Keeper of the Light

She was climbing gamely onto the board for what seemed like the hundredth time, when her bathing suit slipped from her shoulder and he saw the sharp white line it left on her skin.

“You’re burning,” he said. “We’d better get you out of here.”

Olivia sat down on the blanket, her teeth chattering. Alec wrapped her towel around her, rubbing her arms through it, briefly, letting go as he realized the intimacy of the touch. The gold chain clung softly to the pink swell of her breasts, and he looked away.

He got the green and white striped umbrella from the back of the Bronco and set it up over Olivia’s half of the blanket. Then he lay down next to her, relishing the warmth of the sun on his skin. “So, how come you never learned to swim?” he asked. He had spent most of his childhood canoeing and water skiing on the Potomac.

“I never lived near any water.” The umbrella caught her words and floated them down to him.

“Where did you grow up?”

“In the central part of New Jersey. Have you heard of the Pine Barrens?”

“Isn’t that where everyone intermarries and produces, uh—” he was not sure how to word it “—less than brilliant offspring?”

She made a sound of mock disgust. “Well, you’re thinking of the right place, but your view of it is a little colored by its press. Intermarriage is far more the exception than the rule.”

“That’s where you grew up?”

“Yes, and I know what you’re thinking. Just because I can’t master windsurfing does not make me less than brilliant.”

He smiled to himself, staring up at the clear sky, a dazzling blue he had seen nowhere outside the Outer Banks. “Paul was at the lighthouse meeting at my house last night,” he said.

She sat up, abruptly. The gold chain swung free for a moment and then clung once more to the slope of her breast. “You didn’t say anything, did you?”

“No.” He looked up at her worried face. “I told you I wouldn’t. He said something you might find interesting, though.”

“What? Tell me everything he said. Every word, okay?”

Alec smiled. “He’s a nice guy, Olivia, but he’s not God. I’m sorry, but I neglected to take notes. I didn’t realize I’d be tested on the material.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Are you angry with me?”

“No.” He shaded his eyes to see her more clearly. The bridge of her nose was burned. “Do I sound mad?” Did he? Was he? “He said that whatever was wrong between the two of you was his fault, and that he thought he might have made a mistake when he left you.”

Olivia pressed her fist to her mouth. “He said that?”

“Yes. He seems depressed to me. There’s a…heaviness about him.”

She looked out at the sound. “I can’t believe he said he might have made a mistake. Was that his exact word?”

Alec sighed. “I think so. I’ll tape him next time, Olivia, I promise.”

She lay down again. “It’s just that I was about to give up.”

He told her about the horse. “He got sort of choked up while he was helping me.”

“It sounds as if you spent half the night with him. I’m very jealous.” She suddenly gasped. “Don’t ever tell Paul I’m taking stained glass lessons, Alec. You haven’t mentioned it to him, have you?”

He frowned at her. “What are you so afraid of?”

“It’s too hard to explain,” she said, looking away from him. “Just please don’t tell him.”

They were both quiet for a few minutes, and when she spoke again her voice was subdued. “I’m having an amniocentesis done Thursday,” she said.

He looked over at her. “Are you nervous about it?”

“No. Well.” She shrugged. “I guess you always have to face the possibility that something could be wrong. I just hate having to go through it—not the procedure so much as the waiting for results—without Paul.”

“You know, Olivia, I think one of us should tell him we’re friends. It might open his eyes a little to the fact that you’re not going to just sit around waiting for him forever.”

“Except that I would. Wait around forever, I mean.” She let out a weary-sounding sigh. “What about you, Alec?” she asked. “Do you go out at all?”

“No.” He shut his eyes against the brilliant yellow sunlight. “It’s not time yet, and there really isn’t anyone. There’s one woman who has designs on me, but I’m not interested.”

“Who is she?”

“A neighbor. Nola.” He ran a hand through his hair. It was almost dry. “She’s been a family friend for many years. Annie always said she had her eye on me, which I didn’t believe at the time. I do now, though. She brings us food. She calls to check up on me.”

“And you’re not interested?”

“Not in the least.” He stretched, ready for a change of subject. “Well, listen. I’ve been asked to speak on both a radio show and at a meeting of lighthouse enthusiasts in Norfolk this coming Saturday and I’d love to talk you into taking on one of those jobs. Any chance of that?” He looked over at her. “Do you have Saturday off?”

“I do have it off,” Olivia said, “but now that you’ve told me Paul’s having second thoughts, I think I’d like to try to spend the time with him.”

“Oh, right,” Alec said, disappointed. “You should.” He leaned up on his elbow to face her. “Tell him about this.” He touched her still visible hip bone lightly with his fingertips, wondering if he was out of line. “Tell him about the baby.”

“No.” She sat up, smoothing her hair away from her face with her hands. “It’s got to be me he’s coming back for.”

“Well.” Alec sat up too and reached for his T-shirt. “I think it’s about time you got to see a little more of the Outer Banks. We’ll see how much fun you can tolerate.”

He took her to Jockey’s Ridge. She had seen the enormous sand dunes from the road many times, she said, but it had never occurred to her to actually walk on them. She’d put a pair of shorts on over her bathing suit and Alec lent her a T-shirt. He dug around in the glove compartment of the Bronco until he found a tube of zinc oxide—in neon green—and painted it on her nose. The wind was up and the dunes were practically shifting in front of their eyes as they climbed. They reached the highest peak, out of breath, and sat on the ridge to watch a group of helmeted people learning to hang glide.

