Keeper of the Light

Keeper of the Light

Also by DIANE CHAMBERLAIN

THE LIES WE TOLD

SECRETS SHE LEFT BEHIND

BEFORE THE STORM

THE SECRET LIFE OF CEECEE WILKES

THE BAY AT MIDNIGHT

HER MOTHER’S SHADOW

KISS RIVER

KEEPER OF THE LIGHT

THE SHADOW WIFE

(formerly published as Cypress Point)

THE COURAGE TREE

SUMMER’S CHILD

BREAKING THE SILENCE

Watch for

THE MIDWIFE’S CONFESSION

May 2011

DIANE CHAMBERLAIN

Keeper of the Light

Dear Reader,

I’m so pleased that Keeper of the Light is once again available for you to enjoy. Originally published in 1992, Keeper quickly became one of my most popular books—so popular that readers pleaded with me to write a sequel. I finally did so eleven years later, turning the story of the O’Neill family into a trilogy. The second book, Kiss River, will be reissued later this year, and Her Mother’s Shadow next spring.

I took certain liberties with the geography of North Carolina’s Outer Banks to make room for Kiss River and its lighthouse. Kiss River and the people who love it are purely works of fiction, but the unique and beautiful Outer Banks are very real and hold a special place in my heart. I hope they will in yours, as well.

Diane Chamberlain

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

Christmas 1990

It rained the entire day. It rained with such force that the shrubs next to the emergency room parking lot lay flat to the ground and the new roof sprang a leak. One of the nurses set a bucket on the floor of the waiting room to catch the water, and within an hour the rain had filled it to the brim.

Olivia Simon watched the downpour through the broad windows of her office. The rain sapped her concentration, and the journal on her desk was still open to the article she’d started hours before. There was something unnatural about this rain. It sucked the oxygen from the air and made it hard to breathe, and it pounded above her head like marbles falling on a sheet of tin. Just when she thought she could no longer tolerate the noise, it stopped. In the silence, Olivia watched the sky turn light and shiny, like the inside of an eggshell. Then suddenly, it was snowing.

She walked into the reception area, where Kathy Brash and Lynn Wilkes had been playing pinochle for the last abysmally quiet two hours.

“It’s snowing,” Olivia said.

They lifted their rained-dazed eyes to hers, then turned their heads toward the windows.

“Unreal.” Lynn stood for a better look, her white coat scraping a few cards from the table.

“It’s beginning to be an annual tradition on the Outer Banks,” Kathy said. “Last Christmas we actually got snowed in.”

Olivia looked at her watch. Five-thirty. She couldn’t afford to get stuck here tonight.

Lynn took her seat again. “Want us to deal you in, Olivia?”

Olivia declined, and returned to her office. She couldn’t make herself join them tonight. She was too antsy, too preoccupied. She needed to get home.

She sat behind her desk and dialed her home number.

“It’s snowing,” she said when Paul answered.

“Yeah, I know.” He sounded irritated. She was getting accustomed to the curt tone he used with her these days. “When are you getting out of there?”

“Soon. Just a half hour more.” She’d had no choice but to work today. Of the four emergency room physicians, she had the least seniority. She wished she could tell Paul that it had been worth her while coming in today, worth their being apart when, God knows, they needed the time together. But all she had seen in eleven long hours was a scraped knee and a case of severe post-turkey indigestion. On days like this, she found herself missing the chaos of Washington General, where she’d worked for the past ten years, where her seniority had given her some control over her schedule. It scared her these days, being away from Paul. When she wasn’t close enough to touch him, she was afraid he might disappear.

They’d spent last Christmas with his family in Philadelphia. Paul had written a poem about her and stitched it into a sampler sometime during the long hours she was at work and he was not. The sampler hung in the study, and now each time she looked at it she wondered how the warmth Paul had felt for her one short year ago could have disintegrated so quickly.

“Turkey’s falling off the bone,” he said now. “Should I take it out?”

Olivia started to answer, but just then the police radio in the hall outside her office coughed to life.

“Hold on, Paul.” She held the receiver away from her ear and listened as Kathy sat down in front of the radio.

“Kill Devil Hills Emergency Room,” Kathy said.

“We’ve got a gunshot wound to the chest.” A male voice broke through the static. “Female. Mid to late thirties. Pulse one-fifty and thready. B.P. seventy-five over forty.”

“What’s your ETA?” Kathy asked.

“Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. It’s fucking snowing out here.”

Olivia stood up. “Paul, I’ve got to go.” She hung up the phone and raced to the treatment room. “Call Jonathan,” she said as she passed Kathy. Jonathan Cramer was not Olivia’s favorite physician to work with, but he was the back-up physician tonight and he lived closest. He could be here in seconds.

She was soaping her hands and wrists at the treatment room sink when Jonathan arrived. “Gunshot, huh?” he said as he rolled his shirtsleeves over his beefy forearms. “We’ll stabilize her and fly her up to Emerson.”

Olivia turned on the EKG monitor. “We haven’t even seen her yet.”

“She’s going to need a trauma unit.”

Olivia began setting up the intubation tray. Jonathan had last worked in a sleepy Louisiana hospital. Gunshot wounds were probably not his area of greatest confidence. He had been here a little over a year, the first physician hired by the new free-standing emergency room, the only emergency facility serving North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She’d been told she’d be on an equal plane with him, with equal say in all decisions made. Yet she often wondered if someone had neglected to pass that information on to Jonathan.

“Let’s see her first,” she said.

They had the treatment room ready by the time the two paramedics wheeled the woman into the ER. Her shirt and bra had been cut off. The bullet hole in her left breast was deceptively small and bloodless. That could mean only one thing—the bullet had penetrated the heart. Olivia felt a rush of adrenaline. Surgery was the only possible course of action and they had no time to waste.

“Get the surgical tray,” she said to Kathy.

“What?” Jonathan was helping one of the paramedics fit the inflatable MAST trousers on the woman’s legs. “Forget it, Olivia. Let’s get her out of here and up to Emerson.”

“Get me two units of O-negative packed cells,” she said to Lynn as she checked the woman’s vital signs. It would take the helicopter forty minutes to fly her to Emerson, probably longer in the snow, and at least another fifteen minutes before she could get into surgery.

“She won’t make it,” she said.

Kathy produced the surgical tray. The instruments rattled against one another in her trembling hands. She had pinned her dark hair up, and Olivia wished she’d thought to do the same. Her fine brown hair was a little longer than chin-length, and each time she lowered her head it slipped forward, like blinders.

“You can’t be serious,” Jonathan said. “We’re not set up for anything like this.”

“Fifty over thirty,” Lynn said. “I can’t get a radial pulse.”

“Hang normal saline wide open. And do a cutdown, please, Jonathan,” Olivia said. This woman needed blood fast.

“Olivia, this isn’t the goddamned District of Columbia. She needs a trauma unit.”

“Start a bicarb bolus,” she said to Lynn. “And epinephrine. And get that blood hung.” Then she turned to Jonathan. “Look. We can ship her up to Emerson and you and I both know she’ll die on the way. Working on her here might not be ideal, but it’s the only chance she has.” She turned back to the table and did the cut-down herself, slipping the scalpel into the blue vein in the woman’s groin. She picked up the large bore needle.

“I can do it.” Kathy took the needle from her and fit it into the vein. Her hands no longer trembled and Olivia admired her for getting her fear under control so quickly.

Jonathan glowered at her. “I won’t be a part of this. I’m calling the helicopter.” He turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

Olivia stared after him, dumbfounded. “I don’t believe it.” She turned to one of the paramedics. “Call Dr. Shelley,” she said. “Tell him to get over here stat.” She began swabbing Betadine on the woman’s chest and side. Then she slipped her hands into the sterile gloves Lynn held out to her.

“Maybe we should send her up,” Lynn said quietly. Perspiration glowed on her forehead.

“We’re going to do our best for her, Lynn.” Olivia picked up a second scalpel from the tray and noticed the tremor in her own hand. She was suddenly aware of being the only physician in the room. Steady, come on, steady. She set the scalpel between the woman’s ribs and felt all her concentration flow into the task ahead of her. She bore down. No blood at all. She cut deeper, through the layers of muscle, until she reached the heart cavity. Blood suddenly gushed from the wound she’d created. It poured down the front of her scrubs and onto the floor, and the paramedic standing nearest her let out a moan.

“No BP,” Lynn said. “And no pulse.”

Olivia looked up at the flat green line on the monitor behind the patient’s head. She felt a film of sweat break out across her own forehead. They were losing her. She had to widen the incision. She looked at the tray of instruments. “No rib spreader?”

Kathy shook her head.

Of course they had no rib spreader. Olivia set the scalpel again and forced it through the woman’s fifth rib. Once the wound was wide enough, she slipped her hand inside. She cautiously curved her fingers around the woman’s heart, then slid her thumb over the surface, hunting for the bullet hole. She found it quickly—a little dimple in the heart’s smooth surface—and held her thumb over it to block the flow of blood. Then she found the exit wound in the back of the heart. She covered it with her middle finger and felt the heart contract in her palm. She looked at the monitor as a cheer went up in the room.

“We’ve got a pulse!” Kathy said.

Olivia smiled and let out her breath. There was little they could do now except wait for Mike Shelley, the director of the ER, to get over here. She wasn’t sure how long she could hold her position. It was painfully awkward. She was nearly crouching, her spine twisted to keep her hand in the right position on the heart. If she moved her fingers, the woman would die. It was that simple. The muscles in her thighs began to quiver, and her shoulder ached.

She could hear the helicopter making its approach, the familiar thud as it landed on the roof. She hoped they would need it, hoped they could repair the damage to this woman’s heart and stabilize her well enough to make the trip.

For the first time she looked at the woman’s face. Her skin was white and lightly freckled. She wore no makeup. Her hair was cherry-wood red, long and full. It fell over the edge of the table in a mass of corkscrew curls. She looked like an advertisement for Ivory soap.

“Who shot her?” She raised her eyes to the younger of the two paramedics, trying to get her mind off her own discomfort.

The paramedic’s face was as white as the patient’s, his brown eyes wide. “She was a volunteer at the Battered Women’s Shelter in Manteo,” he said. “Some guy came in, threatening his wife and kid, and this lady got in the way.”

The Battered Women’s Shelter. Olivia felt a spasm of pain in her own chest. She had to force herself to ask the next question. “Does anyone know her name?”

“Annie somebody,” said the paramedic. “O’Brien. O’Something.”

“O’Neill,” Olivia whispered, so quietly none of them heard her. She let her eyes run over the body in front of her, over the creamy white, freckled breasts, the softly sloping waistline. She closed her eyes. Her shoulder burned; the tips of her fingers were numb. She was no longer certain they were in exactly the right place. She lifted her eyes back to the monitor. She would be able to tell by any change in the heartbeat if her fingers were slipping.

Had it only been a month since Paul had written that article for Seascape Magazine? She remembered the pictures of the stained glass in Annie Chase O’Neill’s studio. The women in silk, the sleek blue heron, the sunset on the sound. Paul had changed after that story. Everything had changed.

Mike Shelley arrived and she saw in his dark eyes his shock at the scene. But he scrubbed quickly and was at her side in seconds. “Where’s Jonathan?” he asked.

“He thought she should go up and I thought she should stay. So he left to call the helicopter and he hasn’t come back.”

Mike threaded the curved needle with his gloved hands. “Maybe she should have gone up.” He spoke very quietly, very softly, his lips close to her ear. “This way her blood’s on your hands.”

Olivia’s eyes stung. Had she made the wrong decision? No, this woman would never have survived the trip. Never.

Mike had to work around her fingers. If she moved just a fraction of an inch, the blood poured from the bullet holes. The pain in Olivia’s shoulder became a steady fire and the shaking in her legs spread to the rest of her body. Still she held her position while Mike slipped a tiny piece of felt beneath her thumb and stitched it into place. But the exit hole was not so easy to close. It was large and nearly impossible to reach without damaging the heart in the process.

She watched the lines deepen in Mike’s forehead as he struggled with the needle.

“Please, Mike,” she whispered.

He finally shook his head. The felt refused to hold, and the blood seeped, then poured from the back of the heart. Olivia felt the heat of it on her fingers as the green line of the monitor shivered and flattened, and the room grew hushed with failure.

For a moment no one moved. No one spoke. Olivia could hear Mike’s breathing, rapid and deep, keeping time with her own. She straightened up slowly, gritting her teeth against the pain in her back, and looked at Kathy. “Is any of her family here?”

Kathy nodded. “Yes, and we called Kevin in. He’s with them in the little waiting room.”

“I’ll tell them,” Mike said.

Olivia shook her head. “I should do it. I was with her from the start.” She turned and started walking toward the door.

“Whoa.” Mike caught her arm. “Better change first.”

She looked down at her blood-soaked scrubs and felt a ripple of doubt. She was not thinking clearly.

She changed in the lounge and then walked to the small, private waiting room. Through the high window in the hallway she caught a glimpse of snowflakes dancing in the darkness. She wished she could step outside for a second. Her muscles still burned. And she hated what lay ahead of her. She hoped Kevin Rickert, the social worker, had prepared them for what she had to say.

Kevin looked relieved to see her. “This is Dr. Simon,” he said.

There were three of them—a girl about thirteen who looked strikingly like the woman she had just left on the table, a boy a few years older. And a man. Annie’s husband, Alec O’Neill. He was dark-haired, tall and thin, with an athletic tightness to his body. He wore jeans and a blue sweater, and he held his hand toward her, tentatively, his pale blue eyes asking her what his future held.

She shook his hand quickly. “Mr. O’Neill.” She would make the words come out very slowly. “I’m so sorry. The bullet went straight through her heart. The damage was too extensive.”

There was still hope in his eyes. It was always that way. Until you said it clearly, until you stopped mincing words, that hope would be there. The son understood, though. He looked like a younger version of his father—the same black hair, striking pale blue eyes beneath dark brows. He turned to face the wall, his shoulders heaving, although he made no sound.

“Do you understand what Dr. Simon is saying?” Kevin asked.

The man stared at her. “Are you saying Annie’s dead?”

Olivia nodded. “I’m sorry. We worked on her for over an hour but there was…”

“No!” The girl threw herself at Olivia, knocking her into the wooden arm of one of the chairs. She flailed at her with closed fists, but Kevin wrapped his arms around her from behind before she could cause any real harm. “She can’t be dead!” the girl screamed. “There wasn’t any blood.”

Alec O’Neill extracted the girl from Kevin’s grip and pulled her into a hug. “Shh, Lacey.”

Olivia regained her balance and set a hand on the girl’s back. How did she know about the blood? “She was bleeding inside, honey,” Olivia said.

The girl pushed Olivia’s arm away. “Don’t call me honey.”

Alec O’Neill pulled Lacey closer to him and she began to weep against his chest. Olivia looked at Kevin. She felt helpless.

“I’ll stay with them,” Kevin said.

Olivia walked to the door but turned back to face the family once more. “If you have any questions, please call me.”

Alec O’Neill looked across the room at her and Olivia stood fast, forcing herself to face the hurt in his eyes. She’d taken something from him. She needed to give him something back.

“She was very beautiful,” she said.

Jonathan and the helicopter pilot were standing in the hallway, and she had to pass them to get to her office.

“Nice job,” Jonathan said, his tone mocking.

She ignored him and walked into her office, where she cranked open her windows to let in the cold air. The snow was still falling, so silently that when she held her breath she could hear the thunder of the ocean two blocks away.

After a while, Kevin poked his head in her door. “You okay, Olivia?”

She turned away from the window, sat down behind her desk. “Yes. How’s her family?”

Kevin stepped into the room. “Dad and the son went in to see her,” he said as he sat down across the desk from her. “Daughter didn’t want to. I think they’ll be okay. Pretty solid family. Mom was the hub, though, you know, so it’s hard to say.” He shook his head. “Life sucks sometimes, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Looks like this one was pretty rough on you.”

She felt a tear hit her cheek and Kevin plucked a tissue from the box on her desk and handed it to her.

“Cramer’s an asshole,” he said.

“I’m all right.” She sat up straight, blew her nose. “So, do you ever have to comfort Jonathan or Mike? Hand them tissues?”

Kevin smiled. “You think women have exclusive rights on feeling like shit?”

She thought of Alec O’Neill’s eyes when she’d left the waiting room. Those eyes were going to haunt her for a long time. “No, I guess not,” she said. “Thanks for stopping in, Kevin.”

It was after seven. Her shift was long over. She could leave now, anytime she wanted. She would drive to her house on the sound where she would have to tell Paul what had happened tonight, and for the second time that night she would watch a man crumble. What was it about Annie O’Neill?

Olivia looked down at her hand where it rested in her lap. She turned it palm side up and thought she could still feel it—the life, the warmth of Annie’s heart.

CHAPTER TWO

Paul Macelli turned off the Christmas tree lights at seven forty-five and returned to the dining room table, where the turkey, the sweet potatoes, the green beans had grown cold. The gravy had formed a skin and he dabbed at it with his knife, watching the pale brown film coat the silver. He’d lit candles, poured wine. He was trying, wasn’t he? But damn Olivia. She gave his anger justification at every turn. Her work was more important than her marriage. Even on Christmas she couldn’t get out of the emergency room on time.

He looked up at the darkened tree. He probably wouldn’t have bothered with one this year, but Olivia had bought it on her own a week earlier, a mountainous blue pine that she set up herself in front of the window facing Roanoke Sound. She decorated it with the ornaments they’d collected over the nine years of their marriage and strung it with tiny white lights. Last year he had dropped the crystal star they’d always put on top, and so, he thought nobly, it was up to him to find a replacement. He knew exactly what he wanted, had seen it weeks earlier in Annie’s studio. He’d been excited by the prospect of having a legitimate reason to go back, a legitimate reason to see her and feel himself surrounded by her stained glass and photographs. But she hadn’t been there on that particular morning, and he struggled to mask his disappointment as Tom Nestor, the ponytailed artist who shared her studio, wrapped the ornament in tissue paper for him.

“I feel bad charging you for this,” Tom said. “Annie’d probably just give it to you.”

Paul had smiled. “Annie would give everything away if she could,” he said, and Tom smiled back, as though they shared a secret, as though they both had the privilege of knowing Annie’s true nature.

He’d brought the ornament home and set it on top of the pine. It was a stylized stained glass angel in an oval frame with a light behind it. The angel’s silver-white robe had that look of liquid silk that was Annie’s trademark. How she was able to do that in glass he would never understand.

The first time Olivia saw the angel, her face paled and a look of utter defeat came into her eyes.

“Do you mind?” he’d asked her.

“Of course not,” she said, with a truly admirable attempt at sincerity. “It’s lovely.”

He heard Olivia’s car pull into the garage, directly below the dining room table. Paul felt the scowl grow on his face as the engine sputtered to a stop, and in a moment Olivia came in the front door, pulling her gray scarf from her neck. She glanced into the dining room and shook her head quickly, as if to rid her sleek brown hair of the clingy snowflakes.

“Hi,” she said quietly. She took off her coat and hung it in the closet by the front door.

Paul slouched in his chair and let his scowl speak for him, not liking himself much at that moment.

“Why don’t you have the lights on?” Olivia asked. She hit the wall switch and Annie’s angel sprang to life, the silvery robe seeming to swirl in the glass.

