthed the word thanks as he headed toward the door of the den, but Alec held up a hand to stop him.

“Wait a sec,” he said, and then into the phone, “I’m leaving now.” He hung up the phone and looked at Paul. “Are you squeamish?”

“Uh…no. I don’t think so.”

“Come with me, then.” Alec picked up a set of keys from the top of his desk and started toward the door. “One of the wild horses was hit by a car near Kiss River. We might be able to use your help.”

Paul followed him outside. They stopped in the garage, where Alec unlocked a cabinet and removed what looked like a tool chest and what was most definitely a shotgun.

Paul stared at the gun. “Are you going to… Do you think you’ll have to shoot it?”

Alec looked at him, puzzled, before breaking into a smile. “With a tranquilizer dart,” he said. “I’d use an injection if the horse needs to be put down, and that will most likely be the case, if it’s not dead already by the time we get there. I haven’t seen one of them survive a run-in with a car yet.”

Paul got into the Bronco, next to Alec and the gun. “Annie told me the horses stay close to the road now that it’s more developed around Kiss River,” he said.

Alec backed the Bronco out into the street. “They think the grass has been planted just for them.” He shook his head. “There are only ten horses left. Maybe nine, after tonight. We’ve plastered the road with warning signs, but some people still get behind the wheel with their brains in neutral.”

They were quiet as they drove out of Southern Shores. What would Annie think if she could see this scene, Paul wondered, he and Alec cruising up to Kiss River like old buddies, a shotgun resting on the seat between them?

“You were starting to tell me about Annie’s parents,” Paul said.

“Oh, right.” Alec turned on the air conditioner. Nightfall had done nothing to ease the heat of the day. “Her dad’s dead now, but her mother still lives in Boston, where Annie grew up. I don’t know why I have that picture of them hanging in the den. Annie insisted we put it up, but as far as I’m concerned we could have dropped it in the sound.”

Even in the darkness, Paul could see the tension in Alec’s jaw. “She mentioned that she came from a very wealthy family,” he prompted.

Alec glanced over at him. “She said that?” He shook his head. “They had money, all right, but Annie never saw a dime of it once we were married. They cut her off.”

Paul was beginning to perspire. He turned one of the air conditioning vents toward his face. “Why would they do that?” he asked.

“My parents owned a little Irish pub in Arlington—not much of a moneymaking enterprise—and I guess the son of a bartender wasn’t good enough for their blue-blooded daughter.” Alec’s tone was quiet, confidential, and Paul could feel his hurt. “They said I was white trash.”

Paul turned his head to the window. Annie had not married Alec to please her parents. She had left Paul for a man who was no more to their liking than he had been.

“There’s the Kiss River Light,” Alec said.

Paul looked ahead of them into the black night, and in a few seconds he saw it, too. One, one-hundred… So familiar. So constant. So… “Oh my God,” he said.

“What?”

“What will happen to the light while they’re in the process of moving it?”

Alec smiled. “I’ve thought of that myself. Doesn’t feel too good, does it?” He turned the Bronco onto the narrow road leading out to Kiss River, and leaned forward, peering into the darkness. “There they are,” he said.

Paul spotted two women on the side of the road, waving them over with their flashlights. Alec pulled the Bronco onto the sandy shoulder. He handed the shotgun to Paul, and they got out of the car, Alec carrying the tool chest and flashlight.

The women walked over to them.

“It’s one of the colts, Alec,” the taller woman said. “He was on the ground when we called you. He’s up now, but he’s limping badly.” She pointed into the wooded area at the side of the road and Paul could make out the dark silhouette of a young horse.

Alec set the tool chest down and put his hands on his hips, assessing the situation. “Where’s the herd?” he asked.

“Across the street.” The taller woman looked at Paul. “I’m Julie,” she said.

“Paul Macelli,” Paul said.

Alec touched the second woman on the shoulder. “And this is Karen.”

“He was broadsided,” Karen said. “The guy who hit him—with a Mercedes, no less—said the colt flipped up on the hood of the car and broke the windshield. He’s got a right good gash on his left hindquarter.”

Alec looked toward the horse. “Okay, fella,” he said quietly, “let’s see you walk.”

The four of them stood waiting for some movement from the colt, but he seemed frozen in one spot. He lifted his head to look across the road, where a group of horses milled skittishly in the darkness, the light from the beacon brushing over them every few seconds. They were huge, Paul thought with a shudder. Menacing. He remembered Annie warning him to steer clear of them. “They’re wild,” she’d said. “They can be nasty.”