Then he took her to the Bodie Lighthouse. They walked around the site, looking up at the black and white horizontally striped tower, while he told her the history of this particular light. He felt some guilt over not taking her to the Kiss River Lighthouse, especially since he was asking her to speak about it. It was too far from where they were, he told himself, although his real reason was clear to him—the Kiss River Lighthouse belonged to him and Annie. He was not at all ready to share it with someone else.

They had an early dinner, then started the drive back to her car at Rio Beach. They were quiet. Content, he thought. A little tired.

“When are you going back to work, Alec?” Olivia asked when they were a block from the beach.

“Not you, too,” he said.

“Well, it doesn’t seem healthy to take so much time off.”

“That’s because you’re a workaholic.”

“And I need the income.”

He pulled into the little parking lot and turned off the ignition. “Annie had a life insurance policy.” He looked over at her. “It was ridiculous. Three hundred thousand dollars on a woman who earned about fifteen thousand a year and gave most of it away. Or,” he laughed, “spent most of it on insurance premiums, I guess. It was a shock to me. Tom found it when he was cleaning up her stuff at the studio.”

“Why did she do it?”

Alec watched the windsurfers on the sound. “I have two theories,” he said. “Either she knew I’d be so devastated if she died that I wouldn’t be able to work for a long time. Or else, some insurance salesman got to her and she just wanted to make his day. She needed people to like her.” He shook his head. “I think that was why she gave so much of her work away. She never lost that insecurity. She never thought people would care about her just for herself.”

“Well, money’s not the only reason for working,” Olivia said. “You loved treating that horse last night, Alec. You lit up when you were talking about it. Why don’t you go back a day or two a week?”

He hesitated. “It scares me. I’m not in such great shape, though I’m a lot better than I was before you told me about that night in the ER.” He looked at her. Her cheeks were red. The zinc oxide had faded from her nose. She would be hurting tonight. “But it gets stressful at the animal hospital, especially in the summer,” he continued. “Lots of emergencies— Well, look who I’m talking to about emergencies, and I’m just talking about dogs and cats.”

“Yes, but they still suffer. And so do the owners.”

“Right. It never used to bother me, but since Annie…”

“It’s like getting back on a horse, though,” Olivia interrupted him. “You’ve got to do it, and the longer you wait the harder it becomes. After something terrible happens, I sometimes force myself to go into work the next day even if I’m not scheduled. I went in the day after Annie died, even though I didn’t have to.”

He stared at her. “You push yourself too hard, Olivia.”

“Don’t change the subject,” she said. “Just one day a week, okay?”

He smiled. “If you’ll call Paul and try to see him this weekend.”

Paul thought he’d made a mistake in leaving her.

Olivia drove from Rio Beach to the little shop across the parking lot from Annie’s studio, where she bought the Jenny Lind crib she’d had her eye on for weeks. The sales clerk helped her load the box into the trunk of the Volvo, and she drove home with a long-forgotten sense of hope and well-being—and the beginning sting of a fierce sunburn.

She lugged the box into the house and rolled it on its sides through the hall until she reached the little room she would make into a nursery. There, she rested it against the wall, stopping short of taking it apart and setting up the crib. She wouldn’t tempt fate by being overly optimistic.

She would call Paul tonight, ask to see him, talk to him. She was rehearsing the conversation in her mind as she walked out to the mailbox to pick up her mail, and it was there she found the note, scribbled on the back of a used envelope.

“Stopped by on my way to Washington,” Paul had written. “I’ll be up there for a week or so working on a story about oil drilling off the Outer Banks. Call you when I get back.”

She stared at the envelope, at the familiar handwriting. She turned it over, peered inside. Then she balled it up in her fist, crushed it between her palms. She wanted to track him down, call him at his hotel, scream at him. “Didn’t you just tell Alec O’Neill you’d made a mistake?”

But she knew she would do no such thing. Instead, she walked back into the house, where she soaked a few teabags to nurse her burn. Then she called Alec to tell him she’d be happy to accompany him to Norfolk on Saturday.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Wednesday was Jonathan Cramer’s birthday, and Olivia agreed to take his night shift, hoping it would keep her mind off the amniocentesis scheduled for the following morning. Around six, Alec dropped off a blue folder filled with lighthouse in formation she would need to know for the radio interview on Saturday. The waiting room had been full then, and there was little time to talk as he handed her the folder across the reception desk.

“What time are you done here?” he asked.

“Midnight.” She returned his look of disappointment. They would not be able to talk on the phone tonight.

It was close to eleven when a teenage boy was brought in by his friends. Olivia heard him before she saw him.

“I’m gonna have a fucking heart attack,” he screamed, as Kathy and Lynn wheeled him into one of the treatment rooms. Olivia joined them and began questioning the boy—a good-looking kid with sun-streaked blond hair. He was seventeen, he said, and he had been at a party, drinking a little, when his heart started racing, beating so loudly he couldn’t hear anything else. He reeked of alcohol. His blue eyes were glassy, frightened.

“Start a monitor,” she said to Kathy. Then to the boy, “What did you have besides alcohol?”

“Nothing. Just a couple of beers.”

He was lying. He was too agitated, too wired, his palpitations too wild. “I know you had something else. I need to know what it was to be able to treat you properly.”

“My heart’s gonna fucking burst.”

She glanced at Kathy. “He has friends here?”

Kathy nodded. “In the waiting room,” she said. “I asked them what he took, but they claim he was just drinking and then started complaining of a rapid heartbeat.”