He didn’t answer, and Olivia moved to the table and sat down across from him. Sylvie, their gray Persian cat, leaped softly to her lap. “I’m sorry to be so late,” Olivia said, her white hands absently stroking Sylvie’s back. “We had a terrible case come in.”

“Everything’s cold.”

She glanced at the food, then back at him. Her eyes were beautiful. Green. Dark-lashed. A striking contrast to her white skin. “Paul,” she said, “the case that came in—it was Annie O’Neill.”

He drew himself up straight in the chair. “What?” he said. “Why?”

“She was working at the women’s shelter in Manteo tonight and she got in the middle of some gunfire.”

“Is she all right?”

Olivia shook her head. “I’m sorry, Paul. She died.”

He stood up so quickly she jumped, and the silverware shivered on the table. “Is this some kind of sick joke?” he asked, although he knew Olivia was not the type for jokes, sick or otherwise.

“The bullet went straight through her heart.”

The glowing angel taunted him from high above Olivia’s head. “Please tell me you’re lying. Please, Olivia.”

“I’m sorry.”

She was so calm. So cool. He hated her just then. “Excuse me,” he said. He turned and started up the stairs, Olivia close on his heels. He pulled his suitcase from the hall closet and carried it into their bedroom, where he tossed it on the bed. Olivia hung back in the doorway as he pulled some of the neatly pressed clothes from his closet and threw them into the suitcase still on their hangers.

“What are you doing?” Olivia asked.

“I have to get out of here.” He felt trapped by her voice, by her presence. She could never understand.

“Paul.” She took a step toward him and then seemed to think better of it, retreating once more to the doorway, gripping the jamb with her fingers. “This is crazy, Paul. You barely knew her. You were infatuated with her. That was your own word, remember? You said it was one-sided, that she was happily married. I met her husband tonight. I had to tell him…”

Paul leaned toward her. “Shut up,” he said. She took a step back into the hall and he knew he had scared her. He was scaring himself. This was a new and alien Paul Macelli, not the person he’d been for the past thirty-nine years.

Olivia clasped her hands in front of her, the fingers of her right hand playing with the diamond-studded wedding ring on her left. When she spoke this time, her voice was small. “You can talk about her if you like. I know I said I didn’t want to hear it anymore, but this is different. I’ll listen. Just please don’t leave, Paul. Please.” Her voice cracked and he winced. He wanted to put his hands over his ears to shut her out.

He stepped into the bathroom and gathered up his toothbrush, his razor, the case for his eyeglasses. He walked back into the bedroom and dumped them on top of the clothes in the suitcase and zipped it closed. Then he looked up at Olivia. Her lips and cheeks were still red from the cold, her eyes blurry behind tears he had no desire to watch her spill. He looked past her, into the hall where he could see the faint light from the tree downstairs.

“I’m sorry, Olivia.” He pushed past her, moving as quickly as he could, letting his shoes pound the hardwood stairs so he would not be able to hear her if she cried.

He was usually cautious on the road, but tonight he drove recklessly. The few other cars on the long wide highway that ran the length of the Outer Banks crept along the slick road, but he bore down on the gas pedal of the gray Honda, feeling the car slip out of his control over and over again and not caring. He didn’t even slow down when he passed Annie’s studio in Kill Devil Hills, although he did look over. Sometimes the lights inside the studio would be on at night, creating a vivid montage of stained glass in the front windows. Tonight, though, the glass walls in the front of the building were black and opaque-looking, like pieces of slate.

The snow silently battered his windshield, and he nearly missed the turn into the parking lot of the Beach Gazette. There was one other car—a blue station wagon—in the lot, and he wasn’t surprised to see it. Gabe Forrester, the Gazette’s police reporter, was already here, probably delighted to have a meaty story to liven up his job.

Paul didn’t bother to stop in his own office before knocking on Gabe’s door. Gabe was just getting off the phone. “Macelli!” he said. “You look like hell, fella. What are you doing here this time of night?”

“I heard about that murder over in Manteo and thought maybe I could help you out. Do a color piece on her.” He tensed, hoping that Gabe would look puzzled and tell him he had no idea what he was talking about. Maybe Olivia had made it up after all.

“Yeah, a big one.” Gabe leaned back in his chair, his broad, square face sober. “Annie O’Neill. You probably don’t know her, being new here and all.”

“I did a story on her in Seascape.”

“That’s right. Well, you’re the perfect fella for the color stuff then, I guess.” He shook his head with a rueful smile. “She was one of a kind, I’ll say that. I have to call my wife to tell her and I keep putting it off. There’ll be one of the biggest funerals you’ve ever seen around here.” Gabe looked out the window. The snow was slowing down, the flakes small specks of glitter beneath the streetlight. “I don’t know how I’m gonna break it to my kids,” Gabe continued. “She was Jane’s softball coach last year and Jimmy’s den mother years ago. Crazy lady. Good heart, but a little wacky.” He pursed his thin lips, flattened his palms on the top of his desk. “Poor Alec. Do you know her husband, the vet over at the animal hospital in Kill Devil Hills?”

Paul shook his head and sat down across the desk from Gabe because his knees were giving out. He rested his hands on his lap. “How did it happen?” he asked.

Gabe sighed. “She was serving food to the women and kids over at that Battered Women’s Shelter in Manteo when this guy—” Gabe lifted a notepad from his desk and read the name “—Zachary Pointer, came in and started threatening his wife. He had a gun and he was aiming it at her, talking about how it was Christmas, how could she keep the kids from him on Christmas, et cetera, et cetera. Annie stepped between them to protect the wife. She talked to the guy, you know, trying to reason with him, and the bastard fired. That was Annie for you. It happened just that fast.” Gabe snapped his fingers. “Pointer’s in custody. Hope they fry him.”

Paul shivered inside his coat. He worked at keeping his face calm and unreadable. “I’d better get started on the article,” he said, standing up. At Gabe’s door, he turned back. “Uh, are you going to be talking to the family?”

“I was planning on it. You want that part?”

“No, no. I was going to say, it’s probably best if just one of us does it. You know, not make them go through it twice. So I’ll let you handle that, okay?” There was no way he could talk to Alec O’Neill. He’d never met him, never wanted to meet the man Annie slept with night after night, although he had seen him a few times. The last time had been at Annie’s studio. Paul had pretended to be absorbed in the stained glass when Alec walked in for a word with his wife. There was a mirror in the piece Paul was looking at, and in it he watched Annie and Alec speak to one another, their backs to Paul, their voices soft, intent, their heads together. As Alec started to leave, Annie slipped her hand to the seat of his jeans, and Alec kissed her temple. Paul had shut his eyes, trying to block that display of intimacy from his mind. No, he could not talk with Alec O’Neill.

He stopped in the file room and pulled the thick folder on Annie. He was familiar with it, having looked through it numerous times while he was writing the freelance article about her for Seascape. He carried the folder into his office and settled down at his desk, not bothering to take off his coat.

There were dozens of articles. Annie as community leader. Annie as stained glass artist. As photographer. As president of the Animal Welfare League. Many of the articles referred to her as Saint Anne, a nickname that had made her giggle. The oldest article, nearly brown with age, was from 1975. The headline read: Artist Heads Fight to Save Keeper from Eviction. Ah, yes. Annie’s first claim to fame in the Outer Banks. Paul spread the article flat on his desk and scanned it. In 1975, the Park Service had planned to take over operation of the Kiss River Lighthouse site. They wanted to use half of the keeper’s house as their headquarters, the other half as a museum of sorts for the tourists. Annie had met old Mary Poor, the keeper who was then in her seventies and who had lived in the house most of her life. Annie thought the eviction was an incredible injustice. She gathered public support for Mary’s cause and the Park Service relented, allowing the old woman to retain one half of the large keeper’s house for her own use.

There was a picture of Annie with the article that, for a moment, made the muscles in Paul’s chest contract to the point of pain. He stared hard at the picture, then closed his eyes. An infatuation. Go to hell, Olivia.

He’d been told by the editor of the Gazette that he wrote in an “overly emotional” style, a complaint he’d also heard during his years on the Washington Post. How he would avoid that in writing Annie’s color piece, he didn’t know. “You could romanticize a flu epidemic,” the Post editor once told him. “Forget you’re a poet when you walk through your office door.”

Paul spent the next hour putting together the bare bones of the article on Annie and then made a list of who he would interview in the morning. Tom Nestor, of course, and the director of the Battered Women’s Shelter. He jotted down a few more names. He had time. The Gazette was only published three times a week. This issue wouldn’t be out until the day after tomorrow.

He left his office and got back in his car. The suitcase taunted him from the back seat. So, where are we going now, huh, Paul? He knew a few places he could find a room, but that could wait. He pulled onto Croatan Highway again and started driving north, turning off after a couple of miles into the parking lot near Jockey’s Ridge. He got out of his car and began walking through the sand toward the enormous dunes. The snow had stopped while he’d been in his office, and now the sky was cloudless and alive with stars. The dunes quickly surrounded him on all sides, like an eerie moonscape, and he relished the quiet, the solitude. His heavy breathing was the only sound as he hiked up the slope of the largest, snow-dusted dune, swinging his arms back and forth to stay warm. His breath fogged up his glasses, and he took them off to finish the climb.

The muscles in his thighs were stiff by the time he reached the summit. He slipped his glasses back on and turned to face north. A bitter cold wind blew stinging particles of sand against his cheeks, and he rammed his ungloved hands deep into his coat pockets. He was above everything here. He studied the horizon, waiting.

Yes. There it was. The pinpoint of light. It disappeared, and he counted. One, one-hundred, two, one-hundred, three, one-hundred, four, one-hundred. There it was again. The Kiss River Lighthouse. He watched the light glow and vanish in the distance, setting its languorous, hypnotic pace. A clear white light. Annie had told him during one of the interviews that she saw no point to clear, uncolored glass. “It’s like being alive without being in love,” she’d said, and then she’d told him about her fantasy of putting stained glass in the windows of the Kiss River Lighthouse.

“Women,” she’d said, “in long, flowing gowns. Roses, mauves. Icy blues.”

He hadn’t written any of that in the Seascape article. There were many things she’d said to him that he’d kept entirely for himself.

A gust of cold air tore through his coat and stung his eyes.

Annie.

An infatuation.

One-sided.

Paul sat down on the cold sand and buried his head in his arms, finally allowing himself to cry, for what he’d lost, for what he’d never had.

CHAPTER THREE

June 1991

Alec O’Neill’s favorite memory of Annie was also his first. He had been standing right where he stood now, on this same beach, and it was as moonless a night then as it was now, the night air black and sticky like tar. The lighthouse high above him flashed one long glare every four and a half seconds. The wait between those light flashes seemed an eternity in the darkness, and in one of those blasts of light he saw a young woman walking toward him. At first he thought she was a figment of his imagination. It did something to your head, standing out here alone, waiting for the beacon to swing around again and ignite the sand. But it was a woman. In the next flash of light, he saw her long, wild red hair, a yellow knapsack slung over her right shoulder. She was probably a year or two younger than him, twenty or so. She started speaking as she drew near him, while he stood mesmerized. Her name was Annie Chase, she said, her husky voice a surprise. She was hitchhiking down the coast, from Massachusetts to Florida, staying close to the water all the way. She wanted to touch the ocean in every state. She wanted to feel the water grow warmer as she moved south. He was intrigued. Speechless. In the beacon of light he watched her pull a Mexican serape from her knapsack and spread it on the ground.

“I haven’t made love in days,” she said, taking his hand in the darkness. He let her pull him down to the blanket and fought a sudden prudishness as she reached for the snap on his jeans. It was, after all, 1971, and he was twenty-two and five years beyond his first time. Still, she was a complete stranger.

He could barely concentrate on the sensations in his own body, he was so enchanted by hers. The beacon teased him with glimpses of it, delivered in four-and-one-half second intervals. In the tarry blackness between light flashes, he would never have known she was there except for the feel of her beneath his hands. It threw off their rhythm, those lambent pulses of light, made them giggle at first, then groan with the effort of matching his pace to hers, hers to his.

He took her back to the cottage he shared with three friends from Virginia Tech. They had just graduated and were spending the summer working for a construction company on the Outer Banks before going on to graduate school. For the past couple of weeks, they’d been painting the Kiss River Lighthouse and doing some repair work on the old keeper’s house. Usually they spent the evenings drinking too much and looking for women, but tonight the four of them and Annie sat together in the small, sandy living room, eating the pomegranates she had produced from her knapsack and playing games she seemed to have invented on the spot.

“Sentence completion,” she announced in her alien-sounding Boston accent, and she immediately had their attention. “I treasure…” She looked encouragingly at Roger Tucker.

“My surfboard,” Roger said, honestly.

“My Harley,” said Roger’s brother, Jim.

“My cock,” said Bill Larkin, with a laugh.

Annie rolled her eyes in mock disgust and turned to Alec. “I treasure…”

“Tonight,” he said.

“Tonight,” she agreed, smiling.

He watched her as she plucked another red kernel from her pomegranate and slipped it into her mouth. She set the next kernel in her outstretched palm, and she continued to eat that way as they played—one kernel in her mouth, the next in her palm—until her hand had filled with the juicy red fruit. Once the shell of her pomegranate lay empty on her plate, she held her handful of kernels up to the light, admiring them as if they were a pile of rubies.

He was amazed that his friends were sitting here, stone cold sober, playing her games, but he understood. They were under her spell. She had instantly become the red-hot core of the cottage. Of the universe.

“I need…” Annie said.

“A woman.” Roger groaned.

“A beer,” said Jim.

“To get laid,” said Bill, predictably.

“You,” Alec said, surprising himself.

Annie took a bloodred ruby from the pile in her hand and leaned forward to slip it into Alec’s mouth. “I need to be held,” she said, and there was a question in her eyes. Are you up to it? her eyes asked him. Because it’s not a need to be taken lightly.

In his bed later that night he understood what she meant. She could not seem to get close enough to him. “I could love a man who had no legs, or no brain, or no heart,” she said. “But I could never love a man who had no arms.”

She moved in with him, abandoning her idea of hitchhiking down the coast. It was as though she had found him and fully expected to be with him forever, no discussion needed. She loved that he was studying to be a veterinarian and she would bring him injured animals to heal. Seagulls with broken wings, underfed cats with abscessed paws or torn ears. In the course of a week, Annie came across as many hurt animals as the average person encountered in a lifetime. She did not actively seek them out, yet they found her. He understood later that they were drawn to her because she was one of them. Her injuries were not physical. No, physically she was perfect. Her pain was hidden, and over the course of that summer he realized she had given him the task of making her whole.

He stood now in the thick black air, a prickly tension in him as he waited out the seconds between the light. Twenty years had passed since that first night. Twenty excellent years, until this last one. Until Christmas night, a little more than five months ago. He still came out here three, maybe four nights a week because more than any other place, it reminded him of Annie. Was it peace he felt here? Not exactly. Just close to her. As close as he could…

There was a rustling sound behind him. Alec turned his head, listening. Maybe it was one of the wild mustangs that roamed Kiss River? No. He could hear the steady footsteps of someone coming through the field of sea oats, up from the road. He stared in their direction, waiting for the light.

“Dad?”

The beacon caught his son’s black hair, red T-shirt. Clay must have followed him. He walked through the sand to stand at his father’s side. He was seventeen, and this past year had grown to Alec’s height. Alec still had not adjusted to standing eye-to-eye with his son.

“What are you doing out here?” Clay asked.

“Just watching the light.”

Clay didn’t respond, and the beacon swung around once, then twice, before he spoke again. “Is this where you come at night?” he asked, his voice hushed. Both he and Lacey had taken on this careful tone when they spoke to him.

“Reminds me of your mother out here,” Alec said.

Clay was quiet for another minute. “Why don’t you come home? We can rent a movie or something.”

It was Saturday night and Clay was two weeks away from his high school graduation. Surely he had things he’d rather do than spend the night watching movies with his father. In the next flash of light Alec thought he saw fear in Clay’s blue eyes. He rested his hand on his son’s shoulder.

“I’m all right, Clay. Go on now. You must have plans for tonight.”

Clay hesitated. “Well, I’ll be over at Terri’s.”

“Fine.”

Alec listened to the sound of Clay’s footsteps retreat across the field. He listened until he could hear nothing other than the waves breaking against the shore. Then he sat down on the beach, his elbows resting on bent knees, and stared out at a small yellow light on the black horizon.

“Remember, Annie, the night we saw the boat on fire?” He spoke out loud, but his voice was a whisper. So long ago—a decade, maybe more. They’d been sitting right where he sat now and probably they had made love, or were about to, when they spotted the ball of gold light on the horizon, shooting yellow tendrils into the sky and spreading shimmery waves of liquid gold into the water. The keeper’s house was locked tight and dark, Mary Poor asleep for the night, so Alec had driven out to the road to call the Coast Guard from a pay phone. They were already on the scene, he was told. Everyone was off the boat and safe. But by the time he’d returned to Annie she was weeping, having created her own scenario. There were children on board, she told him, old people too feeble to save themselves. He comforted her with the truth, but it was many minutes before she could let go of her own catastrophic vision. They watched the fire burn itself out, until the black smudge of smoke against the night sky was all that remained.

They’d made love on this beach as recently as last summer. The park was closed at dusk, but over the years they had never felt the chain across the road was meant for them. No one had ever disturbed them, not once, although until two years ago they’d known that Mary was sleeping close by.

They’d swim at night, too, when the water was calm enough. Alec was always first back to the beach because he liked to watch her lift up from the black water, a glittering specter in the stark white bursts of light. Her hair was darkened and tamed by the water, sleek and shiny over her shoulders and breasts. Once last year she’d stood in the water, wringing it from her hair and looking up at the beacon. She said something about the lighthouse, about its being as much a comfort to those on land as on sea. “It’s a touchstone,” she said. “It keeps you safe the same time it helps you chart your course.” He’d felt a lump in his throat, as though he knew what lay ahead, what he was going to lose. He’d thought it would be the lighthouse. He hadn’t known it would be Annie.

The lighthouse had been the only real source of friction between them. It stood close to the water, unlike its neighboring lighthouses at Currituck Beach to the north and Bodie Island to the south, which sat, secure, farther inland. Each year the ocean crept closer to the foundation of the Kiss River Light, and Alec joined the desperate battle for its preservation, while Annie distanced herself from that work.

“If it’s time for the sea to take it, we should just let it go.” Every time she’d say those words Alec would picture the graceful white brick lighthouse crumbling into the ocean and feel nearly overwhelmed with sadness.

He closed his eyes now as he sat on the beach, waiting for the next blast of light to shine red through his eyelids. If you stayed with the lighthouse long enough, your heartbeat slowed almost to the rhythm of the light, until it barely seemed to beat at all.

CHAPTER FOUR

Olivia was obsessed with Annie Chase O’Neill. It was getting worse instead of better, and now as she sat in her living room watching Paul and the tanned young boy he’d hired carry boxes and furniture out to the rented U-Haul, she felt the obsession crystallize inside her.

She hadn’t wanted to be here when Paul moved his things out. She hadn’t expected him to do it this soon, this abruptly, but he’d called early this morning to say he had the truck, did she mind? She said no, because she wanted to see him. She would take any opportunity to see him, even though every meeting left her bruised. A little more than five months had passed since he walked out, yet she still ached at the sight of him. Even now that he’d met with a lawyer and signed a long-term lease on a cottage in South Nags Head, she still clung to the hope that he would take a good look at her and realize his mistake.