Finally, the colt took a few tentative steps, obviously favoring his left front leg. Then he stood still, alone in the woods, neighing—crying, really—a sound that hurt to listen to.

Alec took the shotgun from Paul’s hand and gave him the flashlight. “Could you hold the light down here, Paul?” he asked as he knelt down to load the gun with something he took from the chest. Then he stood up. “Hold the light on him,” he said, and Paul and the women trained the beams of their flashlights on the animal’s bloody hindquarters as Alec moved quietly toward him.

Paul glanced over his shoulder at the enormous horses just across the road from where they stood. He felt somehow more exposed without Alec next to him.

Alec lifted the shotgun slowly to his shoulder and fired. The colt bucked and let out a cry. There was an answering whinny from the other side of the road, and Julie and Karen looked over at the herd.

“I’d better keep an eye on them,” Karen said, walking back toward the road. “You two can help Alec.”

There was not much to do as they waited for the tranquilizer to take effect. The three of them stood abreast, watching the frightened little colt stare back at them.

“How are you, Alec?” Julie broke the silence after a minute or two. Her question sounded loaded, one of those simple questions that took on greater meaning between old friends.

“I’m all right,” Alec said. “Hanging in there.”

After another few minutes of silence, the colt dropped abruptly to his knees, then rolled over on his side.

Alec lifted the tool chest. “Let’s see what we’ve got,” he said, as they started walking toward him.

Julie sat on the ground and pulled the colt’s head into her lap, while Paul stood above them, holding the flashlight so that Alec could see what he was doing. He glanced nervously toward the road. How was Karen going to hold those horses back if they decided to protect one of their own?

Alec ran his hands carefully over the colt’s legs, spending a long time on the leg the colt had favored. “Amazing,” he said. “Nothing’s broken. He’s going to be sore for a while, though.” He moved his hands slowly over the trunk of the horse. “No broken ribs. Hopefully no internal injuries, either. Looks like this is the worst problem.” He turned his attention to the gash. “Come a little closer with the light, Paul.”

Paul glanced across the road and reluctantly dropped to his knees. He was defenseless now. If the horses decided to stampede, the three of them were doomed.

He trained the light on the ugly wound. It was deep, and easily eight inches long. Alec washed it with a solution he took from his tool box.

“Do you have to stitch it?” Paul asked.

Alec nodded. “If it were winter, I’d let it go, but with this heat the flies are sure to get to it if I don’t.”

Paul wasn’t certain he could watch this. He hadn’t known what he was agreeing to when he’d told Alec he wasn’t squeamish.

Alec rooted around in the tool chest for another minute. Then he took the flashlight from Paul and handed it to Julie. “You’ll need to hold the edges of the wound together for me, Paul, okay?”

“Uh. You’ll have to show me how.”

Alec demonstrated, and Paul followed his example, wincing as Alec began to stitch.

“How’s your baby doing, Jule?” Alec asked, keeping his eyes on his work.

“She’s not a baby anymore,” Julie said, “which goes to show how long you’ve been out of circulation. She’s a hellion. Into everything.”

Julie talked about the little restaurant she managed, and Alec talked about Clay going off to college in another month. Paul listened to their easy conversation, their comfort with one another. Alec’s voice was so calm, so assured, despite the work he was doing on the colt, that Paul nearly forgot about the horses across the road.

“I wasn’t sure I should call you,” Julie said, after a brief silence. “I know you haven’t been working lately.”

“I’m glad you did,” Alec said.

“Well, I thought twice about it, I can tell you that. But there just isn’t anyone else I’d trust with one of these guys.” Alec glanced up at her with a smile. “This one’s going to make it, Jule.”

There was a silence as Alec continued his stitching. Paul moved his fingers along the edges of the wound to keep pace with him. The tension had left his body. The horses across the road seemed harmless as long as Alec was close by. For the first time he thought he understood. There was nothing mysterious about Annie leaving him for Alec. There had been no ulterior motive on her part, no hidden agenda, no succumbing to the demands of her parents. He could imagine her with Alec—Annie with her need to feel loved and cherished, safe and secure. Alec would have met those needs without even trying.