Olivia left the boy under Kathy’s care and walked into the waiting room. There were three of them, two girls and a boy, and they sat close together on the blue vinyl couch, sharing a stony, defensive demeanor. They had probably talked on the way over here, agreeing with one another about how they would answer any questions asked of them. Olivia felt their fear, though, as she neared them. Behind their hardened features, their faces were ashy pale.

“I’m Dr. Simon.” She pulled up a chair, glad the waiting room was empty now, save for these three. “And I need to get some information from you about your friend in there.”

They stared at her. The boy looked about eighteen. He was barefoot and blond, his hair brushing his shoulders. The blond girl wore skin-tight jeans and a white T-shirt, the sleeves and midriff cut into fringes, while the other girl had on a scoop-neck jersey and a light blue miniskirt. Olivia was so astonished at being able to clearly see the girl’s floral underpants that it was a moment before she noticed her hair. It was very dark, and looked as if it had been cut by a butcher. Olivia knew without a doubt who was sitting in front of her. The girl may have tried to rid herself of her mother’s red hair, but there was little she could do to mask those freckles and dimples and dark blue eyes.

“Lacey?” Olivia asked.

The blond girl drew in her breath. “How does she know your name?”

Lacey struggled to avoid Olivia’s eyes.

“I need to know what your friend in there took,” Olivia said.

“Just beer,” said the boy, his voice deep, challenging.

“No,” Olivia said. “He did not have just beer. This is serious. Your friend could die. I need to know what I’m dealing with.”

“Crack,” said Lacey, and the boy threw his hands in the air and stood up. He swung around to glare at Lacey.

Olivia leaned over to squeeze Lacey’s hand. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll let you know how he’s doing. In the meantime, please give the receptionist his phone number and the name of his parents.”

Olivia returned to the treatment room. The boy was hooked up to the monitor. He had settled down, his eyes closed. His heartbeat was rapid, but rhythmic, and there was little they could do except observe him for now. Within a half hour, Olivia felt certain he was out of danger and she returned to the waiting room to tell his friends.

The two girls were still close together on the sofa, while the boy leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette.

“He’s going to be all right,” Olivia said. The three of them looked at her stonily, no emotion showing in their faces. “Lacey, I’d like to see you for a moment in my office.”

Lacey looked at the boy before she got to her feet and followed Olivia through the waiting room door. She said nothing as they walked down the hall and into Olivia’s office.

“Have a seat,” Olivia gestured to a chair in front of her desk. She sat down herself, a little overwhelmed by the odor of alcohol and tobacco that had accompanied Lacey into the room.

Lacey gave Olivia a narrow-eyed glare across the desk. The loss of the long red curls had transformed her into a tougher, more arrogant-looking young girl. “How did you remember me?” she asked.

“I remember you very well,” Olivia said. “It was a terrible night, and it really stayed in my mind.” What she knew now that she had not known then was that Lacey had been with her mother when she was shot. “It must be very difficult for you to be here in the ER, Lacey. It must bring back some terrible memories for you.”

Lacey shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”

“Your friend could have really gotten himself into trouble,” Olivia said. “Not just with his health, but with the police as well. Maybe you’re getting in with the wrong crowd of people. It could have been you in there.”

“The hell it could. I wouldn’t touch that stuff. None of us would. And I’ve never even met him before. He’s a friend of Bobby’s from Richmond. He brought the crack down with him, but he’s the only one who used it.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Olivia said. The blue folder Alec had brought her was in front of her on the desk, and she touched it lightly with her fingertips before she spoke again. “How did you get to the ER?”

“Bobby.”

“Well, I think Bobby’s had a bit too much to drink to drive you home. Why don’t I call your father to come get you?”

“No.” Lacey suddenly lost her tough-kid facade. Her eyes filled. “Please don’t.”

Olivia looked down at the folder. The idea of calling Alec was appealing, but he would not be pleased to find Lacey in this situation, and Lacey was clearly terrified of having him know what had occurred here tonight.

“How about your brother?” Olivia asked.

Lacey shook her head, dropping her eyes to her lap.

“Well, let’s go talk to your friends and see if we can come up with a way to get you home safely.”

Olivia stood up, and Lacey took off out the office door, obviously relieved to be dismissed. Olivia stared after her for a moment before she followed, wondering if there was anything in the world quite as fragile as a fourteen-year-old girl.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Paul had forgotten the feel of a Washington summer. It was only seven o’clock in the morning, and already his T-shirt stuck in wet patches to his back and chest as he walked through Rock Creek Park. He had walked this same route with Olivia several times a week, and he could still feel her presence on the path. There was the expansive, thicktrunked oak tree she had claimed as her own, never failing to admire it no matter how many times she passed beneath its branches. There was the spot where she’d found a perfect robin’s egg nestled in the grass at the side of the path. She’d picked it up in a tissue and made Paul climb the tree to put it back in the nest. It was not possible to walk along this path without thinking of Olivia.

The branches of the trees hung low to the ground from the weight of their leaves, and everything around him, as far as he could see, was green. The color soothed him, despite the heat. This is what he missed in the Outer Banks. Greenness. Lushness. Sand and water and blue sky were not enough.

The work he had to do up here this week was unbearably boring, not his type of material at all. He had already made up his mind to refuse the next assignment like it, although he didn’t have much choice on a little paper like the Gazette. He missed the Post. He missed just about everything he didn’t have right now.

He reached the end of the path and crossed the street to the deli he and Olivia had frequented. He stepped inside, breathing in the scent of onions and garlic and cinnamon. So strong, so utterly comforting.

It was early, and only two other customers were in the deli, sitting at a small table near the back of the store.

“Mr. Simon!”