He stopped now in the arched doorway between the living room and dining room, pulling a handkerchief from the pocket of his khaki shorts to wipe his forehead.

“Are you sure about the dining room set?” he asked.

He’d taken his shirt off sometime in the last hour and his skin glistened. His dark blond hair was damp and pushed back from his forehead, and his glasses caught the light from the windows behind her head. She felt a futile wave of desire, and looked past him into the dining room.

“It’s yours,” she said, holding a finger to mark her place in the journal on her lap. “It’s been in your family for years.”

“But I know you love it.”

He was not without guilt, she thought.

“It should stay in your family.”

He looked at her a moment longer. “I’m sorry, Liv.”

She’d heard those words from him so often these past few months they no longer had any meaning. She watched him lift the two chairs from one side of the table and head toward the door.

She sat glued to the sofa, afraid to see the rest of the house and the gaps he had left her. Once he and the boy were gone she would brace herself and walk through. Slowly. It would be good for her. Maybe reality would sink in. Maybe she would stop hoping.

Paul walked back into the house, into the dining room. Olivia rose and stood in the arched doorway as he and the boy turned the table upside down and unbolted the legs. When the last screw was removed, Paul stood up to look at her. He adjusted his gold wire-rimmed glasses on his nose and gave her a quick grin that meant nothing. A nervous gesture. He still had that slightly gawky, appealingly academic look that had attracted her ten years earlier, when he worked at the Washington Post and she was a resident at Washington General. She thought now of how quickly she could change this scene. With just a few words she could have him back. She let the fantasy unfold in her mind. “I’m pregnant,” she would say, and he’d drop the table leg and stare at her. “My God, Liv, why didn’t you tell me?” Maybe the news would snap him out of the crazy stupor he’d been mired in all these months. But she would say nothing. She didn’t want the baby to be his reason for coming home. If he came back to her it would have to be because he still loved her. She could accept nothing less.

She poured herself a glass of ginger ale and took her seat again in the living room while they carried the table out to the truck. She listened to Paul’s voice rising up from the driveway and through the open front door as he told the boy to get himself some lunch. “I’ll meet you at the new house at two,” Paul said. Then he came back into the house, walking slowly through the kitchen, the study, the bedrooms, to see if there was anything else he could take from her. When he was finished, he sat down in the rattan chair on the opposite side of the living room from Olivia. He was holding Sweet Arrival, the slim volume of poetry he’d published a few years earlier, and one of the copies of the book they’d written together, The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit, and he rested them in his lap.

“So,” he said. “How have you been?”

She sipped her ginger ale. “Busy.”

“What else is new?” His voice bit her with its sarcasm, but then he softened. “That’s good, though, I guess. Good to keep yourself occupied.”

“I’ve started doing some volunteer work at the Battered Women’s Shelter.” She watched his face closely. The change in his features was abrupt. The color left his cheeks and his eyes widened behind his glasses. He leaned forward.

“Why?”

She shrugged. “To fill the time. I work there a couple of evenings a week. They really need the help. Infections pass like wildfire through a place like that.” It had been hard at first, working there. Everyone spoke of Annie in the same reverent tone Paul had used. Her photographs adorned the walls, and her stained glass seemed to fill every window, bathing the broken women and restless children with color.

“It’s a rough place, Liv.”

She laughed. “I used to work in D.C., remember?”

“You can’t predict what’ll happen in a place like that.”

“It’s fine.”

He sat back, letting out a sigh. Olivia knew he had spent the last few weeks covering Zachary Pointer’s trial. She had not read the articles he’d written. She didn’t want to know how he would allude to Annie, didn’t want to read of his delight in seeing Pointer locked up for life.

“Look,” Paul said to her now. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time. Don’t get mad, okay? I mean, whatever your answer is, I won’t hold it against you. I know you’re human.” That quick, nervous grin again. He fanned absently through the pages of Sweet Arrival, while she waited for him to speak again. “When you realized it was Annie in the emergency room that night—did that affect how you treated her?” he asked. “I mean, did you try as hard to save her as you would have if she were just some…” He must have seen the look on her face, because the words froze on his lips.

Olivia tightened her fingers around the glass of ginger ale. She stood up. “You bastard.”

He set the books on the end table and walked toward her, rested his hand on her elbow. “I’m sorry, Liv. That was out of line. It’s just that…I’ve always wondered. I mean, if it had been me in your position, I don’t know if I could have…”

She jerked her arm away from him. “You’d better go, Paul.”

He walked back to the end table, not looking at her, not speaking to her, and she watched as he gathered his things together and left the house. When he was gone, she sat down again, her legs too weak to carry her through the house. How far they were from a reconciliation if he could think that of her. Hadn’t she wondered about it herself, though? In her bleakest moments, hadn’t she asked herself the same question? She knew the answer. She had tried—with every ounce of strength in her—to save Annie O’Neill’s life. That night had been the hardest she’d ever endured in an emergency room and she was certain she had done her best, although the irony of the situation had not been lost on her for a moment. She had, quite literally, held the life of the woman her husband loved in her hands.

Paul had not hidden his infatuation with Annie from her, and at first that had made Olivia feel safe. If Annie had been a threat, she thought, he would never have been so open about his feelings. It started with the spread he did on her in Seascape. He spoke admiringly of her, but the admiration quickly turned to adulation. It was like a sickness in him. It was one-sided, he assured her—Annie barely knew he was alive. Yet he could speak of nothing else. Olivia heard lengthy descriptions of Annie’s physical beauty, limitless generosity, charming quirkiness, boundless energy and extraordinary artistic talent. She listened, feigned interest. It was a phase, she told herself. It would pass. When it didn’t, she carefully, tactfully suggested he was going a little overboard. No, he said. She didn’t understand.

It wasn’t until Paul mentioned Annie’s two children that Olivia began to feel truly threatened. Paul was one of six children in a closely knit family. He was hungry for a family of his own, and all the medical tests had pointed the finger at Olivia as the reason they had none. She’d finally had surgery this past fall to improve her chance of conceiving, but by then it was too late. Even at the hospital, while holding Olivia’s hand after the operation, Paul spoke of Annie. She had once donated her bone marrow, Paul said. “Can you imagine that? Undergoing surgery to save the life of a total stranger?”

“Yes, Paul, you’ve convinced me.” Olivia spoke in anger for the first time. “She’s a saint.”

After that, he stopped talking to her about Annie, which worried Olivia even more because she knew by his brooding silence that Annie was still much on his mind. He was restless in his sleep. Losing weight. At the breakfast table he pushed his food from one side of the plate to the other. He lost track of their conversations, misplaced his car keys, his wallet. When they made love—their futile attempts at conception—his fingertips felt as dry as ash on her skin, and no matter how close their bodies were she felt the gulf between them that she couldn’t narrow with her words or her touch.

She had asked him outright if he and Annie were lovers, and he hadn’t bothered to mask his disappointment when he told her they were not. “She’s completely in love with her husband and committed to her marriage,” he’d said gloomily, in a way that let Olivia know he no longer felt any such commitment himself. Obviously, the platonic nature of his relationship with Annie had been dictated by Annie herself and not by Paul.

After walking out on her the night Annie died, Paul had taken an apartment close to his office. He’d written her a long letter, filled with his apology and confusion. He knew he couldn’t possibly have Annie now, he wrote, but knowing her made him realize what he was missing with Olivia. Olivia’s self-esteem, which had taken a lifetime to construct from the scrappiest raw materials, disintegrated in the few minutes it took her to read his words.

She saw him from time to time over the next few months when he needed things from the house. Clothes. Tools. The computer. She watched his hands as he folded, lifted, packed. She missed his touch—she’d started getting massages once a week just to feel another human being’s hands on her skin. Paul was no longer cool when he spoke to her, and there was occasionally a smile in his eyes when he saw her. She clung to the hope that the smile meant there was something left between them, something she could build on, but he never gave her the chance. He never stayed in the house longer than he had to, except for that one night in April when she’d shamelessly begged him to stay and he relented, only to kill her with the regret she saw later in his eyes.

What had become of the man she’d married, the man who had written an entire volume of poetry about her, who had helped her put her past aside and made her feel safe for the first time in her life? Who made love to her as though she were the only woman he could ever imagine loving? The man who had not yet met Annie O’Neill.

She wanted him back. She needed him back.

Olivia stood now at her living room window, the room behind her taunting her with new empty spaces to fill, as she watched the U-Haul disappear behind a dune. Out of the hundreds of times they’d made love, why had the forces of nature picked that particular night to leave her pregnant?

She felt a sudden determination replace her dejection. Like the room behind her, she had empty places to fill, and she would fill them with the qualities that had drawn her husband to Annie. But first she would need to learn what they were, and as her impulsive decision to work at the shelter had shown her, she would do whatever it took to find out. She had to admit the truth to herself: Paul’s obsession with Annie had become her own.

CHAPTER FIVE

Alec woke up with Annie’s old green sweatshirt beneath his cheek. He’d taken to sleeping with it, a practice which seemed absurd to him during daylight hours but to which he surrendered at night. The sweatshirt was little more than a rag Annie used to throw on for her early morning runs. When he’d come home from the emergency room that Christmas night, he’d found it lying on her side of the four-poster bed, a crumpled patch of green on the old, faded double wedding ring quilt. He’d slept with it that night, except that, of course, he hadn’t slept at all.

He’d given all her other clothes away after offering them to Lacey, who’d cringed at the thought of wearing them. The sweatshirt, though, he couldn’t part with. He hadn’t washed it and surely after all these months it had taken on more his scent than hers, but it comforted him all the same.

He had a Save the Lighthouse Committee meeting this morning, and he shaved for the occasion, quickly, avoiding a long look in the bathroom mirror. He did not like to see the toll these last few months had taken on his face.

Clay and Lacey were already at the breakfast table when he came downstairs. They were arguing, which was typical of them lately, but they fell silent when he walked into the room.

“Morning,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“Morning, Dad,” Clay said, while Lacey mumbled something under her breath.

Tripod walked over to Alec with his jaunty, three-legged gait, and Alec bent low to scratch the German shepherd’s head. “Anybody feed the animals?” he asked.

“Mmm,” Lacey said, and he took her reply to mean yes.

Alec poured himself a bowl of raisin bran, picked up a stack of photographs from the counter, and took his seat at the table. He looked through the pictures while he ate, holding them in one of the few patches of clear light that flowed through the kitchen windows. Annie’s stained glass colored nearly all the light in the room, splashing greens and blues and reds against the white cupboards and countertops.

Alec studied the photograph he’d taken from the base of the lighthouse, looking up at the black iron gallery. “Your pictures are getting stranger and stranger, Alec,” Tom Nestor had told him when Alec stopped by Annie’s old studio to use the darkroom. Alec propped the picture up against his coffee cup as he dipped his spoon into the raisin bran. It was a weird picture. He liked it.

“Dad?” Lacey asked.

“Hmm?” He turned the photograph on its side to see how it looked from that angle.

“Miss Green is going to call you this morning.”

“Who’s Miss Green?” He raised his head to look at his daughter and she quickly dropped her gaze to her cereal bowl. Why did she do that? “Lace? Look at me.”

She raised her eyes, dark blue and wide like her mother’s, and he had to struggle not to look away himself.

“Who’s Miss Green?” he repeated his question.

“My counselor at school.”

He frowned. “Are you having problems?”

Lacey shrugged and looked down at her bowl again. She played with her spoon, her fingertips stubby and sore-looking. She’d always bitten her nails, but this raw look, this biting them down to the quick, was new. “She’s on my case about my grades.”

Clay laughed. “What do you expect, O’Neill? You haven’t opened a book all semester.”

Alec set a quieting hand on Clay’s arm. “I thought you were getting all A’s, Lace.”

“Not this year.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner so I could have helped you?”

She shrugged again, a little spasm of her slender shoulders. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Bother me.” He felt his face cloud over. “You’re my daughter, Lacey.”

The phone rang on the wall behind him.

“That’s probably her,” Lacey said. Her face had gone white beneath her freckles.

“You’re in deep shit now, O’Neill,” Clay said as Alec stood up to answer the phone.

“Dr. O’Neill?” the woman said, her tone formal, removed.

“Yes.”

“This is Janet Green, Lacey’s counselor.”

He had an immediate image of her: dark hair sprayed into place, too-pink lipstick, a smile wide and false. Someone too cold, too rigid to be working with teenagers.

“Lacey mentioned you’d be calling.” Lacey had certainly waited until the last minute. He watched his daughter pick at her raisin bran, her head bowed, her long red hair falling like curtains on either side of the bowl.

“I live near you,” Janet Green continued. “I’d like to stop by this afternoon and talk with you about Lacey. Save you a trip in.”

Alec looked around him. Last night’s dishes, streaked red with tomato sauce, cluttered the counter next to the sink. The spaghetti pot was still on the stove, one long strand of spaghetti stuck to its side in the shape of a question mark. Pieces of mail and old newspapers littered the countertops, and his pictures of the lighthouse were strewn everywhere.

“Let’s just talk on the phone,” he said.

“Well, did she tell you why I want to see you?”

“She said her grades aren’t very good.”

“No, they’re not. She’s really plummeted, I’m afraid. She has nothing above a C and she’s failing biology and algebra.”

“Failing?” He shot Lacey a look. She leaped from her chair as though he’d touched her with a live wire, swung her book bag from the counter to her shoulder, and flew out the door. He lowered the receiver to his chest. “Lace!” he called after her, but he saw the red blur of her hair as she ran past the kitchen window and out to the street. Alec lifted the phone back to his ear. “She took off,” he said.

“Well, I know she’s upset. She’ll have to take biology and algebra in summer school if she wants to pass the year.”

Alec shook his head. “I don’t get it. She’s always been a straight-A student. Shouldn’t I have known about this sooner? What about her last report card? I would have noticed if she was slipping.”

“Straight C’s.”

He frowned into the phone. “She must not have shown it to me. That’s so unlike her.” He’d never seen a C out of either of his children. For that matter, he’d never seen a B.

“Your son’s kept up with things quite well despite losing his mother, hasn’t he? I hear he’s going to be class valedictorian.”

“Yes.” Alec sat down again at the table, suddenly exhausted. If it were not for the lighthouse meeting, he would go back to bed.

“And he’s going to Duke next year?”

“Yes.” He watched his son get up from the table. Clay took a peach from the fruit bowl and waved as he walked out the door.

“I think Lacey’s a little concerned about what that’ll be like, having her brother gone, just the two of you in the house.”

Alec frowned again. “Did she say that?”

“It’s just a feeling I got. She seems to have had a very difficult time adjusting to her mother’s death.”

“I—well, I guess if her grades are down…” She was failing. He’d had no idea. “I haven’t picked up on anything unusual.” He hadn’t looked for anything. He’d let his children fend for themselves these past few months.

“You’re a veterinarian, right, Dr. O’Neill?”

“Yes.”

“Lacey said you’re not working right now.”

He wanted to tell her it was none of her business, but he held his tongue for Lacey’s sake. “I’ve taken some time off.” He’d thought he’d take a few weeks off after Annie died. The weeks turned into months, the months accumulated at breakneck speed, and he still had no intention of returning to work.

“I see,” Janet Green said, her voice dropping a degree or two to the level of pure condescension. “By the way, are you aware Lacey’s had two detentions in the last few months for smoking on school grounds?”

He started to tell her that Lacey didn’t smoke, but obviously this woman knew his daughter better than he did. “No, I didn’t know that,” he said. “Thank you for telling me.”

He got off the phone and sat down at the table again, drained. This weariness was new for him. He was known for his energy, for his inability to sit idly for more than a minute or two. Now he was too tired to wash the spaghetti pot.

They ate spaghetti a few times a week. It was easy. Boil water, open a jar of sauce. Every once in a while one of the kids would cook, but they were not much more inventive than he was.

Annie used to make everything from scratch. Even bread. Two loaves of honey whole wheat every Saturday. The house would fill with the smell. This kitchen had been alive back then. She’d leave certain items on the countertops—a row of fruit along the backsplash, or colorful packages of exotic teas on the windowsills—so she could admire them while she worked.

Back in those days, Annie would usually get home ahead of him and create something wonderful in the kitchen, and often—in his memory, it was every other day or so—he’d come home and invite her into the bedroom and she would hand the spoon over to one of the kids, who would groan and resign themselves to another late dinner. Annie, the flush of longing already burning in her cheeks, would tell them, “Remember, loves, it’s elegant to dine late.”

That was the way this house operated back then. Annie had been a firm believer in spontaneity. “This is a house without rules,” she’d say. “We have to trust ourselves and our bodies to tell us when to sleep, to eat, to get up in the morning. To make love.”

It had only been in the last couple of years that the kids realized there were plenty of rules in this house—they were just not the same rules their friends lived by, but rather the peculiar rules of Annie’s creation. She allowed no clocks in the house, although Alec always wore a watch. Lacey and Clay were free to make their own decisions in the matter, both of them following their mother’s example until last year, when Clay began wearing a watch identical to Alec’s. Before that, Clay and Lacey were often late for the school bus, or on a few bizarre occasions, extremely early. They had never had a curfew, which made them the envy of their friends. Even when they were small, they were allowed to go to bed anytime they pleased. They regulated themselves quite well, actually, which probably had something to do with the fact that the O’Neills did not own a TV.

Lacey and Clay were never punished for their few misdeeds, but were rewarded frequently, just for existing. When they were young, Alec had often felt like a spectator in all of this, Annie setting the tone for the way they were raised. He caught on quickly, though, discovering that if you treated kids with respect they behaved responsibly. Lacey and Clay had always been a testimony to their methods. “The most important thing is that you’re having fun and you’re safe,” Alec would tell them before they went out. He took delight in that, in trusting them when the parents of their friends weighed their kids down with warnings, threats, and reprimands.

On a whim, Alec got up from the table and went upstairs to Lacey’s room. He opened the door and shook his head with a smile. The room was a wreck, the bed unmade, clothes heaped everywhere, the hamper in her corner overflowing. Her desk was stacked with books and tapes and papers, and the walls were covered with posters of decadent, noxious-looking musicians. On the shelf that ran around three sides of her room, at the level of his shoulders, sat her antique dolls, providing a weird contrast to the depraved young men. There were thirteen of the dolls, neatly spaced on the shelves he’d built five years ago. Annie had given her a doll for each birthday. Right now they looked out at Alec with placid smiles on their haunting, small-toothed mouths.

She’s smoking, damn it. Should he talk to her about it? What would Annie have done? An open discussion at the dinner table, most likely, with no accusations, no expectations, no demands. Alec let out a long sigh. He wasn’t up to it.

Tripod hobbled into the doorway and leaned heavily against Alec’s leg. Alec gave the dog a perfunctory scratch behind one ear as they stared together into the disaster that was Lacey’s room. Annie had been no sterling housekeeper—she was notoriously disorganized—but she’d been a master at cramming things into closets and cupboards, and the house always had the appearance of neatness. Lacey’s room had certainly never looked like this when Annie was alive, but Alec could hardly hold his daughter responsible for the mess in this room when it only reflected what was going on in every other room in the house.