The pulsing light of the beacon seemed to slow, lingering on Alec’s hand for several seconds before melting back into the darkness. Then his hands stilled, suddenly, the needle poised above the wound, and Paul looked up to find Alec staring at him.

“Are you all right?” Alec asked, as the soft white light swept over them again.

“Yes,” Paul said, lowering his eyes to the horse. He wondered what Alec had seen in his face.

Okay, he thought, you won. She was yours, not mine. She loved you, not me. You won, Alec. Fair and square.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

It was nearly eleven by the time Alec said good-night to Paul and walked alone into his house. Lacey and Clay were still out, and the emptiness was oppressive. Even Tripod did not bother to come downstairs to greet him.

He poured iced tea into one of the green, hand-blown tumblers Julie had given Annie for her birthday a few years earlier, and carried it into the living room, where he sat down on the couch and stared at the phone. It was after eleven. Too late to call Olivia, and that was just as well. He’d become a little too dependent on those phone calls. He’d see her in the morning, anyway. She had agreed to go windsurfing with him at Rio Beach.

He lay down, stretching out along the length of the sofa, a throw pillow beneath his head. It had been a long, long time since he’d worked on an animal. It had felt good—powerful—to be able to make a difference, to set something right for a change. He had expected to find a dead horse up there. Or worse, a dying horse. He supposed that’s why he’d asked Paul to come along—to keep his mind off his jangling nerves.

Paul had to be the softest man he’d ever met. He’d gotten misty-eyed over the colt. Alec could imagine him with Olivia. An image—thoroughly prurient—slipped into his mind of Olivia and Paul together, and he rested his arm over his eyes to try to block it out. The first erotic thought he’d had in months and he wasn’t even a part of it.

God, he missed Annie. Sleeping with her, waking up with her. He missed those clandestine Friday “lunches” in motel rooms. She had been a different woman during those two hours each week. She’d never been a reluctant lover, but he knew it was usually the closeness she was after. The holding. The loving words. He’d learned long ago that he had a need for sex itself—for the purely physical pleasure it offered—that she didn’t share. He’d adjusted. They had acknowledged their differences and worked it out. But during those weekly rendezvous, Annie had been impassioned, eager. Her body had given off steam when he touched her.

Alec finished the iced tea, wishing he’d poured himself something stronger, something numbing. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, letting the hum of the air conditioner lull him to sleep.

When he woke up, he could not at first get his bearings. The dim light from the kitchen washed over the wall in front of him and he saw the ten oval windows. He was lying on the living room sofa. He had a throbbing erection, and its inspiration—Annie—no longer existed. God damn it.

He got off the couch in a rage, hurling the throw pillow to the floor. Fuck the Battered Women’s Shelter. Fuck Zachary Pointer. He lifted the tumbler from the coffee table and heaved it toward the wall. Fuck you, Annie.

The tumbler sailed across the room, and he caught his breath as it connected with one of the ten small oval windows, splintering the detailed stained glass image of a dark-haired woman carrying a parasol.

Alec stared at the empty, oval-shaped hole in the wall. He closed his eyes and groaned, raking his hands through his hair.

The side yard was illuminated by lights under the eaves, and Alec could see some of the small, painstakingly cut pieces of glass as he walked barefoot through the sand. He sat on the ground beneath the windows and began picking up the pieces, collecting them in his palm.

A car stopped on the street in front of the house and he heard laughter, followed by the slamming of a door. In a moment Clay was walking toward him.

“Dad? What are you doing out here?” Clay looked down at the colored glass in his father’s hand. “Who broke the window?”

“It was an accident.” Alec followed Clay’s eyes to where the green tumbler rested in the sand, and for a moment neither of them spoke.

“Did Lacey…?”

“No. It wasn’t Lacey.”

Clay stuffed his hands in the pockets of his shorts. “Well, look, Dad,” he said. “It’s late. You can worry about the window tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to leave the glass out here.” Alec ran his fingers through the sand and found a small white triangle of the parasol.

“It’ll be all right.” Clay glanced around him as if he were worried someone in the neighborhood might be watching this scene. “Come on, Dad. You’re freaking me out. I’ll help you find the pieces in the morning.”

Alec looked up at his son. A handsome young man. Black hair. Dark skin. Seventeen years old. In all likelihood he had made love to Terri Hazleton tonight. In another month, he’d leave home for good. He’d start his new life. His own life. Alec stared into his pale blue eyes. “I miss your mother,” he said.