Paul smiled as he recognized Joe, the round-faced, balding owner of the deli who was working alone behind the counter. Joe had learned Olivia’s name many years earlier and assumed that since Paul was her husband, his name was the same. He and Olivia had never bothered to correct him.

“Haven’t seen you in months!” Joe grinned.

“How’ve you been, Joe?” Paul asked, approaching the counter. “Olivia and I moved to North Carolina. The Outer Banks.”

“Ah,” Joe said. “It’s beautiful down there. You really get the weather, though, don’t you?”

“A bit.”

“Have a seat.” Joe gestured to the tables. “You want the onion bagel with salmon cream cheese?”

“You’ve got quite a memory.”

“Some people stick in your mind, you know what I mean?” He set a cup of coffee on the top of the deli case and Paul carried it to the nearest table.

“So how is Dr. Simon doing?” Joe asked as he worked on Paul’s bagel. “She’s still doctoring, I hope.”

“Uh huh. She’s working in an emergency room down there. I’m up here by myself on business.” At some point he was going to have to come up with a way of saying they were separated. He could imagine Joe’s reaction. He could almost picture the pain and disappointment in his eyes.

“She liked cinnamon and raisin, right?”

“Right.”

Joe shook his head as he carried the plate to Paul’s table. “You give her my best,” he said, setting the bagel next to Paul’s coffee. He wiped his hands on his apron, then reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He glanced toward the door before sitting down across the table from Paul. “Let me show you something,” he said. He took a picture from the wallet and set it on the table in front of Paul. A small, dark-haired girl, about five years old, grinned up at him. “Know who that is?”

“One of your grandkids?”

“That’s right. Lindsay. The one who wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that wife of yours.”

“Oh.” Paul lifted the picture to get a better look at the child. “I’d forgotten.”

“A crazy coincidence, wasn’t it? You and Dr. Simon were sitting right here when that beeper of hers went off, like it did more times than not, right? And she zipped off like she always did, no matter if she’d gotten her bagel yet, and you and I were saying what a shame it was she always had to take off like that. Remember?”

Paul nodded.

“And it turns out it was little Lindsay in the emergency room they were calling her for.”

Paul did remember that morning, as well as the morning after when all of Joe’s family came into the deli to meet Olivia and the bagels were on the house. Paul had been proud to be her husband.

“Drowned in the bathtub,” Joe said. His eyes had filled. “The gal in the ambulance said she was as good as dead till your wife got to her.” Joe tapped the picture. “You take this to her—to Dr. Simon. Show her what good work she did that morning.”

Paul swallowed. “All right,” he said. He pulled out his own wallet and slipped the picture inside. “Thanks, Joe. She’ll be happy to see it.”

There was a sudden rush of customers, and Joe returned to his place behind the counter. Paul wrapped the bagel in his napkin. His throat had constricted. He couldn’t eat. He waved good-bye to Joe and went outside, the air hitting him in the face like a hot, wet rag as he walked quickly across the street and back into Rock Creek Park. He knew exactly where he would sit to finish his breakfast—on the lush green grass beneath Olivia’s favorite old oak.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“How did it go today?” Alec asked. “The amnio?”

Olivia held the phone against her ear as she rolled onto her side. She’d hiked her nightgown up to her hips, and her hand rested on the bandaid below her navel.

“It was all right.” She was relieved to hear Alec’s voice, relieved to talk to someone who knew about the baby. She had felt more alone today than at any time since Paul left her. She’d wept on the far-too-long drive to Chesapeake, as well as on the way back, and she’d gone to bed early tonight—nine-thirty—as though she could hasten Alec’s call just by being there. “Today was the easy part,” she said. “Now comes the waiting.”

“I thought of you driving up there alone. I should have offered to go with you. Didn’t think of it till too late.”

Olivia smiled. He was so sweet. Thoughtful. And his voice was sleepy. Warm. Like the triangle of moonlight that crept across her bed, and her legs, and her hand where it rested on her belly. More than likely his room was drenched in moonlight too. It was in his eyes, perhaps. On his chest. She could see the wedge of white light playing with the softly curled hair of his chest. She had not stared at his body the other day at Rio Beach. She had barely noticed it, but right now she found she could remember it in detail.

“Olivia?”

“Yes?”

“You’re very quiet. Are you sure you’re all right?”

She lifted her hand from her stomach and watched the diamonds in her ring soak up the moonlight. “My bed just feels particularly empty tonight.”

“Oh,” he said. “Do you know how to reach Paul? Maybe you should call him.”

“Actually, you’re a lot easier to talk to than Paul these days.”

“Yeah, but I can’t do much about filling your bed.”

She cringed, and rolled onto her back again. “Where is this conversation going?” she asked.

“Shall we change the subject?”

“Actually, this subject has been on my mind a lot lately. I think it began when you told me about Paul saying he might have made a mistake. I started thinking about him—you know, about being with him—and then he takes off for D.C.”

“Maybe when he gets back.”

“Maybe. Alec? How do you…” She struggled for the right words. “How are you coping with celibacy?”

He laughed. “That’s pretty damn personal, Dr. Simon.”

“Sorry.”

Alec sighed. “Mother Nature has a way of taking care of things,” he said. “Having your spouse die seems to obliterate any libidinous urges, temporarily at any rate. At least I’m assuming it’s temporary.” He chuckled. “Actually, I’m sure it is. I guess it doesn’t work that way when you’re only separated, huh?”

“No,” she said.

“Are you still getting massages?”

“It’s not the same thing,” she said grumpily.

Alec was quiet for a moment. “What would happen if you showed up in Paul’s hotel room?”