He leaned against the door jamb and shut his eyes to block out the reproachful, saucer-eyed stares of the dolls. “I’m screwing up, Annie,” he said, and he felt Tripod turn his head to look up at him at the defeated tone of his voice.

At ten-twenty that morning, Alec pulled into the parking lot of the Sea Tern and slipped into the space between Nola Dillard’s BMW and Brian Cass’s old station wagon. He was late again, but he was loaded with excuses this time. First the call from Lacey’s counselor, which admittedly had not taken that long but which had forced him to spend a good hour thinking about his life. Then there was the call from Randi, begging him to come back to work. She was handling just about everything since he’d left, and she’d been tolerant at first. Very understanding—a quality of Randi’s he had always criticized her for. She let people walk on her, and now he was doing the walking. Well, she was starting to fight back. This was the third phone call this week, but he wasn’t about to bend. He told her once again he wasn’t ready to return to work. He wasn’t sure he would ever be ready.

“Here he is.” Nola Dillard stepped toward him as he walked into the meeting room at the back of the restaurant. Her jaw had a peculiar set to it. She clutched his arm, her heavy, flowery perfume filling the air between them, and whispered close to his ear. “We’ve got problems, hon.”

“Thought you got lost, Alec.” Walter Liscott stood up and pulled out the chair at the head of the table for him.

“Sorry I’m late.” He took the seat Walter offered him.

The entire Save the Lighthouse Committee was assembled in front of him. Two men in addition to himself and two women, already well into their coffee and doughnuts. They had undoubtedly grown accustomed to his tardiness by now. Sondra Carter, the second woman on the committee and the owner of a small boutique in Duck, had suggested it was his little tribute to Annie, who had never been on time for anything in her life.

The waitress appeared in the room and poured Alec a cup of coffee. “Help yourself to a doughnut, Dr. O’Neill,” she said.

Alec nodded and set his notebook on the table. He looked at Nola, wondering what she had been trying to tell him.

“Okay,” he said. “This morning we’re brainstorming fundraising ideas.”

Walter ran his hand over his thinning gray hair. He cleared his throat and began speaking in a deep, syrupy voice. “We were talking before you came in, Alec. And the truth is, we’re not altogether in agreement on something.”

Alec tensed. “What are you saying, Walter?” he asked. He would have to come on time from now on. Didn’t want to invite a mutiny.

“Well…” Walter cleared his throat again and glanced at the others. He’d obviously been selected as their spokesperson. “While we’re all in agreement on the goal of this committee—raising funds to save the lighthouse—we’re not in agreement on how the lighthouse ought to be saved. Me for one, I don’t want to bust my tail raising money and then have them screw the whole thing up by trying to move the damn thing and topple it over in the process.”

“I agree,” Sondra said. “Either our money goes to building a sea wall around the lighthouse, or they get none of it.”

“Hold it.” Alec raised his hand. “You all know the choice on how the lighthouse is saved is not ours to make.”

“That’s right,” Nola said. Her white-blond hair was pinned up as usual and she wore her gray power suit this morning, a blue Dorsett Realty pin attached to the lapel. She pointed a long red fingernail at Walter. “The Park Service wants to save the lighthouse as much as we do, Walter. They won’t agree to something they’re not absolutely certain will work. Come on, folks,” she pleaded. “We’ve worked so hard and the money’s starting to come in. Now that it’s getting close, y’all are chickening out.”

“I’m just afraid they’ll make the wrong choice.”

Walter sounded close to tears, and Alec understood his concern. Everyone in this room loved the Kiss River Lighthouse and understood its fragility. Up until a few weeks ago, the plan had been to build a sea wall around it. Within a few years, the lighthouse would be on its own small island in the sea. An aesthetically appealing solution. Now, quite suddenly, the Park Service had changed its mind and was speaking very seriously about moving it—building a track, lifting it up, and sliding it 600 yards inland, all at the cost of several million dollars. It was a frightening and impossible concept to comprehend. Not only did he understand Walter’s fears; he shared them.

“Nola’s right,” Alec said. “We have to trust the engineers to come up with the best solution. We can’t second-guess them.”

Nola winked at him. “I move we get on with the meeting.”

“I second the motion,” Brian said.

There was some grumbling, but no one left the table, and Alec led them through an hour of ideas. A silent auction. An educational brochure to generate interest. More talk shows and speaking engagements. It wasn’t until he was driving home that he let his own fears surface. Engineers were human. Fallible. What if they destroyed the lighthouse by trying to save it?

He was at his desk in the den when Lacey got home from school. He spotted her through the window. She was out on the sidewalk talking to Jessica Dillard, Nola’s daughter and Lacey’s best friend. Jessica was grinning, but there was a meanness in the grin, an ugly superior quality that surprised him and made his heart ache for his daughter. Jessica stood with one hand on her hip. Her sleek blond hair rested on her shoulders and she had a cigarette elegantly balanced between her fingers. She looked very much like her mother.

Alec leaned closer to the open window.

“You should try it, Lacey,” Jessica was saying. “You’re so lame this year. You’ve forgotten how to have fun.”

Lacey said something he couldn’t hear before turning toward the house. Try what, he wondered? Alcohol? Marijuana? Sex? He shuddered and turned to face the door, his chair creaking. “Lacey?”

She stepped into the den, folding her arms across her chest.

“Things okay with you and Jessica?”

“Yes.” Lacey let a wall of red hair fall over her left eye, cutting him out. He wouldn’t push her. Not now.

“I signed you up for summer school. Biology and Algebra.”

“Only losers go to summer school.”

“I’m afraid you don’t have much choice.”

She looked up at him with her one exposed eye. “Are you going to ground me?”

“Ground you? Of course not.” He’d never grounded his kids. “But I want you to promise me that if you start having that much trouble with school again, you’ll let me know.”

“Okay.” She swept her hair back over her shoulder and turned to leave the room. In the doorway, she hesitated and looked back at him. “I’m sorry, Dad. I just haven’t been able to do my work this year.”

“I know what you mean, Lacey,” he said. “I haven’t been able to do mine, either.”

CHAPTER SIX

Paul was still in bed when he heard the interview on the radio. They were talking about the Kiss River Lighthouse. At first he thought he was dreaming, but the voice began to make sense, to clear his head. He opened his eyes to the blue and gold light streaming through the stained glass panel hanging in his bedroom window. He lay very still, listening.

The woman’s name was Nola Dillard and she was talking about the Save the Lighthouse Committee. “We’re going to lose the Kiss River Lighthouse within three years if erosion continues at its current rate,” she said.

Paul rolled onto his side and turned up the sound as Nola Dillard continued to speak of the disaster facing the tallest lighthouse in the country. When she was finished, Paul pulled his phone book out of the nightstand and dialed the number of the radio station.

“How can I reach the woman who was just interviewed about the lighthouse?” he asked, propping himself up against the headboard of his bed.

“She’s still here,” the male voice on the other end of the phone told him. “Hold on.”

There was a thirty-second wait. He could hear voices in the background. Laughter.

“This is Nola Dillard,” a woman said.

“Yes, Ms. Dillard. My name is Paul Macelli and I just heard you talk about the Kiss River Lighthouse. I’d like to help.”

“Great!” she said. “The bottom line is money, Mr….?”

“Macelli. I’m afraid there’s not much I can do for you financially, but I have some spare time and energy. I’d be happy to help in some other way. I didn’t realize the lighthouse was in jeopardy.”

There was a silence. He had somehow stumbled, said something wrong.

When she spoke again, her voice had developed a barely perceptible chill. “Are you a new resident of the Outer Banks, Mr. Macelli?”

So that was it. He was an outsider. He thought of telling her about the summer he’d lived here long ago, the summer after he got his masters degree, but he stopped himself. He had told no one about those few months in the Outer Banks, not even Olivia.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m new here, but I work for the Beach Gazette. Surely there’s some way I can help.”

Nola Dillard sighed. “Well, I tell you what, hon. We’re having a committee meeting Thursday night at the Sea Tern Inn. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes.” Oh, yes. Two of his interviews with Annie had been in that restaurant. He’d avoided it since her death.

“Meet me out front about seven forty-five. I’ll talk to the committee first and clear the way for you a bit, all right?”

He thanked her and got off the phone. At least she hadn’t asked him what his interest was in the lighthouse. He would have said something about being a history fanatic, someone who couldn’t bear to lose the past. It would have been the truth.

Nola Dillard was a striking woman. Early forties, probably. Pale-blond hair pinned up in back, enormous gray eyes, and skin a little too lined from a tan she probably nurtured year-round.

She reached her hand toward him and he shook it. “We’re all set, Mr…. Paul, is it? I’m Nola. Come on in.”

He followed her through the familiar main room of the restaurant, with its heavy wooden tables and sea-lore accents, to a small room in the back. The committee members sat around one long table, and they looked up when he entered. There were three men and one woman besides Nola. He glanced at their faces and was startled when his eyes found Alec O’Neill at the head of the table. He recognized him immediately, from the glimpse he’d had of him with Annie, and more so, from the photograph of him in her studio—the black and white picture that had frightened him a little with its dark, unsmiling countenance and a threat in his pale eyes. Those eyes were on him now as Nola guided Paul toward the head of the table. He glanced quickly at the exit. Should he take off, make an absolute fool of himself? Nola’s hand was soft at his elbow, pushing him forward, as Alec rose from his chair.

“Paul, this is Alec O’Neill, our venerable leader. Alec, Paul Macelli.”

Alec O’Neill raised his dark eyebrows in Paul’s direction. Paul shook his hand, mumbling a greeting, his tongue suddenly too big for his mouth. He nodded his way around the rest of the group and took a seat next to Nola. A waitress came into the room and asked him what he’d like to drink. His first thought was something stiff and fiery, but a quick look around the room told him alcohol was out. Alec himself was drinking what looked like lemonade.

Paul ordered iced tea. He leaned back in the chair, loosening the collar of his shirt.

Alec looked at him with those riveting eyes and Paul felt totally exposed. Could he possibly know? Perhaps he recognized Paul’s name as the man who’d written the article about Annie in Seascape.

“Nola says you’re a journalist,” Alec said.

“Yes. I work for the Gazette, but I freelance too. So, if there’s any way you think I can help, just let me know.” He laughed nervously, the color rising in his cheeks.

Alec took a swallow of his lemonade. “Well, I think there probably is a way you can help us. We need to educate the public. I handle speaking engagements locally and around the state, but we need to shift our publicity to the national level. The Kiss River Lighthouse is a national monument, so it shouldn’t be up to the locals to support the preservation effort. We’re talking about putting together a brochure of some sort on the history of the lighthouse, something that would have wide distribution.” Alec leaned back in his chair. “Do you think you could help with that?”

“Of course.” Paul had dropped his eyes to Alec’s hands sometime during the last few minutes. Alec’s fingers were long, tanned, and angular. Paul thought of him touching Annie with those hands, pulling her close to him in their bed. Hands she welcomed on her body. Alec still wore his wedding ring. From this distance it looked like a plain gold band, but he knew that up close it would be inlaid with the same gold braid that had graced Annie’s ring. What had Alec done with her ring? She’d been cremated. What did they do…

“So, paper and printing will be donated,” Alec was saying, and Paul quickly returned his gaze to Alec’s face, to his eyes, ice-blue and unavoidable. “It’s the compilation of the facts and the actual writing that we need.”

“Is there a historical collection I can use?” Paul asked, and then he had a sudden, disconcerting thought. What if the old lighthouse keeper, Mary Poor, was still alive? She couldn’t be, he reassured himself. She’d been an old woman the last time he had seen her, and that had been many long years ago.

“There’s a private collection,” Alec said. “I’ll check into getting you permission to look at it. But for now, how about just covering our efforts in the Gazette?”

“Fine,” Paul said, and he sat back, glad to have the attention of the room off him as Alec shifted the topic to a silent auction. He would leave the moment the meeting was over.

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was Mary Poor’s ninetieth birthday and she was quite content. She sat on the porch of the blue, two-story house that had been her home for the past two years and watched the early morning sunlight turn the boats on the waterfront purple, then pink, then yellow. She had gotten used to this view, to the gentle rhythm of the rocker, to sharing her porch with others her age. She had expected to live out her life at Kiss River, but she knew she was luckier than most to have had sixty-five years under the warmth of the beacon.

She still spoke of the lighthouse to anyone who would listen. Over and over again, she recounted tales of the storms, the wrecks, the sea. She knew she sounded like the others when she rambled on that way, trapped in the past, but she didn’t care. It was a conscious decision she made to allow herself to babble, a privilege that came with age.

The doctor who examined her yesterday had marveled at her keen vision, her fine hearing, and her strength, despite the tortured bone in her hip. Mary had talked politics with the man, showing off. “You’re sharper than I am, Mrs. Poor,” the doctor had said, and Mary was certain he had not been patronizing her.

“So, if I’m in such good shape, why can’t I have a cigarette?” she’d asked him, but he’d only laughed, and slipped his stethoscope into his bag.

Mary rarely let others know just how capable she still was. She wanted to enjoy some of the pleasures of old age, of being taken care of, pampered. She even let Sandy, one of the girls on the staff, cut her short, snow-white hair now, although she could still do it perfectly well herself if she had to.

She tried to keep up with things. She watched the news, television still an amazement to her. She’d had one at Kiss River, but all it ever brought into her house there was static and splintery gray lines. She kept up with the newspaper, too. Right now the Beach Gazette rested on her lap, and when the boats on the waterfront finally lost their color and the show of the sunrise was over, she picked up the paper and began to read. Her favorite part was the crossword puzzle, but she always saved that until last, until she’d read everything else and needed something to work on as she waited for Trudy or Jane to get up and join her on the porch.

She read the front page and then opened the paper. She was folding the page back when she saw the picture: the tall, glittering white brick lighthouse against a dark sky. A little well of pain surfaced briefly in her chest, then subsided. In the corner of the picture she could just make out the northern tip of her old house, her husband Caleb’s family home, the house the Park Service now owned. The headline read, Erosion Threatens Kiss River Lighthouse. There was a byline. Paul Macelli. Mary narrowed her eyes. Paul Macelli? They’d let anybody write about Kiss River these days. She read the article through. A committee had been formed to save the lighthouse. Alec O’Neill was chairman. Mary smiled when she read that. It fit.

She rested the paper on her lap again and thought about Alec O’Neill. She had learned of Annie’s death too late to get to her funeral, and she’d wept, unable to remember the last time she’d cried over a loss. But Annie. A kindred spirit. Like a daughter in a way, although Mary’s own daughter, Elizabeth, had never listened to her with such interest. Mary could tell Annie anything, and Annie had told her all, hadn’t she? “Mary,” she’d said one night, after the fire had burned out and they’d drunk brandy, coffee, “you know me better than anyone in the world.”

Mary had loved her, fiercely, with a lay-down-her-life-for-her sort of love. She thought of that after Annie died. Why couldn’t it have been her instead? She’d lived long enough, while Annie was just beginning, really. In more ways than one. Mary felt that blind sort of love that led her to do the things she did for Annie, to see to Annie’s happiness without bothering to think through the consequences, without stopping to think that what she did might be wrong.

For a while after Annie died, Mary couldn’t imagine going on without her visits to look forward to. She’d seen Annie less since moving here to the old folks’ home, but the younger woman had still come once or twice a week, with gifts more often than not. Things Mary didn’t need, but that was Annie, and Mary would never tell her not to bother. Annie’s visits were shorter here. There were always people around; she watched her words.

It was her last visit that haunted Mary, that stayed in her mind. She told herself Annie was gone now, what did it matter? But Annie had been so distressed that afternoon as she sat with Mary in the living room, surrounded by the other residents of the home. The dimpled smile was gone, and she struggled to hold back tears. Mary had finally taken her up to her bedroom and let her weep, let her talk about what she’d done. Mary had absolved her, like a priest in a confessional. She actually thought of that later, that Annie had died forgiven.

Mary had sent a card to Alec and her children. Sandy took her out to buy it, and she made that girl drive her to four or five card stores before she found one with a white lighthouse on it. She lay awake for one full night trying to decide what to write. She composed long dissertations in her mind on how extraordinary Annie was, how terribly she would miss her, but in the end she wrote something simple, something anyone might write, and sent the card off.

Alec O’Neill. She had never been able to look that man in the eye. “I won’t hurt him,” Annie had said, too many times to count. “I’ll never hurt him.”

Mary looked down at the article again, reading it through once more. They needed historical information on the lighthouse. Incidents. Anecdotes. Soon they would be looking for her. Who would come? Alec O’Neill? Paul Macelli? Or maybe someone from the Park Service. That would be best. If she saw Alec or Paul—well, she sometimes said too much these days. She might tell them more than they wanted to hear.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Olivia bought a strawberry ice cream cone at the deli and sat on a bench across the street from the cedar-sided building that housed Annie’s studio. The front wall of the building was composed of ten large windows. She could see that stained glass panels hung inside them, but from her seat directly under the midday sun, she could not make out their shapes or designs.

She’d done this one other time, sat on this bench and stared at the studio. It was just a month or so after Paul started talking about Annie, back when she was alive. Already Annie had assumed a larger-than-life dimension in Olivia’s mind, and she’d sat here hoping for a glimpse of the woman that never came. She’d lacked the courage to go inside the studio. She couldn’t be certain of her reactions if she came face to face with her. Paul was very bright, very attractive. If he were trying to seduce Annie, it could only be a matter of time until she gave in. Olivia imagined letting Annie see her, get to know her. If the woman had a shred of decency, she wouldn’t want to hurt her.

Her reasons for sitting on this bench today were different. Now she just wanted to understand the pull Annie’d had over Paul. She already felt herself changing. She was beginning to enjoy her volunteer work at the shelter, although she had never simply given her skills away before. Her medical training had always included an unspoken focus on pulling in a hefty income.

At first she had found the work at the shelter painful. She’d take the stories of the shelter residents home with her and lie sleepless in her bed, the tired faces of the women filling the empty darkness of her bedroom. The plight of those women and their children opened old wounds in Olivia she thought had healed long ago. She understood too well how it felt to be a victim, how it felt to be poor and desperate, and she had to continually remind herself that she was strong now. She was skilled. The consummate professional, Paul had once said of her, and she’d thought at the time that he’d meant it as a compliment. Still, seeing the hungry, battered children at the shelter triggered memories of snowy winters spent with one pair of thin-soled shoes, or meals of canned beans and a single hot dog, to be split between herself and her brothers, Clint and Avery.

She swallowed the last of her ice cream cone and stood up. The beach traffic was heavier now that some schools were out for the summer, and she crossed the street carefully. She was cautious these days, aware that every move she made affected the tiny life forming inside her as well as her own.

The small wooden sign next to the door read simply, STAINED GLASS AND PHOTOGRAPHY. She stepped inside, closing the door behind her and shutting out the street sounds. It took her a moment to adjust to the quiet, cool, multicolored beauty of the room. A man sat at a broad work table directly in front of her and he looked up when she walked in. Smoke curled in the air above him as he stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray on the table. He was a large man, with hair the color of shredded wheat tied back in a ponytail, and a ragged mustache above generous lips. His thick hand held some sort of tool, and he raised it from the piece of glass on which he was working.

“Let me know if you have any questions.” His voice was deep, raspy.