Clay lowered himself to the sand, and leaned back against the house. “I know, Dad,” he said quietly. “I do, too.” He sifted his fingers through the sand and found a small red piece of glass, which he handed to Alec.

Alec closed his fingers around the fragments of glass in his palm. He rested his arms on his knees and looked out at the black water of the sound. “They’re going to move the lighthouse, Clay,” he said. “They’re going to pull the damn thing out of the ground, and Kiss River will never be the same again.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Alec could have asked Olivia to come to his house. He had the sailboards there; they could have set out right from the little cove that formed his back yard. As he drove toward Rio Beach, though, he realized that he hadn’t wanted Olivia at his house in case Clay or Lacey were there. So what did that mean? Nola was over all the time, and he never gave it a second thought. But if they found Olivia there, he would have to offer an explanation for her presence. They might remember her from that night in the ER, or they might not. That wasn’t it. He just didn’t want them to see him with a woman other than their mother, no matter how platonic the relationship might be.

Olivia was leaning against her car in the little parking area adjacent to Rio Beach. She wore a white cover-up over her bathing suit and her legs were nearly the color of the jacket. This was a woman who worked entirely too much.

He parked next to her, and she shaded her eyes as he got out of the Bronco and began unstrapping the sailboard from the roof.

“I’m warning you, Alec,” she said. “I can’t swim a stroke.”

He threw her a life vest from the back seat of the Bronco. “You don’t need to know how to swim,” he said. “You do need some sunscreen, though.”

“I put some thirty on. This is the first time I’ve been out in the sun this summer.”

“It looks like the first time in your life.”

She made a face at him and took the end of the board to help him carry it through the tangled weeds leading out to the sound.

“How come there’s just one board?”

“Because the wind is perfect for you today, but a little nonexistent for my taste. It’s pretty shallow here. I can stay next to you and tell you what to do.”

Rio Beach was nothing more than a scrap of sand at the water’s edge, barely wide enough for the blanket Alec spread across it. He stood with his hands on his hips, looking out at the sound. The sun shimmered on the water, and he could see other windsurfers in the distance, but he knew none of them had put in here. Rio Beach was his little secret.

“Great day for this,” he said, turning to Olivia. She was gnawing on her lower lip. “Are you ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.” She took off her jacket and laid it on the blanket. Her bathing suit was black and violet, conservatively cut at the thigh, but dipping gently over her breasts, and he remembered his erotic fantasy of her and Paul from the night before.

“What are you smiling about?” she asked.

He laughed as he took off his T-shirt. “Just glad to be out here,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

She wore a long gold chain that fell softly between her breasts. The bone-whiteness of her skin made her look terribly fragile, but he would never have guessed she was pregnant. The slight rise of her belly would not give her away.

“So, did you call your doctor about windsurfing?” he asked. She had told him she was concerned about the advisability of windsurfing when pregnant.

She wrinkled her nose. “Yes. Turns out she’s a windsurfer herself. She said the only risk she could see was that I might actually have fun for once and not know how to cope with the experience.”

Alec laughed. “Your doctor’s got you pegged.”

He gave her a little demonstration, showing off a bit with a beach start, a couple of duck-jibes, before settling down to the tamer moves she would need to learn. The twelve-foot board felt sluggish, cumbersome beneath his feet. He was used to the small board he liked to take out in the ocean.

She shivered when she stepped into the water. Alec held the sailboard steady for her, and she climbed onto it, her face the picture of concentration. “Put your feet on either side of the mast,” he said.

“Is this the mast?”

“Right.” He held her hand to steady her as she rose to her feet. “Now hold on to the rope. You’re going to uphaul to get the sail out of the water. Bend your legs. That’s it. Keep your back straight and use your legs to pull the sail up.”

She pulled in the rope, hand over hand, and the sail began to rise out of the water, taking wind, causing the board to turn suddenly beneath her feet. She screamed, falling backward into the water with a splash. He walked around the board to help her, but she surfaced laughing.

“I should have warned you about that,” he said. “When the clew comes out of the…”

“What’s the clew?” she asked, tossing the water out of her hair.

“This part of the sail right here,” he said, and he got onto the board once more to show her how it was done.

She spent more of her time in the water than on the board, but she was nothing if not a good sport. She laughed a couple of times to the point of tears. It was a side to her he had not seen, a side he imagined she rarely saw herself.