“I don’t want to be humiliated.”

“I’m certain he still cares about you.”

Almost unknowingly, she had moved her hand to the warm delta of her pubic hair. She parted her legs a little. She could do this. She could listen to Alec’s voice and…

“Oh, God.” She sat up abruptly, tugging her nightgown to her knees.

“What’s the matter?”

“Talking about this is definitely not helping, Alec.” She propped her pillow up against the headboard and sat back, lifting the blue file folder from her night table to her lap. “Why don’t you just quiz me on the lighthouse?”

Mike Shelley walked into her office late the following afternoon.

“Do you have a minute?”

She closed the patient chart she’d been working on as he sat down on the other side of her desk. He looked a little tired, but he was smiling. He leaned back in the chair.

“I wanted to let you know I’ll be leaving the ER in September.”

“No.” She was genuinely distressed. She depended on the calm efficiency Mike brought to his job as director of the emergency room.

“I’m afraid so. My parents are in Florida, and they haven’t been well this past year. I’d like to be closer to them and I’ve been offered a job down there.” He paused. “So, obviously, that leaves my position here open. I wanted to tell you that you’re in the running, along with Jonathan and two candidates from outside.”

The ambition Olivia had tried to temper when she started working in this small, sedate ER suddenly reared its head. She smiled. “I’m honored to be considered.”

“Between you and me, Olivia, you’re my first choice. Jonathan’s clinically good, but your past experience is far more varied and you handle everything that comes through the door with a cool head. That’s critical in this job. I don’t want you to get your hopes up, though. You still have the least seniority of anyone on the staff.” He stood up and sighed. “Jonathan wants this badly,” he said, and she thought she detected a warning in his voice. “He may be a bear to work with until this is over.”

Olivia smiled. “What else is new?”

She reached for the phone the instant Mike left her office and dialed Paul’s number, but she succeeded only in reaching his answering machine. She’d forgotten he was in Washington. She listened to his voice on the tape, imagining it filling his little cottage, resonating off the colored images in Annie’s stained glass.

She didn’t bother to leave a message. Instead she called Alec and was pleased when he suggested they go out to dinner to celebrate.

“Except,” she said, “there’s really nothing to celebrate yet.” Mike had warned her not to get her hopes up, and already she was picturing taking his place.

“Sure there is.” Alec sounded unusually cheerful. “More than you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.”

He picked her up at the emergency room after her shift and drove her to a small restaurant she’d never even noticed before. It was tucked between a few acres of amusement park rides on one side and a trailer park on the other, but inside it was cozy and dark. The candlelit tables were draped in mauve tablecloths, and the waiter laid her napkin across her lap as she sat down. The setting was undeniably romantic.

They ordered their meals, Alec turning down wine out of obvious deference to her condition. Olivia looked at him across the table as the waiter walked away. “So,” she said, “what did you mean there’s more to celebrate than I know about?”

He lowered his own napkin to his lap. “I went in to work today,” he said, grinning.

“Oh, Alec, really? How was it?”

“It was great till the animals started showing up.”

She gave him a sympathetic smile before she realized he was joking.

“It was actually painless,” he said. “Thanks for persuading me. I’m going to work three days a week for now.”

“You look as though it agrees with you,” she said. He had not stopped smiling since they sat down, and she could barely remember the haggard look he’d worn that first day she’d met him in the studio.

They filled their plates at the salad bar. “You must have had a sonogram with the amnio yesterday, huh?” Alec asked as they walked back to their table.

“Right.”

“No twins?”

She took her seat again. “Just one unbelievably tiny fetus,” she said. “Sex indeterminate.”

“What was it like being a twin?” Alec cut a cherry tomato neatly in half. “You must have been very close to your brother.”

“When we were kids, yes, we were close, but probably not the way you would imagine.” She sipped her water, set the glass down again. “I was born first, but my mother’d had no prenatal care and the midwife wasn’t prepared for twins. The cord was wrapped around Clint’s neck for quite a while before she even realized he was there. He suffered some brain damage.”

“Oh, no.”

“It wasn’t severe. He was mildly retarded, but he also had a wealth of physical problems.” She pictured her brother as a child, his skin so white, so translucent that the veins were clearly visible at his temples. “He was always small for his age and he was asthmatic. Quite frail. So I didn’t have the usual twin experience. I had to look out for him.”

She had sat up with Clint during his middle-of-the-night asthma attacks. She’d beaten up kids who made fun of him. She’d even done his homework for him, until one of her teachers told her she couldn’t protect Clint from everything. You have to look out for yourself, Livvie, she’d said, and Olivia had finally done exactly that. Once she left home, she neatly, permanently cut Clint out of her life. In the early years of her marriage, Paul had encouraged her to get in touch with Clint, but even with Paul’s support she had not been able to make the phone call or write the letter that would have brought her brother back into her world.

“How did he die?” Alec asked.

“Respiratory problems and something with his liver. My mother died a few years after I moved out, and Clint and my older brother, Avery, stayed on in the house in the Pine Barrens.” Clint had idolized Avery, but Avery had been a dangerous boy to look up to.

The waiter set their meals in front of them, and Olivia took a bite of tender, perfectly cooked salmon.

“Was it growing up with Clint that made you want to be a doctor?” Alec asked.