Olivia nodded, and walked to the right, away from his eyes. She was moving in slow motion, it seemed. She felt drugged, hypnotized, by the sunlit colors on either side of her. The studio was small and high-ceilinged, and the glass walls in the front and back were covered from floor to ceiling with stained glass panels in all sizes. Overwhelming. At first she could barely separate one piece from the next, but then her eye was drawn to a long panel, perhaps five feet by two, of a woman in Victorian garb. Her white dress seemed to flow and sway on the glass, and Olivia was reminded of the small angel Paul had bought for their Christmas tree. The woman peered out, coy-eyed, from beneath the brim of her flowered hat.

The man at the work table caught her staring. “That one’s not for sale,” he said.

“It’s beautiful,” Olivia said. “Did Annie O’Neill make it?”

“Uh-huh. I kept it for myself when she died.” He laughed, a soft, guttural chuckle. “Told myself she would’ve wanted me to have it, since it was my favorite. The ones on the right side there were all Annie’s. Not too much of hers left. Most of it’s been sold.”

Much of it, she guessed, to Paul.

“The rest I made,” the man continued. He gestured toward the east end of the studio, where a maze of white temporary walls were covered with framed photographs. “Photographs are mostly mine, too, although Annie was an accomplished photographer in her own right.”

Olivia walked toward the photographs. The first few walls were covered with color prints—seascapes, sunsets, nature shots—most of them with Tom Nestor’s signature in the lower right-hand corner. There was a surprising delicacy to the pictures for such a large man.

She turned a corner and found photographs of three people she remembered all too well—Annie’s husband and two children. The shot of the girl was from her shoulders up. She grinned mischievously, deep dimples carved into her lightly freckled cheeks, her full red hair blowing wildly around her face.

The photograph of the boy had been taken on the beach. He stood shirtless next to his surfboard, his dark hair slicked back and droplets of water sparkling starlike on his chest.

Between those pictures was a black and white portrait of Alec O’Neill. Olivia was drawn to his eyes, pale beneath his dark brows, the pupils little black daggers that made her shiver. He wore a black cardigan sweater and a white T-shirt, the dark hair on his chest just visible at the neckline. His head was tilted, one hand against his temple, as though his elbow rested on his raised knee, perhaps, or on a table out of the camera’s range. There was no smile. His lips were flattened, tight, the perfect match for the cold accusation she saw in his eyes.

She stepped away, his eyes following her as she turned the corner to come face to face with a huge black and white portrait of Annie herself. Olivia stared. Annie looked familiar in her creamy-skinned beauty, but like a stranger in the lively contours of her face. Her hair was an untamed halo of pale silk against the glossy black background.

“They broke the mold after they made Annie.” The man had come up behind her, and Olivia turned to face him.

“Did you take it?”

“Yes.” He seemed to have difficulty shifting his gaze from Annie to Olivia, but he finally reached forward to shake her hand. “I’m Tom Nestor,” he said. He smelled like smoke.

“Olivia Simon.” She looked back at the portrait. “She must have been a wonderful subject for a photographer.”

“Oh, yeah.” He dug his hands into the pockets of his denim overalls. The sleeves of his blue-striped shirt were rolled up to his elbows, and thick blond hair covered his meaty forearms. “You know, you hear about people dying, you think, I can’t believe it, but then you start facing up to it. It took me months to believe it with Annie, though. Sometimes I still think she’s going to walk through that door and tell me it was all a gag, she just needed some time away. I love the idea that she might…” His voice drifted off and he shrugged and smiled. “Oh, well.”

Olivia remembered the woman on the table in the Emergency Room, the flat line of the monitor, the life slipping out of her hand.

“I should really get another artist in here,” Tom continued. “I can’t pay the rent on this place myself. Alec—Annie’s husband—he’s been helping me out. But I just can’t imagine working with someone else. I worked with Annie for fifteen years.”

Olivia turned to face him. “My husband did a story on her in Seascape Magazine.”

Tom looked surprised. “Paul Macelli’s your husband? I didn’t realize he was married.”

No, she imagined he hadn’t spoken of her much. Maybe he’d never even told Annie he was married. “Well, he’s…we’re separated,” she said.

“Oh.” Tom fixed his gaze on Annie’s picture again. “He still comes in here from time to time. Said he’s fixing up a new house. He bought a lot of her stained glass. He wanted that Victorian lady you were looking at, but I’m not parting with her.”

Olivia glanced at the rest of the photographs and then walked back to the center of the studio. She touched the corner of a stained glass panel hanging from the ceiling. “How do you do this?” she asked, running her fingers over the dark lines between the segments of blue glass. “This is lead, right?”

Tom sat down behind the work table. “No, actually that’s copper foil covered with solder. Come over here.”

She sat down on the chair next to him. He was working on a panel of white irises against a blue and black background. For the next ten minutes, she watched in fascination as he melted ropes of silvery solder onto the copper-wrapped edges of the glass, while the colors from the panels in the windows played on his hands, his cheeks, his pale blond eyelashes.

“Do you give lessons?” she asked, surprising Tom no more than herself.

“Not usually.” He looked up at her and grinned. “You interested?”

“Well, yes, I’d like to try. I’m not very creative, though.”

She had never done anything like this. She’d never had the time, never taken the time, to learn a skill so thoroughly unrelated to her profession.

“You might surprise yourself,” Tom said. He named a price and she agreed; she would have agreed to any amount.

Tom glanced down at her sandaled feet. “Wear closed-toed shoes,” he said. “And you’ll need safety glasses, but I think I’ve got an old pair of Annie’s somewhere around here. You can use them.”

Before she left she bought a small, oval-shaped panel Annie had made—the delicate, iridescent detail of a peacock feather. She was leaving the studio when she nearly tripped over a stack of magazines piled close to the door.

Tom sighed. “I’ve got to do something about this mess.” He waved a hand toward the magazines and a few piles of paperback books stacked next to them. “People have been bringing in their books and magazines for years. Annie would take them to the old folks’ home in Manteo. I haven’t wanted to tell people to stop, ’cause Annie would have had my head, but I just don’t feel like driving over there.”

“I can take them sometime,” Olivia said. When? she wondered. Her impulsivity was beginning to worry her.

“Hey, would you? That’d be great. You just tell me when you’re headed out that way and I’ll load you up.”

She arrived at the studio at exactly eleven the following Saturday. Tom fitted her with Annie’s green safety glasses, Annie’s old green apron. He drew a pattern of squares and rectangles on a sheet of graph paper, laid a piece of clear glass over it, and showed her how to use the glass cutter to score the glass. Her first cut was perfect, he said, as were her second and third.

“You have a natural feel for this.”

She smiled, pleased. She had a steady hand; she was used to a scalpel. She only needed to adjust her pressure to the fragile glass.

Her head was bowed low over her work when she heard someone enter the studio.

“Morning, Tom.”

She looked up to see Alec O’Neill, and her hand froze above the glass.

“Howdy, Alec,” Tom said.

Alec barely seemed to notice her. He was carrying a camera case, and he stepped through a side door in the studio, closing it behind him.

“What’s in there?” Olivia asked.

“Darkroom,” said Tom. “That’s Annie’s husband, Alec. He comes in a couple of times a week to develop film or make prints or whatever.”

She glanced at the closed darkroom door, and returned her attention to her work. Her next cut splintered a little, and she jerked her hands quickly away from the glass. “Shouldn’t I be wearing some sort of gloves?”

“No.” Tom looked offended. “You want to feel what you’re doing.”

She worked a while longer, glancing at her watch from time to time, hoping she would be finished before Alec O’Neill came out of the darkroom. Her next cut was crooked. This was not as easy as she’d thought. She had hung the peacock feather in her kitchen window, and now that she had a better sense of the work that had gone into it, she was anxious to see it again, to study it from a new perspective.

She was using pliers to break apart a scored piece of glass when the darkroom door squeaked open, and she kept her eyes riveted on her work as Alec O’Neill walked back into the studio.

“I left the negatives in there,” he said to Tom.

“Those closeups you made of the brick came out good,” Tom said.

Alec didn’t respond, and she felt his eyes on her. She lifted her face, slipped off the glasses.

“This is Olivia Simon,” Tom said. “Olivia, Alec O’Neill.”

Olivia nodded, and Alec frowned. “I’ve met you some where.”

She set down the pliers and lowered her hands to her lap. “Yes, you have,” she said, “but not under very good circumstances, I’m afraid. I was the physician on duty the night your wife was brought to the emergency room.”

“Oh.” Alec nodded slightly. “Yes.”

“You were what?” Tom leaned back to look at her.

“I stopped in to take a look at your wife’s work, and I liked it so much that I asked Tom to give me lessons.”

Alec cocked his head at her, as though he were not quite certain he believed her. “Well,” he said after a moment. “You came to the right guy.” He looked as though he wanted to say something more, and Olivia held her breath, aware of the still, colorful air surrounding the three of them. Then he gave a slight wave of his hand. “I’ll see you in a couple of days, Tom,” he said, and he turned and left the studio.

“You were there the night Annie died?” Tom asked, once the door had closed behind Alec.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“It wasn’t a night I particularly want to remember.”

“But, Christ, I mean that’s weird, don’t you think? We stood right over there,” he pointed to the photographs, “and talked about her, and you never said a word.”

She looked over at him. His heavy blond eyebrows were knitted together in a frown, and his eyes had reddened.

“Aren’t there things you just can’t talk about?” she asked.

He drew back from her, and she knew that, unwittingly, she had struck a nerve in him.

“Yeah. Right.” He shook his head to whisk away what ever emotions had been stirred loose in him over the past few minutes. “Didn’t mean to jump on you. Let’s get back to work here.”

She returned to her work, but as she cut, as she measured, she was aware of Tom’s troubled silence, and she knew that this was yet another man who had loved Annie Chase O’Neill.

CHAPTER NINE

“You’re coming to graduation tonight, aren’t you?” Clay looked across the table at his father, while Lacey drowned her frozen waffle in maple syrup.

“Of course,” Alec said. “I wouldn’t miss it.” He wondered how Clay could have thought anything else, but he guessed his actions hadn’t been too predictable lately.

“How’s the speech coming?” he asked. Clay had seemed uncharacteristically nervous the past few days, and right now he was tapping his foot on the floor beneath the table. He’d been carrying his notecards around with him, wedged into his shirt pocket or clutched in his hand. Even now the cards were perched, dog-eared and smudged, in front of his orange juice glass. Alec felt a little sorry for his son. He wished there was some way he could make it easier for him.

“It’s fine,” Clay said. “By the way, is it okay if I have a few people over after?”

“Sure,” Alec said, pleased. “It’s been a while since you’ve done that. I’ll disappear.”

“Well, no, you don’t have to disappear,” Clay said quickly.

Alec reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He set it on the table next to Clay’s cereal bowl. “Take what you need for food and whatever.”

Clay stared at the wallet for a moment. He glanced at Lacey before he opened it and pulled out a twenty.

“Can’t get much with that,” Alec said. He took his wallet back and handed Clay a couple more twenties. “You only graduate once.”

Clay held the bills on the table. “You act like money’s nothing these days,” he said, carefully. Alec had the feeling both his kids thought he was losing his mind. He was not working; he was spending freely. But he wasn’t quite ready to tell them about the insurance policy. He needed to keep it to himself a while longer—a sweet, tender secret he shared with Annie.

“You don’t need to concern yourself with finances other than your own,” Alec said.

Clay looked around the room. “I’d better get home early today to get this place cleaned up.”

“I’ll do it,” Lacey volunteered, surprising them both. “It’ll be your graduation present.”

Alec spent the day with his camera on the beach at Kiss River. He was taking slides for a change, pictures he would use when he spoke to the Rotary Club in Elizabeth City next week.

He and Clay arrived home at the same time and they barely recognized the house they walked into. It smelled of lemon oil, and whatever it was Annie used to put in the bag of the vacuum cleaner. The living room was spotless, the kitchen scrubbed and sparkling and full of color from the stained glass at the windows.

“God,” Clay said, looking around him. “Seems a shame to have a party here. I hate to wreck the place.”

Lacey walked into the kitchen from the laundry room, a basket of clean clothes in her arms.

“The house looks fantastic, Lace,” Alec said.

She set the laundry basket down and wrinkled her freckled, sunburned nose at her father. “It was getting to me,” she said.

Alec smiled. “Yeah, it was getting to me, too. I just didn’t have the energy to do anything about it.”

“Thanks, O’Neill,” Clay said. “You can always get a job as a maid if you flunk out of high school.”

Alec was staring at the laundry basket. There on top, neatly folded, was Annie’s old green sweatshirt. He picked it up, the folds coming undone, the worn fabric falling over his arm.

“You washed this?” He asked the obvious.

Lacey nodded. “It was on your bed.”

Alec lifted the sweatshirt to his nose and breathed in the scent of detergent. Lacey and Clay looked at one another, and he lowered the shirt to his side.

“Your mother wore this a lot, you know?” he explained. “So when I threw her things out, I kept it as a remembrance. It still smelled like her, like that stuff she used on her hair. I should have set it aside so you didn’t get it mixed up with the dirty clothes.” He tried to laugh. “I guess I can finally get rid of it.” He looked over at the trash can in the corner of the kitchen, but slipped the sweatshirt under his arm instead.

“It was right there with your dirty sheets,” Lacey said, her voice high. Scared and defensive. “How was I supposed to know it wasn’t laundry?”

“It’s all right, Annie,” he said, “it’s…”

Lacey stamped her foot, her face crimson. “I am not Annie!”

Alec quickly played his words back to himself. Yes, he’d just called her Annie. He reached for her shoulder.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

Lacey dodged his hand. “Next time you can do your own fucking laundry!”

Alec watched as she ran out of the room, and in a moment they heard her light, quick steps on the stairs, followed by the slamming of her bedroom door.

“You’ve done that a lot, you know,” Clay said quietly.

Alec looked at his son. “Done what? Called her Annie?” He frowned, trying to think. “No, I haven’t.”

“Ask her.” Clay nodded in the direction of the stairs. “I bet she could tell you how many times you’ve done it.”

Alec struggled out of his suit jacket and pressed his back against the car seat. He felt perspiration on his neck, across his chest. He tried to slow down his breathing. Keep it even. Stop gulping air.

He’d parked a little bit away from the rest of the cars in Cafferty High’s parking lot. He needed a few minutes to pull himself together before he could face people. Parents of Clay’s friends, he hadn’t seen in months. His teachers. Everyone who was going to want to talk to him and say wonderful things about his son. If he could just keep a smile on his face, say the appropriate thing at the appropriate moment. God, he was never going to make it through the next couple of hours. Damn it, Annie.

She used to talk about seeing her kids graduate. As much as she tried to pretend that Lacey’s and Clay’s accomplishments were immaterial, she took pride in everything they did. She would have thrown a huge celebration for Clay’s graduation. She would have hooted and hollered her way through the ceremony to make sure Clay knew she was there. Annie is one intense mother, Tom Nestor had said to him once, and he was right. Annie always tried to give her children the things she had never received from her own parents.

Her parents did not go to her graduation from the exclusive high school she’d attended in Boston. “We would have been proud to come if you’d kept your grades up,” her father had told her. “But losing your membership in the National Honor Society during your last semester of school is inexcusable.”

Her parents had been very wealthy. They’d groomed Annie to fit into their social circle, to date the sons of their well-connected friends and acquaintances. When she failed to meet their expectations, which she did often, either by accident or design, they punished her by withholding their love. When Alec pictured her childhood, he saw a little girl with unruly red hair sitting alone in the corner of her room, teary-eyed, hugging a teddy bear. Annie had never described that scene to him, yet it had been vivid in his mind from the night he first met her and learned how desperately she needed to be loved.

Annie’s response to her upbringing was to criticize nothing in her children, to love them unequivocally. “I wouldn’t care if they were so ugly people couldn’t look at them without getting sick, or so dumb they could never learn to count to ten,” she’d said. “They’d still be my precious babies.”

Alec could see her making that little speech as she kneaded bread dough in the kitchen, and in his memory she was wearing the green sweatshirt, sleeves pushed up high on her arms, the fabric over her left breast smudged with flour.

The sweatshirt. Why had that hit him so hard? It was only his imagination that it still smelled like her, but when he saw it lying on the pile of laundry he’d felt as if he’d lost her all over again.

“Grow up.” He said the words out loud to himself as he picked up his camera and stepped from the car. The air was sticky hot, with a breeze that ballooned the sleeves of his shirt. He would think about the lighthouse. Or windsurfing. He had to get through this for Clay’s sake.

“Alec?”

He turned to see Lee and Peter Hazleton walking toward him. The parents of Clay’s girlfriend, Terri. He hadn’t seen them since the memorial service for Annie.

“Hi!” He manufactured what he hoped was a great smile.

Peter slapped his back. “Big day, huh? My camera’s out of commission. Take a few of Terri for us, okay?”

“Clay would never forgive me if I didn’t.” He spotted Lacey on the lawn with a group of girls. “I’m going to get my daughter and find a seat,” he said, pleased for the escape.

It shocked him every time he saw Lacey these days. He wished he could see Annie again to compare their faces and mark the differences. Maybe it would put an end to this jolt he felt every time he saw his daughter. She looked more like Annie than Annie had. He felt awkward with her. He could no longer look at her for more than a few seconds without feeling an overwhelming sadness.

He called to her and she walked over to him, looking alternately at the ground or the sky, steadfastly avoiding his eyes. He hadn’t seen her since the explosion in the kitchen that afternoon. “Let’s find our seats,” he said to her now, and she followed him without speaking.

Clay had reserved two seats for them in the front row. Alec sat between Lacey and a heavyset woman who was perspiring profusely and who squeezed his thigh with her own. He shifted a little closer to Lacey and could smell smoke in her long hair. She was only thirteen. Damn.

He pulled his camera out of the case and started to change the lens. Lacey stared straight ahead at the empty wooden platform, and Alec knew it was up to him to break the silence.

“I’m sorry I called you Annie, Lace,” he said.

She shrugged, her response to the world. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Well, yeah, it does. Clay says that’s not the first time I’ve done it.”

She shrugged again, her gaze dropping to the dry patch of lawn in front of their chairs.

“I overreacted about the sweatshirt.”

She turned her head away from him. She was rocking slightly, as though she heard a beat he couldn’t hear.

“When does summer school start?” he asked, struggling to engage her, but just then Clay appeared in front of them. He was already in his blue cap and gown, and a film of perspiration lined his forehead. “Aren’t these great seats?” He held out his hand and Alec shook it, the gesture making him feel old. Clay reached inside his gown and took the battered notecards from his pants pocket. He handed them to Alec. “Hold these for me. I don’t want to rely on them.” He tugged a long strand of his sister’s hair. “How’re ya doin’, O’Neill?”

Lacey shrugged. “’Kay.”

Clay glanced behind him. “Better get to work,” he said, and he turned and walked back toward the stage.

The band began playing “Pomp and Circumstance,” and the graduates filed into their seats. Alec and Lacey turned to watch them. Alec tried to tune out the familiar, stirring music, imagining himself sailing across the sound, working with the wind.

The graduates were finally seated and the speeches began. He felt Lacey tense next to him as Clay walked up to the podium. He wanted to put his arm around her, pull her close, but he kept his hands in his lap as he watched his son. Clay looked for all the world like a man up there. His voice seemed deeper as it poured through the loudspeaker; his smile was genuine. There was nothing at all to betray his nervousness. Anyone would think he was making up the speech on the spot, he seemed so comfortable with the words. He talked about his class and its accomplishments. Then he hesitated briefly, and when he spoke again his voice quivered, almost imperceptibly.