Olivia shook her head. “I wasn’t even a pre-med major when I started college. I was going to Penn State, and I was living with a woman who was a doctor. She was the sister of…” How much should she say? “This is confusing. She was the sister of a teacher I had in high school, the teacher I moved in with after I left home.” She took another bite of her salmon, chewing slowly, before she continued. “I’ve always had a tendency to be very influenced by the women around me. My mother wasn’t much of a role model, so I grew up a little unsure of myself as a female. My brothers were my strongest influence when I was young. I could beat up nearly anyone on the playground by the time I was twelve.” She smiled. “But when I became a teenager I realized that wasn’t appropriate behavior for a girl, so I started looking to my teacher for clues to how a woman should act. I started to…emulate her, and it became a pattern. When I lived with her sister while I was at college, I began modeling myself after her. That’s why medicine started to look so appealing.”

“Good thing she wasn’t a trash collector.”

Olivia laughed.

They ate in a comfortable silence for a few minutes before Alec began talking about Lacey and Clay. Olivia thought of Lacey’s tough-looking appearance in the emergency room a few nights earlier. Alec had his hands full with her.

“Do they have grandparents?” she asked suddenly, wondering if he was getting any help from the rest of his family. “Are your parents still alive?”

“No. They died a long time ago, before the kids were born.”

“How about on Annie’s side?”

Alec made a sound of disgust. “They never even met them,” he said bitterly.

“Bad topic,” Olivia said.

Alec set down his fork. “Annie’s parents had her life planned out for her. She had to do the whole routine—private schools, the debutante ball. They’d picked out the guy they wanted her to marry and no one else would do. They completely cut her off when she married me, not just financially, but emotionally as well.” Alec picked up his fork again, holding it above his plate. “I tried to contact them. I called them several times, but they wouldn’t even come to the phone. I wrote them letters using the animal hospital as a return address so Annie wouldn’t know, but I never heard a word from them. Finally,” Alec smiled at whatever he was remembering, “I came up with what I thought was a foolproof plan.”

“What was that?”

He leaned toward her across the table. “This was about five years ago, during one of Annie’s bouts of withdrawal. I always figured those moods of hers were connected with her thoughts about her family. So I went to Boston, armed with pictures of Annie and the kids, and I made an appointment to see Annie’s father, who was a cardiologist.”

“You mean, a medical appointment?”

Alec laughed. “Pretty damn clever, huh? You should have seen his office. Incredibly posh. A lot of gaudy antique reproductions. It was nauseating. So his nurse took me into one of the examination rooms and asked my why I was there. I told her I’d been having chest pains, and she made me take off my shirt to do an EKG, which had not been in my plans. I had not planned on having to meet my father-in-law for the first time half naked.”

Olivia smiled, remembering exactly how he looked shirtless.

“So, of course I had this perfectly normal EKG. The nurse left and then Dr. Chase himself came in. He asked me what my problem was, and I said, ‘I’m not sick. I’m your son-in-law.’”

“What did he say?”

“He turned purple, and he told me in no uncertain terms to get the hell out of his office. He left and slammed the door in my face. I left too, but before I did, I gave the nurse the envelope with the pictures in it and asked her to give it to him.”

“Did he get them? Did you ever hear anything from him?”

Alec ran his fork through the crabmeat on his plate. “The next thing we heard, he had died of a heart attack. An old friend of Annie’s wrote to tell her about a month after it happened, and when I figured out the date he died I realized it was the day after I’d gone to see him.”

Olivia shifted back in her chair. “Oh,” she said.

“So, of course, I never told Annie what I’d done. She was so upset she hadn’t known in time to go to his funeral. Jesus.” Alec shook his head. “Her mother had the audacity to show up at Annie’s funeral, though. I wouldn’t even talk to her, although there were certainly plenty of things I wanted to say. Fucking bitch.” He looked up at Olivia. “Pardon me.”

She laughed, and Alec smiled. “How did I get on the subject of Annie again? Back to Olivia. Are you all set for your debut as a connoisseur of the Kiss River Lighthouse tomorrow?”

“I think so.”

“I’ll pick you up around ten.”

The waiter cleared their plates away and they ordered coffee. Olivia watched Alec drop two lumps of sugar in his cup. He was smiling to himself.

“Alec?” she said.

“Hmmm?”

“You’re different tonight.”

“Am I? Is that good or bad?”

“It’s wonderful,” she said. “You seem happy. Even when you’re talking about painful things, like Annie’s parents, you seem removed from the sadness somehow.”

He nodded. “I feel better. Every day’s a little improvement from the day before.” The candlelight flickered in his pale eyes. “I owe a lot of how I feel to you. You’ve let me talk, let me cry on your shoulder, or at least in your kitchen. Going in to work today topped it off. Thank you.”

She felt his knees touch hers beneath the table, and this time she didn’t bother to move away.

Outside, the air was filled with screams and music from the amusement park next door. The sky above the rides was lit up from the colored lights. Alec rested his hand lightly on Olivia’s back as they crossed the parking lot to the Bronco, and she was exquisitely aware of every fingerpoint of pressure.

Three teenagers walked toward them, probably cutting across the parking lot to get to the amusement park, and they were very close before Olivia recognized them as Lacey and her two friends from the emergency room.

“Dad?” Lacey stopped, frozen, a few yards in front of them.

Alec stiffened at Olivia’s side, dropping his hand quickly from her back. “Hi, Lace,” he said. “Jessica.” Alec stared at the boy walking between his daughter and her friend, while Lacey stared at Olivia, nothing short of stark terror in her face.

Olivia broke the silence. “I like your haircut, Lacey,” she said. “It really looks different than it did back in December.” She looked hard into the girl’s eyes, letting her know she had said nothing to Alec about Lacey’s visit to the emergency room.

“This is Olivia Simon, Lacey,” Alec said taking a step away from Olivia. “Do you remember her?”