“I’m grateful to my parents, who, through their love and respect, taught me to believe in myself and think for myself.” Clay looked at Alec for a moment and then back up to the crowd. “My mother died in December and my only regret is that she can’t be here to share this moment with me.”

Alec’s eyes filled. He felt a shifting in the audience behind him as people turned to look at him and Lacey. He would not fall apart here.

Windsurfing. Cutting through the water, far out in the sound, far from the shore. Far from the joyless reality that had become his life.

A woman leaned forward from the front row to get a look at him. For a moment he thought it was the doctor he’d met at the studio. Olivia. He leaned forward himself to see her more clearly, and felt some disappointment that the woman was a stranger.

Tomorrow was Saturday. He would go to the studio about the time she’d be done with her lesson. He would buy her lunch. He would finally ask the questions that had been haunting him for the last few long and lonely months.

CHAPTER TEN

The glass was cool beneath her fingertips. Olivia drew the glass cutter cleanly across the surface, mesmerized by the changing color of her hands. Tinted sunlight flooded the studio and fell across the work table in violet and teal and bloodred, at first making concentration on her task impossible.

“You’ll get used to it,” Tom said.

He was right. After a while, the colors seemed essential. Intoxicating.

Tom handed her another glass cutter, this one with a beveled, oil-filled handle. “Try this one on that piece,” he said.

She took the cutter from his hand and scored a perfectly straight line down the center of the glass.

“You’ve been practicing,” he said.

She beamed. “Nothing to it.” She had been practicing, setting up the glass at her kitchen table each evening after work. She’d had to force herself the first time—there were several articles she should have been reading in The Journal of Emergency Medicine—but then she got into a pattern, and she began to look forward to getting home in the evening, sitting down with the glass. She’d drawn her own geometric design on graph paper last night, and now she was cutting shapes to fit the design from scraps of colored glass.

She had nearly finished scoring the third piece when Alec O’Neill arrived. He nodded to Tom before his eyes settled on her.

“I’d like to talk with you,” he said. “Do you have some time after your lesson?”

She took off the green safety glasses and glanced at her watch, although she had no other plans for the day. “Yes,” she said, looking up at him. He was wearing acid-washed jeans and a faded blue polo shirt, but at that moment he was bathed in a vermilion light from head to toe.

“Twelve?” he suggested. “I’ll meet you across the street at the deli.”

He disappeared briefly into the darkroom and then left again after telling her he’d see her soon. The stained glass panel on the door swayed for a moment after he closed it, and Olivia watched the wall near the darkroom change from blue to rose, then blue again.

She reached for another scrap of glass, a piece she’d been eyeing since her arrival at the studio that morning. It was a deep green, with a light, rippled texture.

“No,” said Tom. “Not that piece. It’s hand-rolled. Too delicate.”

“But it’s so beautiful.” She ran her fingers over the cool, wavy surface. “I haven’t broken anything yet, Tom. Couldn’t I try it?”

“All right.” Tom reluctantly let her set the glass in front of her on the table. “But pretend this piece of glass is Alec, all right? He’s about as fragile as a person can get. I don’t know what it is he wants to talk to you about, but keep in mind you need a light touch, okay?”

She looked at Tom’s dark blue eyes. “Okay,” she said, and the word came out in a whisper. She slipped on the safety glasses again, then carefully set the cutter to the glass, licking her lips, holding her breath. But despite her caution, despite the lightness of her touch, the glass splintered raggedly in pieces beneath her multicolored hands.

The tiny deli was crowded. People in bathing suits pressed up against the counter, and the smell of cold cuts and pickles mingled with the scent of sunscreen. Olivia felt overdressed in her flowered skirt and green blouse. She stood against the wall by the door, searching the crowd for Alec’s face.

“Dr. Simon.”

She followed the voice with her eyes, peering around the back of a woman standing next to her to see Alec at one of the four small tables near the windows. She squeezed her way through the crowd. Alec stood up and leaned across the little table to pull the chair out for her.

“Thanks.” She sat down, catching her reflection in the window. Her straight, dark hair brushed the tops of her shoulders, and her bangs had grown long enough to sweep to the side. She remembered the black and white photograph of Annie, with her wide smile and glittering hair.

“It’s crowded, but they’re fast here.” Alec turned to look up at the menu, written in chalk on a black slate board hanging above the counter. “What would you like?”

“Turkey on whole wheat,” she said. “And lemonade.”

Alec got up—sprang up—and walked behind the counter where he spoke to one of the young women who was making sandwiches, his hand on her shoulder. Olivia studied him from the safety of her chair by the window. He looked about forty and a little too thin, thinner than he had been that night in the ER. He was tan, but there were circles beneath his eyes she did not remember from that night, and hollows in his cheeks. His hair was very dark, yet even from this distance she could see the gray creeping into it at his temples. He moved with an athletic grace and she imagined he worked construction, something that put him outside all the time, that allowed him to use up his wired energy and kept him in shape.

The woman behind the counter handed him their drinks and he nodded his thanks to her before turning to work his way back to the table. Olivia wondered if he ever smiled.

He put her lemonade in front of her and took a long drink from his own cup before sitting down again. She had the feeling he did not sit often.

He looked at her across the table. The sunlight hit his eyes and sharpened the contrast between the translucent blue and the small black pupils. “I asked you to meet me because I need some answers about what happened to my wife that night,” he said. She felt his denim-covered knees touch her bare ones and drew her chair back a little. “It didn’t seem important then, but I can’t seem to… I keep wondering…” He rubbed his temples with his long tanned fingers. “There are these gaps for me. I mean, I said good-bye to her on Christmas morning and that was it.” He dropped his eyes and leaned back as the waitress set their sandwiches down in front of them. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat and Olivia knew he was very close to the edge.

“Mr. O’Neill,” she said after the waitress had left.

“Alec.”

“Alec. I’ll answer any questions you have to the best of my ability, but some of the answers might be hard to hear. Maybe this isn’t the right place.”

He looked around him at the press of bodies. “I have an office near here,” he said. “I’m not working these days, but it’s open. We could take our sandwiches over there. Would you mind? Do you have time?”

She nodded. “That would be fine.”

Alec got a bag for their sandwiches, and they walked outside and across the street to the studio parking lot.

“You can follow me,” he said, opening the door of a navy-blue Bronco.

She got into her Volvo and followed him out to Croatan Highway, where he turned left towards Nags Head. He had an office, he’d said. Maybe he managed a construction crew. What did he mean he wasn’t working? She realized she knew nothing about him, other than the fact that he’d been married to the woman she both idolized and detested.

They pulled into the parking lot of the Beacon Animal Hospital and she frowned when she saw the shingles hanging below the sign: Alec O’Neill, DVM and Randall Allwood, DVM. He was a vet. She had to quickly reorganize her thinking about him.

Alec got out of his car, carrying the bag with their sandwiches. “Let’s sneak in the back way,” he said.

Olivia felt oddly criminal, as though she should tiptoe across the pea gravel that crunched beneath their feet as they walked around to the back of the building. Alec opened the door and they stepped into a cool, vinyl-tiled hallway. Frantic yapping filled the air. He unlocked the first door on the left and let Olivia in ahead of him. It was a small office, the walls paneled a pale, ashy color. The air was warm and stale, and Alec reached up to turn the knob of the air conditioning vent in the ceiling.

“Sorry it’s so stuffy,” he said. “Should be better in a minute.”

“You’re a vet,” she said, taking a seat in the red leather chair he gestured toward.

“Uh-huh.” He handed her the wrapped turkey sandwich and sat down behind his desk. The paneling was covered with photographs, many of the Kiss River Lighthouse. There were also a few pictures of windsurfers, and a portrait of a tawny-colored cocker puppy sitting next to a gray Persian cat that reminded her of Sylvie. She considered mentioning that to him, but he seemed so preoccupied with his own thoughts that she let it go.

Hanging in the window above his desk was a stained glass panel, the letters DVM in blue nestled between the tail of a black cat and the outstretched wings of a gull. Olivia had a sudden image of Annie presenting it to him—a surprise, a symbol of her pride in him.

He opened the wrapping on his sandwich and pressed the paper flat against his desk. “I can’t say that I feel much like a vet these days, though. I was going to take a month off when Annie died, but…” He shrugged. “It’s been a little longer than a month.”

Olivia nodded. She knew exactly how long it had been. The night he’d lost his wife was the night she’d lost her husband.

“So.” He looked up at her expectantly.

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“Exactly what happened in the emergency room that night. You said you worked on her. I understand in general what you mean by that, but in her case, specifically, what happened?” He drew in his breath and glanced at a photograph on his desk. It was set at an angle so she couldn’t quite make it out, but she was certain it was Annie and their children. She could see a patch of red that was most likely Annie’s hair. “I guess more than anything I want to know if she was ever conscious,” he continued. “If she felt anything. Suffered.”

“No,” she said. “She didn’t suffer, and she never regained consciousness. I honestly don’t think she ever knew what hit her. She probably felt a sharp stinging pain from the bullet—just enough to surprise her—and then immediately lost consciousness.”

He licked his lips, nodded. “Good,” he said.

“When they brought her in she was in very bad shape, and I could tell from her symptoms that the bullet had entered her heart and surgery was the only option.”

“Was it you who performed the surgery?”

“Yes. Along with Mike Shelley. He’s the director of the ER, and he got there about halfway through.”

“Shouldn’t she have been sent up to Emerson Memorial—to a trauma unit—for that sort of injury?”

Olivia stiffened. She heard Mike Shelley’s voice in the back of her mind. Maybe she should have been sent up. This way her blood’s on your hands. “Ideally, she should have had a trauma unit, yes. But it would have taken far too long to transport her to Emerson. She would have died on the way. Immediate surgery was her only chance.”

“So you had to…open her up right there?”

“Yes. Then I… Do you really want to hear more?”

He set his sandwich down. “I want to know everything.”

“We’d lost her heartbeat. I was able to get my hand around her heart and hold my finger and thumb over the holes the bullet had made, and then her heart began to contract again.” Olivia had lifted her hand involuntarily. Alec stared at it and something contracted in him. She saw him start, saw his breathing quicken, and she rushed on, dropping her hand to the arm of the chair. “I was very hopeful then. I thought if we could just close those holes we’d be all right.” She explained about Mike Shelley trying to sew the hole in the back of Annie’s heart. She remembered feeling the blood seeping over her fingers. Sometimes still she woke up at night, winded, and had to turn the light on to be certain her hand was not warm and sticky with blood. Suddenly she was afraid of crying her self. The tears were so close. Her nose burned with the effort of holding them back.

“Well,” said Alec. There was no feeling at all in his voice. “It sounds as though everything that could have been done was done.”

“Yes.”

He sank lower in his chair. “I’ve forgotten most of that night,” he said. He was not looking at her. His eyes were focused on some invisible point in the air between them. “Someone must have called my neighbor, Nola, because I know she drove us home. I couldn’t tell you a thing about that ride, though. My kids were with me, but I don’t remember them being there at all.” He looked over at her. “I get the feeling it was a difficult night for you too.”

“Yes.” She wondered what she was giving away in her face.

“Even talking about it now isn’t easy.”

“You have a right to know.”

He nodded. “Well, thank you. For everything you did that night, and for taking the time to talk with me now.” He gestured toward the sandwich in her lap. “You haven’t touched your lunch.”

She glanced down at the tightly wrapped sandwich. “I’ll save it for dinner,” she said, but he wasn’t listening. He was staring at the photograph on his desk.

“I just wish I’d had one extra minute with her to say good-bye,” he said. Then he looked at Olivia’s hand, where her wedding ring circled her finger. “You’re married?”

“Yes.”

“Be sure to treat every minute with your husband as though it’s your last.”

“Well, actually, we’re separated.” She squirmed, feeling somehow guilty that she and Paul were alive and healthy, yet apart.

“Oh,” Alec said. “Is that good or bad?”

“Horrible.”

“I’m sorry. How long has it been?”

“Six months.” If he made any connection between his six months without his wife and hers without her husband, he gave no sign.

“His idea or yours?”

“Entirely his.” She looked down at her hand, where she was twisting the diamond ring around on her finger. “There was another woman,” she said, wondering how far she would take this. “It wasn’t an affair, exactly. They weren’t…it was platonic. He barely knew her. I think it was more of a fantasy, and anyway, she’s no longer around. She…moved away, but he’s still upset about it, I guess.”

“Is there any chance you two will get back together?”

“I hope so. I’m pregnant.”

He dropped his puzzled gaze to her stomach.

“Just eleven weeks,” she said.

Alec raised his dark eyebrows in a question. “I thought you said…?”

“Oh.” She felt herself blush. “He…stopped by one night.”

For the first time, Alec smiled, and she could see the handsomeness hiding behind his haggard demeanor. She laughed herself.

The door to his office opened a crack and a woman stuck her head in. “Alec?” She stepped into the room. She wore a white lab coat over jeans, and her dark hair was braided down her back. She glanced at Olivia, then back at Alec. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you were with someone. Are you working?”

“You wish.” Alec actually grinned. He stood up and walked around his desk to kiss the woman’s cheek. Then he gestured in Olivia’s direction. “This is Olivia Simon. She was the doctor in the ER the night Annie died.”

“Oh.” The woman’s expression sobered and she turned toward Olivia. “I’m Randi Allwood.”

“Randi’s my partner,” Alec said.

“Can’t prove it by me,” said Randi. “I seem to be running this place singlehandedly these days.”

Alec nodded toward Olivia as a signal it was time to leave, and she rose from her seat.

“I need to talk to you, Alec,” Randi said as Alec started for the door.

“All right,” Alec held the door open for Olivia. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

He walked Olivia to her car. “Thanks again for doing this,” he said, “and good luck with your husband.”

“Thank you.” Olivia turned to face him.

“Does he know about—” Alec dropped his hand between them, nearly touching her stomach with the back of his fingers “—what happened the last time he…stopped by?”

Olivia shook her head. “No.”

“Does he know you still love him?”

“I think so.” Did he? There had been so much unpleasantness between them lately that perhaps he didn’t.

Alec opened her car door. “Make sure he knows that, okay?”

Olivia got into her car and waved to him before pulling out onto Croatan Highway. She could not recall the last time she’d told Paul she loved him. What about that night in April? She must have, but she couldn’t remember. She’d avoided the memory of that night for the past few months.

It had been a Thursday night, early in April, and he’d stopped by the house, looking for something. Software for his computer? She didn’t remember. It wasn’t important. She was already in bed, but she was not quite asleep when she heard him let himself in. Her first thought was angry, bitter—what gall, marching into the house as though he still lived there—but it was quickly replaced by relief, that she could see him, talk with him. She lay still as he walked through the living room and up the stairs. He came into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the queen-size bed.

“I’m sorry to disturb you this late,” he said. “I just need to pick something up and then I’ll be out of here.”

She looked up at him. It was dark in the room, but she thought she saw something tender in his eyes. He was actually sitting on their bed, next to her, the warm length of his thigh against her hip. She reached for his hand and held it softly on his knee, grateful that he didn’t try to pull away from her.

“You don’t have to rush off,” she said.

He lightly ran his thumb across the back of her fingers, encouraging her, and she brazenly drew his hand beneath the sheet to her bare breast.

He said nothing, but she felt the tips of his fingers graze over her nipple, once, then a second time. She wrapped her hand around the buckle of his belt, worried she was pushing him too far, too fast, but unable to stop herself. She had gone without him far too long.

He gently withdrew his hand from under the sheet and took off his glasses, folding the wire arms before setting them on the night table, close to the lamp. He lowered his head to her lips and kissed her softly. Then he began undressing, slowly, folding his shirt, his pants, and Olivia’s heart pumped with anticipation, not just of making love to him but of the possibilities wrapped up in this moment. The hope. When he slipped into the bed next to her, she was smiling. She wanted to welcome him home.

He touched her woodenly at first, as though he did not quite remember who she was, what she liked. His penis lay limp and cool against her thigh, and she bit her lip in disappointment. She was doing something wrong; he was not aroused. The old uncertainty washed over her. Insecurities she had thought were long gone.

His touch grew more certain, though, as he stroked her body, and when she finally straddled him, reaching down to draw him inside her, he was more than ready. They made love with an exquisite slowness that Olivia knew she was controlling with her own body. She did not want it to end. While they were locked together she could pretend that everything was all right, that they would be together not just at this moment, but tomorrow as well, and next week, next year.

She cried when it was over, bathing his shoulder with her tears, and he ran his hand over her hair. “I’m so sorry, Liv,” he said.

She raised herself to her elbow to look at him, not certain why he was apologizing. “Please stay,” she said.

He shook his head. “We should never have made love. It just makes it harder for you.”

“You still think about her.” She tried to keep the accusation out of her voice.

“Yes.” He rolled out from under her and sat up on the side of the bed, reaching for his glasses. “I know it’s sick,” he said. “I know she’s dead, but it’s as though she’s taken over my mind. I’ve stopped trying to fight it. I’ve just given in.”

Olivia sat up and moved next to him, resting her chin on his shoulder, her hand on his back. “Maybe if you moved back in,” she said. “If we tried to build a life together again. Maybe then you could forget her.”

“It’s no use, and it wouldn’t be fair to you.”

“Let that be my choice. I’d like to try, Paul. It was so wonderful making love just now. That’s what we need to do to—” the word exorcize slipped into her mind “—to help you forget her.”

“It won’t work, Liv.” He pulled on his shorts and stood up, staring at the dark sound through the window. “When we made love just now, I couldn’t get into it until I imagined you were Annie.” He turned to face her. “Is that what you want?”

Her tears were immediate. She pulled the blanket around her to cover her nakedness. “What was so extraordinary about her?” she asked. “What did she have that I’m so horribly deficient in?”

“Shh, nothing.” He bent down, patronizing her with a quick hug. “Don’t cry, Liv. Please.”

She looked up at him. “Was it ever any good for you with me? Have you just been pretending it was good all these years so you didn’t hurt my feelings?” He had been her first and only lover, and although she’d been far past the age when most women first made love, she’d been terrified. Paul’s patient encouragement had made it easy for her, though. He’d fed her confidence with loving praise, tender compliments, and he’d told her, in the most flattering tone, that she had become an animal in bed. It relieved her to know she was capable of passion and desire when she’d long thought those emotions were impossible for her.

“Of course it was good,” he said. “This has nothing at all to do with sex.” He turned his head to the window, letting out a long sigh and rubbing his hands tiredly over his face. “I’m sorry I said that about Annie, Liv.” He shook his head, and when he spoke again, his voice was thick. “You didn’t deserve that. I’m really sorry.”

She did not know what to say. She had no idea what words she could use to save the little scraps of whatever they had left together. And so she watched in silence as he finished dressing, as he bent low to kiss the top of her head, as he left the room. She listened to him hunting in the study for whatever it was he needed. Then she heard him leave the house, closing the door quietly behind him, but closing it all the same. She listened to him pull the car out of the driveway, and she could still hear it as he turned the corner onto Mallard Run. It was another hour before she shut her eyes, and an hour after that before she slept. And it was just a few short weeks before she knew that the seed Paul had imagined himself planting in Annie had started a new life in her.