Lacey gave a quick nod, but Alec didn’t seem to notice. He thrust his hand toward the boy. “I’m Lacey’s father,” he said.

“Bobby,” the boy said, solemnly shaking Alec’s hand.

“Where are you kids off to?” Alec asked.

“The rides, Dad.” Lacey walked past her father, and Jessica and Bobby quickly followed.

“Well, have fun,” Alec called after them. He glanced at Olivia, and they started walking toward the Bronco again, this time a few feet apart. It felt like miles.

Alec was quiet as they got into the car. He turned to look behind him as he backed out of the lot into the street, and in the garish, blinking lights from the amusement park, his knuckles glowed white on the steering wheel. He turned toward Kill Devil Hills. He wished he were rid of her now, she thought. He wished he did not have to drive her back to the ER before heading home.

They had driven four blocks in silence when she finally spoke. “Is it any woman you don’t want Lacey to see you with, or just the one who couldn’t save her mother’s life?”

Alec looked at her sharply, then back to the road. He sighed. “Sorry. My kids have never seen me with a woman other than Annie and that just felt weird. I don’t want her to read anything into seeing me with you. I think she’d feel like I’m betraying Annie.”

“We’re friends, Alec. Aren’t you allowed to have friends?”

He didn’t seem to hear her. “That boy she was with looks far too old for her.”

Olivia twisted her wedding ring around on her finger. “Maybe she needs to be restricted a little more than she is.”

He shook his head. “No way. Annie would never have tied her down.”

She weighed her words carefully before she spoke. “Annie’s not here,” she said quietly. “The situation’s different from any the two of you had to handle when she was alive. You don’t really know what she would have done.”

Alec pulled the Bronco into the emergency room parking lot. “Well, soon enough you’ll have your own kid and then you can raise him or her any way your heart desires, but Lacey’s done just fine all these years and I’m not going to change things now.” He turned off the ignition and got out of the car, walking around it to open her door for her. By the time she had stepped out, her eyes had filled. She looked up at him.

“I understand that you’re embarrassed Lacey saw us together,” she said, “but please don’t take it out on me.”

He looked crestfallen. “I’m sorry,” he said, nearly whispering, and she was glad they were under the bright lights of the parking lot, glad they couldn’t touch. She got into her own car and pulled out of the lot, glancing back to see him standing in the pool of white light, watching her drive away.

There were four messages on her answering machine when she arrived home, all left by the same reporter—an eager-sounding young woman—from the Gazette. Each message was more urgent than the one preceding it, and the last was marked by an almost threatening quality, as the reporter finally stated the nature of her call: “It’s critical that I speak with you tonight, Dr. Simon,” the woman said. “It’s regarding Annie O’Neill.”

Olivia bristled. She pressed the erase button. What could possibly be so urgent about a woman who was already dead, a woman Olivia had no interest whatsoever in discussing tonight? She knew reporters, though. This young woman would not give up until she had Olivia on the line.

She followed the phone cord to the wall and unplugged it. In the kitchen, she lifted the phone from the wall and set it on the counter. She pulled the cord from the jack in her bedroom as well, knowing as she did so that she was cutting herself off from the possibility of hearing anything more from Alec that night. That was just as well. If he didn’t try to call her tonight, she didn’t want to know.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“She’s the doctor who killed Mom,” Lacey said as she poured milk on her puffed rice.

Alec frowned at his daughter across the table. “No,” he said carefully. “She’s the doctor who tried to save your mother’s life.”

Lacey looked up at him. “Mom had this one tiny little speck of blood on her shirt. That was it, but by the time that doctor got through with her, she’d bled to death.” Lacey’s lower lip trembled, and he watched her fighting to still it. She looked down at her bowl, bobbing the puffed rice in the milk with her spoon. A tiny stripe of red was growing in the part of her black hair.

“Lace,” he said. “Look at me.”

She tried. She lifted her eyes to his for the briefest of moments, then turned her head toward the window.

“Sweetheart.” He rested his hand on her wrist. “We’ve never really talked about this. About what actually happened that night.”

Lacey pulled her hand away from him. “She’s dead,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Well, I think maybe it does. I had a lot of questions, Lacey, and I bet you do, too. That’s how I know Dr. Simon. I bumped into her a few weeks ago at the studio. She’s taking stained glass lessons from Tom, and I had a long talk with her about what happened to Mom.”

Lacey looked at him, her nose red. “Are you, like, dating her?”

“No.”

“Then why were you with her last night?”

“She’s become a friend.”

“You had your arm around her.”

He did not know what to say. He couldn’t even explain last night to himself. “She’s married, Lace,” he said. “She and her husband are separated right now, but they’re probably going to get back together. Her husband is the guy who wrote that article about Mom in Seascape Magazine, remember?”

She wrinkled her nose. “He got my age wrong.”

“Did he?”

“Don’t you remember? He said I was twelve. Twelve.” Her eyes grew huge. “I was thirteen and a half.”

Alec smiled at her indignation. “Well, I guess that sort of mistake happens all the time.”

Lacey began dipping her spoon in and out of the cereal again. So far none of the puffed rice had made it to her mouth. “So,” she said, “what did you and that doctor talk about last night?”

“The lighthouse.” Alec leaned back in his chair. “She’s going to help out with the speaking engagements. She has a lot of experience doing that sort of thing. As a matter of fact, she’s driving up to Norfolk with me this morning.”

Lacey rolled her eyes and stood up to carry her bowl to the sink.

“Aren’t you going to eat that?” Alec asked.