Alec wasn’t surprised to find Randi still waiting for him in his office. He had avoided seeing her these past six months. He’d bumped into her a couple of times, once in the grocery store, once at the Sea Tern, but he’d kept those meetings brief, shifting away from her when he saw impatience replace the sympathy in her eyes. Now, though, he was cornered.

“Sit down, Alec.” She was sitting in the chair Olivia had vacated, and he sat down once again behind his desk.

“It was so great to walk in here and see you in that chair,” she said.

“Look, Randi, I was here because we were talking about something too heavy for a restaurant. This was the best place to meet. Don’t read so much into it.”

“When are you coming back, Alec?”

He hated being asked that question so directly. It made it impossible to dodge. “I don’t know,” he said.

She sighed, exasperated, and leaned forward in the chair. “What the hell are you living on? How are you keeping your kids fed? How do you plan to get Clay through four years at Duke?”

“It’s not a problem.”

“Isn’t your brain disintegrating?”

“I like the time off, Randi. It gives me loads of time to work on the lighthouse committee.”

She sat back, scowling. “Alec, you’re pissing me off.”

He smiled.

“Don’t give me that condescending smile,” she said, but she was smiling herself. “Oh, Alec, the bottom line is I miss you, and I worry about you. But you just dumped everything on me. You said it would be one month, and here I am nearly a year later doing it all.”

“It hasn’t even been six months, and you’re not alone. Isn’t Steve Matthews working out?”

She waved her hand impatiently through the air. “That’s not the point.”

He stood up and walked around to the front of his desk, leaning back against it, working his way toward the door. “Randi, if it’s really too much for you, tell me and we’ll get someone else in to help out. I don’t want you to be overextended.”

She sighed and seemed to deflate in the chair. “I’m all right. I just thought playing on your guilt might work.” She stood up too, and he was pleased to see she was surrendering. She walked over to him for a hug, which he provided, stunned for a moment by the way her breasts felt against his chest, by the way her hair lay warm and fragrant next to his cheek.

He pulled away from her, gently. “Wow, do you feel good. It’s been a while since I hugged a woman.”

There was a sudden glint in Randi’s eyes. “I’ve been dying to fix you up with this friend of mine,” she said.

He shook his head.

“You’d love her, Alec, and it’s time you went out. There’s a world full of single women out there, and you’re a free man.”

He was irritated by the word free. “It’s way too soon,” he said.

“What about that doctor? She’s pretty and…”

“And married and pregnant.”

“Don’t you miss sex?” she asked bluntly.

“I miss everything,” he snapped, suddenly angry, and Randi took a step backward. “This is not some high school game, here, Randi. I’ve lost my wife. My right arm, you know? Annie wasn’t replaceable.”

“I know that,” Randi said in a small voice. There were tears in her eyes.

“Let me do things at my own pace, okay?” He picked up his keys from the desk and started for the door.

“Alec,” she said. “Please don’t be angry.”

“I’m not.” He opened the door and looked back at her. “I shouldn’t expect you to understand, Randi. Don’t worry about it.”

He was sweating by the time he reached the Bronco. He sat for a moment with the door open, letting the air conditioner blow the heat from the car. Then he pulled onto the road, heading north, his car practically operating on autopilot. In a short time, he had reached Kiss River. There might be tourists at the lighthouse this time of day, but he knew how to escape them.

He turned onto the winding, wooded road that led out to the lighthouse. He had to stop for a minute as one of the wild mustangs—the black stallion he had treated for an infection last fall—leisurely crossed the road in front of him. He drove on until he reached the small parking lot, surrounded on all sides by thick, scrubby bayberry bushes. He got out of the Bronco and took the footpath that led to the lighthouse.

The ocean was rough today. It broke wildly over the jetty, and he felt the spray against his face as he neared the lighthouse. It rose above him, the white brick sun-drenched and blinding. There were a couple of kids on the crescent of sand that made up the small, ever-shrinking Kiss River beach, and a few tourists milling around, some of them reading the plaques, others shading their eyes as they looked skyward toward the black iron gallery high above them.

Alec tried to make himself invisible as he approached the door in the white brick foundation. He glanced over at the old keeper’s house. It looked as though no one from the Park Service was around today. Good. He slipped a key from his pocket and into the lock, jiggling it a little before the door opened. Mary Poor had given the key to Annie years ago, and she had cherished it. Controlled it jealously.

He disappeared inside, locking the door behind him. It was cool, almost chilly. There were birds somewhere in the tower. He couldn’t see them, but he heard the echoing flap of their wings, the occasional chirp that ricocheted off the rounded brick walls. The brick was white in here as well, although the paint was crumbling, flaking onto the floor in a coarse white powder.

Alec began the long climb to the top up the steel circular staircase, not bothering to stop at the six rectangular windows that marked the landings along the way, and by the time he reached the claustrophobic room below the lantern, he was winded. He was not getting enough exercise these days.

He opened the door and stepped into the sunlight on the gallery. He sat down, close to the tower so he could not be seen from below, and breathed in the damp, salty air.

Glassy blue water stretched out in front of him for as far as he could see. He had a clear view of the jetty, and it made him remember the funeral and the welcome numbness that had befriended him back then. From the moment Olivia Simon told him Annie was dead, he’d felt nothing. He didn’t cry, didn’t even feel close to crying. Nola helped him make the arrangements, weeping most of the time and talking about how Annie usually did that sort of thing, how good she was at rallying people together at a time of crisis, and he’d muttered some form of agreement from inside the comforting protective capsule that had formed around him.

The funeral was held in the largest church in the northern Outer Banks, but even it was not big enough to hold everyone who wanted to come. Someone told him later that people stood in the vestibule and spilled out onto the front steps and into the parking lot.

Alec sat between Clay and Nola. Lacey had refused to come and he didn’t press the issue with her, although person after person wanted to know where she was. He was too dazed to realize that his response “—she didn’t want to come—” was not enough.

Even Annie’s mother was there, and Alec let her sit in the back of the church, although Nola begged him to try to make peace with the woman.

“Annie would never have let her sit back there, Alec.” She spoke quietly in his ear.

“I don’t want her near me,” he said, and he wished he could stop Clay from turning around to get a glimpse of the grandmother he had never known.

Alec listened as people recounted how Annie had touched their lives. They walked up to the podium in the front of the church, one after another, ending finally with the county commissioner, who spoke of how Annie had been “woman of the year” for four years in a row, how she’d donated stained glass panels to the library and the community center, how she’d fought for the rights of people who could not fight for themselves. “She was our Saint Anne,” he said. “You always knew you could turn to her for help. The word ‘no’ was simply not in her vocabulary.”

Alec listened to it all from behind the wall he’d built around himself. He did not like it, this recitation of her generosity. It was her generosity that killed her.

Nearly everyone met on the cold beach at Kiss River afterward to watch Alec and Clay walk out on the windy jetty with Annie’s ashes. It wasn’t until Alec let them fly, until he watched in horror as the wind caught them and carried them away from him with cruel speed, that the numbness gave way to a searing pain. The ashes had been all that was left of her and he’d cast them away. He stared after them, stunned, until Clay tugged at his arm.

“Let’s go back, Dad,” he said. By the time they reached the beach once again, Alec was weeping freely and leaning on his son. Arms reached for him, and he was quickly pulled into a loving circle. Clay, Nola, Tom, Randi. Everyone. They moved closer to him until they formed one black mass with Alec at its core, completely surrounded, completely alone.

Alec leaned forward and looked directly down from the gallery. The ocean was closer to the lighthouse than the last time he was up here, or perhaps that was his imagination. Whatever the Park Service decided to do to save it, he wished they would hurry up.

He patted his pocket for the illicit key. Mary! Alec had a sudden brainstorm. He would call that journalist, Paul Macelli, as soon as he got home and tell him to get in touch with Mary Poor. He hoped the old woman was still alive, still thinking clearly. She would be loaded with anecdotes. Paul might not even need the historical collection if Mary was lucid enough to help him out.

Alec stood up and drew in a long breath of salty air. He felt better, although he could still hear Randi’s voice, telling him about the joys of being “free.” He shook his head. Randi couldn’t possibly understand, he told himself. He shouldn’t hold it against her.

He thought of the doctor. Olivia. The woman whose husband had left her for an illusion. She knew how he felt. He could tell by the way she spoke to him, by the empathy in her eyes. She had understood completely.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Paul lay on his bed, staring at the colors in his ceiling. It was six in the evening, his favorite time in this room. The slant of the sun was just right to lift the tropical fish from the stained glass panel at his window and transpose them onto his ceiling, a bit distorted perhaps, but shimmering with blue and green and gold. He could easily lie here watching them until darkness fell. He had spent many evenings in this house watching his room grow dark, and this evening in particular he was anxious for darkness, for sleep. He wanted to sleep away the call from Alec O’Neill. He wanted to pretend he had not picked up the phone in the kitchen an hour earlier to hear the enthusiasm in Alec’s voice. How could he sound so content, so pleased with life? He had an idea, Alec told him. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of it sooner. Paul could interview the old lighthouse keeper, Mary Poor, for the brochure on the lighthouse.

Paul had said nothing, stunned. Oh sure, he thought. Why don’t I just lie down on a bed of nails?

“She’s living at the Manteo Retirement Home,” Alec continued. “My wife used to visit her there, and as of the last time she saw her—about six months ago—Mary was very lucid.”

Paul could see no way out of it. He’d set his own trap the morning he’d called Nola Dillard and begged to be on the committee. But maybe Mary Poor would not remember him. Regardless of how lucid she was, she was a very old woman and she had not seen him in many years. He thought of telling Alec that something had come up and he would not be able to serve on the committee after all, but the pull of the lighthouse was too strong. He would be happy to meet with the old keeper, he said. He’d get on it as soon as he could.

Then he’d hung up the phone, walked into his bedroom, and lay down to let the colors soothe him.

The phone rang again, and Paul reached over to his night table to pick it up.

“Am I interrupting something?” Olivia asked.

“No.” He lay back again, phone to his ear. The colors were beginning to blend, melting onto the far wall.

“I just called to see how you’re doing.”

“I’m all right,” he said. “You?”

“Okay. I’m working at the shelter tonight.”

“Still doing that, huh?” He hated her working there. Annie had worked at the shelter out of a genuine desire to help others, but he did not understand Olivia’s motivation. Occasionally he’d pictured something happening to her there, something horrible. Another crazed husband, perhaps. The thought of her being hurt terrified him in a way he hadn’t expected.

“Yes. Just one night a week.” She hesitated. “But the real reason I’m calling is to let you know I still love you.”

He closed his eyes. “Don’t, Olivia,” he said. “I’m not worth it.”

“I haven’t forgotten the way things used to be between us.”

He felt villainous. This was so hard for her. She’d counted on him, been dependent on him. She could be tough and self-assured in the ER, but once she took off her stethoscope, she was far frailer, far softer than anyone would guess.

“Paul?”

“I’m here.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I just needed to let you know that.”

“All right. Thank you.”

She hesitated a moment before saying good-bye. Once she’d hung up, he squeezed his face into a grimace. Damn. What was he supposed to say? She kept setting herself up to be hurt again.

He thought of telling her the truth. It would upset her at first, but then she’d understand. She’d know that what he’d felt for Annie had been no infatuation. It burned him every time he thought of that word coming out of Olivia’s mouth, although it was hardly her fault for thinking that. He had let her believe it.

He had done countless interviews with Annie, dragging them out, putting off the inevitable writing of the article when he would no longer have any legitimate reason to see her. Those interviews had been torture for him. He’d had to keep his distance from her, hanging on every word across the vast plane of a restaurant table, when what he longed to do was touch her cheek or curl a strand of her phenomenal hair around his finger. He knew better than to try to get that close. He could tell by the little light of warning in her eyes to deal with her in a businesslike manner.

He’d taped the interviews, despite her reluctance. “Promise you’ll interview me as though we’ve never met before, Paul. As though we’re total strangers to each other,” she’d pleaded, and he had done his utmost to comply. He was afraid to listen to those tapes now, to actually hear her husky voice and her Boston accent and her crazy giggle.

She’d filled the tapes with talk about Alec. Paul hated listening to her talk about him, always with warmth, always a softening in her tone when she mentioned his name. He didn’t need to hear about Alec, he told her. Her husband was not a necessary part of the article. She persisted, though, stubbornly reciting anecdotes of her marriage, drawing the words around herself like armor. He allowed her the armor, the distance. Until the night he could allow it no longer.

On that bitter cold night, five days before Christmas, he drove to her studio. He had not planned it, not in any conscious way, but he knew exactly what he would do. He parked in the little lot and looked up at the studio windows. The lights were on inside, and the colors of the stained glass in the windows were vibrant. He approached the front door, dizzy from the array of multihued designs mapped out on either side of him. Or perhaps from nerves.

Through the front door, he could see Annie leaning over the worktable, her hand moving slowly above a stained glass lampshade. The door was unlocked, and she looked up as he stepped inside. Her mouth was open, her eyes surprised and, he knew, a little frightened. She was alone, at night, in the cozy, colorful warmth of her studio. There was no safe restaurant table here, and she must have known he would not allow her to weave little stories about Alec and her marriage to deter him. He understood the fear in her eyes. He was just not certain if it was him she was afraid of or herself.

“Paul.” She leaned back in her chair, making an effort to smile.

“Keep working,” he said. “I just want to watch.”

She made no move to lift the ball of cotton she was holding. He pulled a second chair close to the end of the table and sat down.

“Go on,” he said.

She dipped the cotton into a bowl of black liquid. Then she carefully smoothed it over the lead veins in the stained glass lampshade. She was wearing green corduroy pants and a heavy, off-white fisherman knit sweater. Her hair fell over her arm, spilling onto the table, onto the glass.

He watched her work for several minutes before he spoke again.

“I love you, Annie,” he said, the words crackling in the silence. She looked up, brushing her hair back over her shoulder. “I know,” she said. She returned to her work but within a minute or two raised her head again. “Maybe you should go, Paul.”

“Do you really want me to?”

She dropped her eyes quickly to the lampshade. Then she set down the ball of cotton and knotted her fingers together on the table. “Paul,” she said, “please don’t make this so hard.”

“If you can honestly tell me you want me to go, I will.”

She shut her eyes and he reached over to rest his hand on hers. Her fingers were cold and stiff. “Annie,” he said.

She looked over at him. “I was so grateful to you for the way you handled the interviews,” she said. “For not bringing up the past, for not trying to…take advantage of the situation when I knew that was what you really wanted to do.”

“It was so hard to be with you and not…”

“But you made it,” she interrupted, leaning toward him.

“We both did. So why come here now and undo three months of willpower?”

“Because I’m going crazy, Annie,” he said. “You’re all I think about.”

She withdrew her hand from his and lowered it to her lap. “You have a wife to think about,” she said. “And I have a husband.”

Paul shook his head. “I’ve treated Olivia terribly since we’ve been here.”

“You need to put your energy into her, not me. Here.” She pulled open a drawer in the worktable and took out a rubber band, which she slipped onto his wrist. “Every time you think of me, do this.” She pulled back hard on the elastic and let it snap against the inside of his wrist. He actually winced at the sting. “You’ll forget about me in no time,” she said.

He smiled at her. “It’s that simple, huh?” He looked down at his wrist, running his fingers over the reddened skin. “Will you wear one too?”

“I don’t have to,” she said. “When I think of you, I remind myself about Alec. My marriage comes first. I’m nearly forty now and my priorities are very clear in my mind. Forget about me, Paul. Walk out that door and forget I exist.”

He stood up. “I won’t ever be able to forget you,” he said. He took off the rubber band and set it on the work table. “And I don’t need this. Thinking about you is already painful enough. But I’ll leave. The last thing I’d ever want to do is hurt you.”

He bent over to kiss the top of her head, her hair soft beneath his lips. Then he walked slowly to the door, determined that he would leave without taking one last look at her.

“Paul?”

He turned around. She had stood up. She folded her arms stiffly, tightly, beneath her breasts, and he could almost see the battle going on inside her. “I don’t want you to go,” she said. “Could you just…hold me?”

He walked back to her and pulled her gently into his arms. She fit snugly against him, her hair smelling like sunshine. She sighed, letting her arms circle his back, and he felt a shiver run through her body.

“Oh, God, Paul.”

He raised his hand to her throat. Her pulse was warm and rapid beneath his fingers. “I want to make love to you,” he said.

She drew her head back to look at him, a crease between her brows. “This is a dangerous place to make love,” she said. “There’s glass everywhere. It gets into the carpet. It…”

“Shhh.” He pressed his finger to her lips. “I don’t care.” He leaned forward to kiss her, and he was not surprised when she tipped her head back and opened her mouth for him.

She stepped away from him and reached for the wall switch to turn out the light, but he caught her hand.

“Leave it on,” he said. “I want to see you.”

“This is a glass house, Paul.” She extracted her hand from his.

She was right, of course. On either side of them the glass walls were filled with the black night outside, but everything that went on in here would be visible from the parking lot, filtered through the multicolored images in the glass.

Annie hit the switch and took his hand, suddenly the leader. “Come with me,” she said.

She led him to the far end of the studio, where photographs were displayed on a maze of white walls. She walked among the pictures, turning on the little light above each one to create a soft white glow around herself and Paul. Then she sat down on the floor, her back against the wall.

He was about to drop down beside her when he glanced at the photograph closest to his head and found himself looking directly into the unsmiling eyes of Alec O’Neill. A chill ran up his spine, and he was a bit shaken as he lowered himself next to Annie. But she pulled him toward her, and his anxiety disappeared.

He watched her face as he undressed her. There was a need in her eyes, a need she had masked during the interviews that was open in her now. “I just want you to hold me,” she said, but she did not try to stop him as he unfastened her bra. She rose to her knees to unzip her corduroy pants, and he helped her take them off. There was a softness, a fullness to her body he had not expected, a fullness he wanted to drown in.

He laid her back on the carpet and kissed her again before lowering his head to her breast. She caught his chin, drawing his face up until their eyes met. “Couldn’t you be satisfied just lying here with me?” she asked.

He shook his head slowly, and as he touched her, as he moved his hands over her body, her resistance fell away.

He felt a sort of joy when it was over, when he lay holding her close to him and felt their hearts pounding in harmony. It seemed that they had lain that way for a very long time before he realized she was crying.

“What is it?” he asked, kissing her eyes.

She pulled away from him abruptly, covering her face with her hands. “I’m such a fool,” she said.

“No, Annie, don’t say that. Don’t think it.”

She sat up and drew herself into a corner, grabbing her clothes and holding them in a bundle against her breasts. She sobbed, her face lowered into her sweater, her shoulders tightening up when he tried to touch her. In the white light he could see silver in her hair, dozens of pale strands battling with the red, making her seem even more vulnerable.

He smoothed his hand over her hair. He didn’t know what to say, other than that he loved her, and he said that over and over again while she wept, her face buried in her arms.

“Annie, talk to me,” he pleaded. “Tell me you’re angry with me. Tell me anything.”

She didn’t respond, and after a few minutes he began to dress. He stood up, switching off the light above Alec’s picture before lowering himself to her side again. Her crying had stopped, but she didn’t raise her head and an occasional tremor still shook her shoulders.

“Let me help you get dressed,” he said.

She shook her head. “No. Please just go home.”

“I don’t want to leave you like this.”

“Please.”

He stood again and reluctantly walked to the door.

“Paul?”

He looked back at her. She had raised her head and in the dim light he could see the terrible glistening red of her cheeks.

“Can you leave the Outer Banks?” she asked. “Can you move away? Please, Paul, I’m begging you.”

The desperation in her voice made him cringe. He walked back to the maze of pictures and knelt down in front of her, resting his hands on her bare knees. It suddenly felt very cold in the studio, and she didn’t try to stop him as he pulled the fisherman knit sweater from the bundle in her shivering arms. He fit it over her head, and she put her hands into the sleeves he held out for her. Then he lifted her thick hair out of the collar and leaned forward to kiss her forehead. “I would do anything I could for you, Annie,” he said. “But I can’t move away. This is my home too, now.”

Olivia was asleep when he arrived home. He had called her to say he’d be late, not to wait up. He showered in the downstairs bathroom so he wouldn’t wake her, and it was then that he found the slivers of glass. In his knee. His shoulder. His palm.

He went upstairs to the bathroom they shared and picked quietly through Olivia’s side of the medicine cabinet for her tweezers. He sat down on the edge of the tub, struggling to remove the crystal thorns in the waxy light of the bathroom. The shard in his palm came out easily; the one in his knee slightly less so, and the cut bled each time he bent his leg. He would have to bandage it or there would be blood to explain on the sheets in the morning.

The glass in his shoulder was the most difficult to remove, the hardest to reach with the tweezers. When he was finished and in bed, when he was thinking back to the night, he wondered if Annie had them too, those slivers of glass. He hoped not. He could not bear to think of her in pain, or to remember her tears.

What if Alec was still awake when she got home? Maybe he would question her lateness, or catch her struggling to remove bits of glass from her shoulders. What would she tell him? What words would she use to explain away the evidence of her deception?

CHAPTER TWELVE

The young man was nervous, as well he should be. Mary could see it in his cautious smile, in the way his eyes refused to rest on her face. He wore round wire-rimmed glasses, and the glass looked very thin, almost as though it offered no correction. As though he wore them for show, to make himself look smarter than he actually was. He tapped the tip of his pen against his briefcase as he launched into an elaborate explanation of what he wanted, and Mary assumed the watery-eyed blank look of the elderly to make him wonder just how much she was following, to make him talk more, to watch him squirm.

She had not immediately known who he was. People change, yes. Plus he mumbled when he introduced himself. Pawmasell, he’d said. But now Mary knew. Now she had it all figured out.

“So we want to put together an educational brochure with anecdotes from your years in the lighthouse. You know, how the keeper would spend the day, or anything unusual that might have happened back then.” He looked directly at Mary for the first time. “Does this make sense to you?”

“Yes, Mr. Macelli,” Mary said, clearly startling him.

“Uh.” A grin came quickly to his lips. “I guess you remember me,” he said. “It’s been so long, I figured…”

“I don’t forget people.”

“Well.” He fumbled with the latch on his briefcase. “Do you mind if I record our conversation?” He pulled a notepad and a small black tape recorder from the briefcase. Apparently he did not want to talk about the past, which was fine with Mary.

“Not at all, not at all,” she said. She had developed this habit of repeating things, which seemed to irritate no one more than it did herself.

Paul set the recorder on the broad flat arm of Mary’s rocker, and his fingers shook as he turned it on. “Just begin anywhere,” he said.

Mary rested her hands in the lap of her cotton dress and crossed her sneakered feet one over the other. She looked toward the waterfront, where the boats glistened in the sun. How Caleb would have loved this—this invitation to speak for as long as he chose about Kiss River! He would have known right where to begin his story. But Mary had some uncertainty these days about what came when, what was truth and what was legend. It didn’t matter, though. No one would know.

She leaned back in the rocker and closed her eyes for a few seconds, listening to the faint hum of the recorder as it took in her silence. Then she opened her eyes and began to speak.

“The Kiss River Lighthouse was illuminated for the first time the night my husband Caleb’s father was born,” she said. “He came into the world in the downstairs bedroom of the keeper’s house. Caleb’s grandfather was the first keeper, and he and his wife had been in the house just a week when my father-in-law made his appearance—several weeks early, I should add. Everybody said it was the light that did it, that brought on his mother’s labor. The midwife timed her contractions by the rotation of the beacon. That was September thirtieth, 1874. Twenty-seven years later, in 1901, Caleb himself was born in the very same room, right about the same time of night, brought into the world by the same midwife, who they say was old as the stars by then.”

Mary was quiet for a moment. She looked toward the waterfront again and suddenly felt the limitations of the view, as she had when she first moved here. She missed the panorama from the tower and the endless expanse of sea rolled out beneath her.

“It’s inborn, Caleb used to say.” Mary nodded to herself. “All of it. Inborn.”

“What is?” Paul asked.

Mary looked at him. His pupils were mere specks in the center of his dust-colored eyes. “When you’re born under the light, you’re born with a need to protect people from the sea and the storms. From their own mistakes in navigation. Your first breath is filled with the sea; your first vision is a pure white light. And you know right from the start what your life work is—no one has to tell you. That light must never go out and so everything you do, day and night, is toward that end.” Mary paused a minute, cleared her throat. “It’s the same when you marry into it,” she said. “I knew from the day I first set foot in Kiss River that I would be Caleb’s partner in that task.

“You can’t grow up the son and grandson of a lighthouse keeper and not respect the sea, Caleb used to say. It’s beautiful and it’s dangerous, all at once, like some women.” Mary looked again at Paul Macelli, who began writing feverishly on his notepad even though the recorder was picking up every word. His fingers were white from squeezing the pen, and in spite of herself, she felt some sympathy for him.

She continued quickly. “There was supposed to be a minimum of two keepers at Kiss River. The assistant keepers came and went, but Caleb’s family never left. It was home to all of us.”

She talked about what it had been like for Caleb growing up at Kiss River, how his mother had carried him across the sound in a boat every morning so he would attend school in Deweytown. “That’s where Caleb and I met,” Mary said. “We were married in 1923, and that’s when I became the assistant keeper. But I’m getting ahead of myself, here.”

Her mouth was dry. She would have liked something to drink. A beer would be just right, but alcohol was taboo here at the home. She sighed, drawing her mind back to her visitor.

“So how did the keeper spend the day, you ask? Climbing stairs, that’s how.” Mary smiled to herself. “I still climb those steps in my sleep, all two hundred and seventy of them, and when I wake up in the morning my legs ache and I could swear the smell of kerosene is on my pillow. I guess you could say it was a monotonous life, but looking back it was anything but. It’s the adventures that stand out. The storms. The wrecks that washed up on the beach. How about the night the mosquitoes put the light out? Would you like to hear about that?”

“I’d like to hear anything you’re willing to tell me.”

“You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you?”

“Uh, no.” He looked surprised. “Sorry.”

Mary shook her head in disappointment and then told him about the summer after she and Caleb were married, how the mosquitoes were as big as mayflies and how they were drawn to the light to such an extent that it could barely be seen from the sea. She told him about the time when Caleb was just ten years old and the clockworks that turned the lens failed. His father had broken his leg and couldn’t climb the steps to the lantern room, and they were between assistant keepers, so Caleb and his mother took turns for two entire nights, cranking the lens at the proper speed so that ships out at sea would know which light they were seeing and would not be driven off course. Mary could still remember worrying when Caleb did not show up for school those few days. When he finally made it in, he could hardly move from the stiffness in his arms, and he said his mother cried all night long from the pain in her shoulders. It was only the physical labor that was difficult, he claimed in later years. The timing of the rotations had posed no challenge, because their bodies had long existed in perfect harmony with the rhythm of the light.

Mary told him about the first wreck Caleb ever remembered being witness to. She could tell the story easily, she’d heard it so often from her husband. The wreck occurred one morning in 1907 when the four-masted schooner, the Agnes Lowrie, stranded on a bar off the coast of Kiss River. “She’d been sitting there quite a while by the time Caleb and his father got to her, along with the men from the lifesaving station,” Mary said. “They could see the people on the deck, waving at them, thinking they were finally about to be rescued. But everything went wrong.” She described the futile attempts to reach the schooner with the breeches buoy, dragging the story out, enjoying herself. “As she broke apart, people started jumping in the water, swimming toward the beach for all they were worth, but they didn’t know how mean the sea could be. By the time they got close to Caleb and the others, they were floating dead men.” Mary shuddered, remembering how Caleb’s voice had grown hushed when he recounted that tale.

Someone inside the retirement home turned on the television. It blasted loudly onto the porch for a few seconds before someone else turned it down.

“Well,” Mary said, “Caleb’s father died right before we got married, and seeing as how Caleb had plenty of experience, he was made the new keeper. He had to apply for it. They didn’t just pass the job on down, father to son, but it was no problem for him to get it. He was without an assistant for a few weeks before we got married, so it was just him and his crippled mother at the station one night when he was struck by a bolt of lightning.”

“Really?” Paul Macelli looked impressed.

“Yes, indeed. Indeed. Frightening thing, and I can tell you I was glad I wasn’t there to see it. He was standing on the steps inside the lighthouse when a bolt hit the tower and sent an electrical charge right through those two hundred and seventy steel steps. Caleb’s legs went numb, but he wasn’t about to let the light go out. No, sir. He dragged himself up to the lantern room right after he was hit and did a full night’s watch.” Mary looked out at the boats, thinking how typical that was of Caleb. Always steady and true. “That’s the way it was in the old days,” she said. “People had a sense of responsibility. They took pride in a job. It’s not like it is with young people today.”

Mary closed her eyes and was quiet for a full minute or two, long enough for Paul Macelli to ask her if she was through talking for the day. She looked over at him.

“No,” she said. “I have one more story for you. Let me tell you about the Mirage.”

“Pardon?”

“The Mirage. It was a ship. A trawler.” Mary’s voice was so low that Paul had to lift the recorder close to her mouth to catch her words. “It was March of 1942. You know what was happening then, don’t you?”

“The war?” Paul asked.

“The war indeed,” Mary nodded. “The lighthouse had electricity by then, so we didn’t have to worry about winding the clockworks or taking care of the lanterns. The only reason we were still there was that someone needed to be, so the Coast Guard let Caleb stay on as a civilian keeper. Thank the Lord. Don’t know where we would’ve gone. Anyway, seems like back then most of the war was being fought right here off the coast. The lights were blacked out all up and down the Outer Banks and the lighthouse light was dimmed. You couldn’t have any lights on shore because the German U-boats might see our ships silhouetted against them. Didn’t seem to make much difference, though. Those subs were picking off our ships one a day back then. One a day.”

Mary paused to let her words sink in. “Well, one morning, just before first light, Caleb was up in the lantern room and he spotted a small boat drifting way out to sea, bobbing up and down in rough water, most likely broken down. He could just make out two men in her. So he got in his little power boat and went out to them. The breakers were mean and cold, and Caleb wasn’t sure he’d make it, but he did. By the time he reached the men, they were half froze. Caleb towed them in, and once up on the beach, they told him they’d been on an English trawler called the Mirage which had been torpedoed by the Germans sometime during the night. They were the only ones who managed to get off before she went down.” Mary looked out toward the street. “When Caleb told me the name of the trawler, I remembered way back to when I was a girl and saw the word ‘mirage’ somewhere and asked my father what it meant. He told me how on a hot day, the beach can look like it has water on it when it doesn’t. ‘Sometimes, Mary,’ he said, ‘things are not what they seem.’ I should have paid better attention to what he was trying to tell me.” Mary looked at Paul Macelli to be sure he was paying attention himself.

“So Caleb brought these two British sailors up to the house. They spoke English with a kind of uppity accent. My daughter Elizabeth—she was about fourteen then—and I fed them three good meals that day, while they told us about being torpedoed and losing their friends and all.

“I bedded those boys down in the spare room upstairs that night. About eleven or so Caleb and I heard a scream coming from Elizabeth’s room, so Caleb quick grabbed his shotgun and went up there. One of the boys was in Elizabeth’s room, trying to talk her into some indecency. Caleb let him have it with the gun—killed him right there in the upstairs hallway. The other fella took off when he heard Caleb shoot his friend, so we quick called the Coast Guard and they caught up with him.” Mary smiled at the memory. “Found him tangling with a wild boar—a fate no man deserves. It turns out they weren’t Brits at all. They were German spies. The Coast Guard had been getting reports of them for weeks and hadn’t been able to track them down. Caleb got a medal for it, even though he was kicking himself for not just letting the two of them freeze to death out in the ocean. The Mirage didn’t exist, of course.”

Mary took in a long breath, suddenly exhausted. She pointed her thin, straight finger at her interviewer. “Sometimes, Mr. Macelli, things are not what they seem,” she said. “Not what they seem at all.”

Paul Macelli stared at her for a moment. Then he clicked off the recorder and lifted his briefcase to his lap. “You’ve been very helpful,” he said. “May I come back sometime to hear more?”

“Of course, of course,” Mary said.

Paul put the recorder in the briefcase and stood up. He looked out toward the waterfront for a moment and then down at Mary. “They tried to get you off lighthouse property in the early seventies, didn’t they?” he asked.

Mary stared up at him. He was a fool. He could have simply left, not tempting fate and her ire any more than he already had. Obviously, though, he couldn’t help himself.

“Yes, that’s right,” she said.

“Wasn’t it Annie O’Neill who helped you out back then?” he asked, and Mary wanted to say, You and I both know it was Annie, now, don’t we, Mr. Macelli? but she wanted this young man to come back. She wanted to tell him more stories of the lighthouse. She wanted to speak for hours into that little black recorder.

“Yes,” she said. “Annie O’Neill.”

She watched him walk down the sidewalk and get into his car. Then Mary leaned her head back against the rocker and closed her eyes. There was a burning pain in her belly that didn’t subside until she heard the sound of Paul Macelli’s car fade into the air.

Mary had met Annie in May of 1974, when she was seventy-three years old, practically a young woman. She’d been cleaning the windows in the lantern room of the lighthouse when she spotted a young girl down on the beach. Her beach, for the road leading out to the lighthouse was unpaved then and not too many people were willing to risk it. So at first Mary thought Annie was an apparition, and she stood at the window of the lantern room to see if the girl moved, if she was real. From that height, Annie was a tiny, doll-like figure, her dark skirt and red hair whipping out behind her as she stared out to sea.

Mary climbed down the stairs and walked out to the beach.

“Hello, there!” she called as she neared the girl, and Annie turned, shading her eyes with her hand and smiling broadly.

“Hi!” she said, her voice surprising Mary with its huskiness. So deep for such a young girl. Then she asked, as though Mary were the interloper here, “Who are you?”

“The keeper,” Mary replied. “I live here.”

“The keeper,” Annie exclaimed. “Well, you must be the luckiest woman in the world.”

Mary had smiled herself then, because that was exactly how she felt.

“I wanted to come out here by the lighthouse.” Annie looked down at the sand beneath her bare feet. “I met the man I married right here on this spot.”

“Here?” Mary asked, incredulous. “There’s never anyone around here.”

“He was painting and doing some repair work on the house.”

Ah, yes. Mary remembered. A few summers ago the place had swarmed with young men, half-naked and bronzed and beautiful, scarves tied around their foreheads to keep the sweat from their eyes. She must mean one of them.

“It was nighttime when I met Alec, though. It was very dark, but every time the lighthouse flashed I could see him. He was standing right here, just enjoying the evening. The closer I got, the better he looked.” She smiled, blushing, and turned her face back to the water. Her hair blew in long tufts up and around her head, and she lifted her hands to draw it back to her shoulders.

“Well.” Mary was startled to know this had gone on within a short distance of her home. “So this spot’s special for you.”

“Uh-huh. Now we’ve got a little boy. We’ve been living in Atlanta while Alec finished his training—he’s a veterinarian—but all the while we knew this was where we wanted to settle down. So, now we’re finally here.” She looked puzzled and glanced up at the lighthouse. “You’re the keeper?” she asked. “I didn’t think they still had keepers. Aren’t all the lighthouses run by electricity now?”

Mary nodded. “Yes, and this one’s had electricity since 1939. Most of them are maintained by the Coast Guard these days. My husband was the last keeper on the North Carolina coast, and when he died, I took over.” She studied Annie, who was shading her eyes to stare up at the tower. “Would you like to go up?” she asked, surprising herself with the question. She never invited anyone up with her. The tower had been closed to the public for many years.

Annie clapped her hands together. “Oh, I’d love to.”

They walked toward the door in the lighthouse, Mary stopping for the bucket of wild blackberries she’d picked earlier that morning.

She could still climb to the top of the tower with only one or two stops along the way to catch her breath and rest her legs. Annie had to stop too, or maybe she just pretended she needed to so Mary didn’t feel too old. Mary led her right up to the lantern room, where the enormous honeycomb lens took up so much space there was barely room to walk around it.

“Oh, my God,” Annie said, awestruck. “I’ve never seen so much glass in one place in my entire life.” She looked at Mary. “I love glass,” she said. “This is fantastic.”

Mary let her slip inside the lens, through the opening made when one segment of glass had to be removed a few years earlier after being damaged in a storm. Annie turned slowly in a circle, taking in all of the landscape, which Mary knew would appear upside down to her through the curved glass of the lens.

It took her a while to lure Annie away from the lens and down to the next level, where they stepped out onto the gallery. They sat on the warm iron floor, and Mary pointed out landmarks in the distance. Annie was quiet at first, overwhelmed, it seemed, and Mary watched her eyes fill with tears at the beauty spread out below them. She learned right then that nearly everything made this girl cry.

They spent a good two hours up there, eating berries and talking, the windows Mary had been cleaning in the lantern room forgotten.

Mary told her a little about Caleb, how she used to love to sit up here with him, how after decades of living at Kiss River they had never tired of the view. Caleb had been dead ten long years then, and having Annie to talk with, having someone listen to her so attentively, made her depressingly aware of how few friends she’d been able to make over the years, how hungry she was for companionship. For some reason, she told Annie about Elizabeth. “She hated living in such an isolated place, and she resented her father and me for making her live here. She just took off when she was fifteen years old. Quit school and married a man from Charlotte who was ten years older than her. She moved there and never sent us her address. I went there once to try to find her but without any luck.” Mary looked out at the blue horizon. “That child broke our hearts.” Why was she telling all this to a stranger? She no longer discussed these things even with herself. “She’d be forty-five now, Elizabeth.” Mary shook her head. “It’s hard for me to believe I’ve got a daughter who’s forty-five years old.”

“Maybe it’s not too late to make things right with her,” Annie said. “Do you know where she is now?”

She nodded. “I have an address I got from a friend of hers. I heard her husband died a few years back, so she must be living alone now. I write her letters a couple times a year, but I’ve never once heard back from her.”

Annie frowned. “She doesn’t know how lucky she is to have a mother who cares about her. Who loves her,” she said. “She doesn’t know what she’s thrown away.”

Mary felt a little choked up. She took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her brown work pants, pulled one out and lit it in her cupped hand, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs. It had been a long, long time since she’d let herself think about Elizabeth, and she could not bear how much it hurt, so she changed the topic to the young woman sharing her balcony. Annie’s hands and lips were stained with the juice of the berries, the color clashing wildly with the red of her hair.

“Where are you from?” Mary asked. “Where did you pick up that accent?”

“Boston.” Annie smiled.