“I’ve lost my appetite.” She began running water into the bowl.

“Who’s Bobby?” Alec asked.

“A friend.” She kept her back to him as she put the bowl in the dishwasher.

“Well, why don’t you ask him over sometime so I could get to know him?”

Lacey turned around to frown at him. “Get a life, Dad.” She dried her hands on a paper towel and left the room.

Alec smiled as he pulled into Olivia’s driveway. She was sitting on her front deck in a pale, apricot-colored suit that looked out of place on the rustic wooden deck, but would be perfect for her interview in Norfolk. He was wearing a suit himself.

He got out of the Bronco and walked around to open the door for her, and he was relieved to see her ready smile after their tense words of the night before.

“You look beautiful,” he said as he took his seat behind the wheel once again. “Sophisticated.”

“You too,” she said. “First tie I’ve seen you in. Looks nice.”

Alec quizzed her about the lighthouse as they drove over the long bridge to the mainland, and they had crossed the state line into Virginia before either of them mentioned the night before.

“I’m sorry about the way I acted when we bumped into Lacey,” he said. “Are you still angry with me?”

“No. I know it was awkward for you.”

“I tried to call you to apologize, but you didn’t answer.” He had dialed her number several times, finally giving up at eleven o’clock.

“I’d unplugged my phone.”

Alec frowned at her. “So I couldn’t get through?”

“No, Alec.” She smiled. The peeling bridge of her nose made her look very young. “A reporter from the Gazette was trying to reach me and I just didn’t feel like talking to her.”

“What did she want to talk to you about?”

Olivia shrugged and looked out the window where a de-lapidated barn sat in the middle of a wide, jade-green field. “I have no idea,” she said.

They reached Norfolk a few minutes after noon, and they ate lunch at a restaurant near the radio station where Olivia would be interviewed. Olivia ate her own tuna salad sandwich as well as a couple of bites of his.

He grinned at her. “Are you one of those people who eats a lot when they’re nervous?”

“I’m eating for two, remember?” she said, then added a bit defensively, “And I’m not in the least nervous.”

He walked her to the door of the radio station, feeling guilty about leaving her to wait out the forty-five minutes before her interview alone. Then he drove to the public library, where the Mid-Atlantic Lighthouse Friends were meeting.

He had taken the easier assignment, he thought as he spoke to the appreciative audience of thirty or so fellow lighthouse fanatics. They could not have been more receptive, and by the time he had finished, several of the men and a couple of the women had written hefty checks for the lighthouse fund. He left after a short period of questions and answers, and once back in the Bronco, turned on the radio to catch the last ten minutes of Olivia’s interview. Olivia and her interviewer, Rob McCain, were laughing, and he knew it was going well.

“Obviously,” Olivia said, “the vagaries of nature are only a small part of what we’re dealing with. Any decisions made with regard to the lighthouse have political and technological and economic implications as well.”

Alec stopped for a red light, smiling, impressed.

“But the sea wall concept seemed to have so much support behind it,” Rob McCain said. “Was that support politically motivated?”

“No more than for any other solution,” Olivia said. “The interest in saving the Kiss River Lighthouse cuts across political boundaries, and so the need for funding is completely nonpartisan. We’ve received donations from schoolchildren and grandmothers and executives and politicians. Anyone who cares about saving a piece of our history.”

He liked that she was using the word we to describe the committee, despite the fact that he usually felt possessive about the little band of lighthouse zealots he’d put together. After today, Olivia most definitely belonged.

She stood on the sidewalk in front of the radio station, watching for the Bronco. The interview had gone exceedingly well. She’d done a little extra reading on her own beyond the information Alec had given her, and it had increased her comfort, her confidence.

The Bronco turned the corner and came to a stop in front of the radio station. Olivia climbed into the passenger seat to find Alec grinning at her.

“I caught the tail end of it,” he said as he pulled out into traffic. “You were great.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I enjoyed it.”

It was hot in the car. She wished she could take off her suit jacket, but she’d had to pin the waistband of her skirt closed this morning. She’d been stunned that the safety pin barely managed to span the gap between the hook and the eye. Her jacket would have to stay on no matter how warm it got.

“Air conditioner’s starting to act up, I’m afraid,” Alec said.

She opened her window a crack and turned to look at him. “How did yours go?” she asked.

“Fine. They were very enthusiastic, but I think you should take all the speaking engagements from now on.” He glanced over at her. “You floored me, Olivia. I don’t think I believe that stuff about you not feeling confident outside the ER. I think you were born confident.”

She smiled. “The teacher I moved in with after I ran away from home was in charge of the debate team at my high school.”

Alec was quiet for a moment. “You ran away?” he asked finally. “You’d told me that you left home, not that you…” He looked over at her. “Why, Olivia? Why would you do something like that?” His tone was very soft. Curious, not accusatory.

Olivia gnawed on her lower lip, wondering how to answer him. Alec looked at her again, his eyebrows raised.

“I’m debating whether to tell you the abridged or unabridged version,” she said.

“I’d like the unabridged. We still have a long drive ahead of us.”

She drew in a breath, resting her head against the back of the seat. “Well,” she said, “I left home—ran away from home—the day I was raped and I was afraid to go back, so I never did.”

“But why would you leave your family at a time like that?” Alec’s eyes were on the road, but he was frowning.

She was quiet for a long moment, trying to find the words.

“Do you want to tell me?” He glanced at her.

“Yes.”

“Try, then.”

“It’s too hot,” she said, and even she could hear the child like tone of her voice.

Alec turned the failing air conditioner up another notch, and it gave out a promising stream of cool, light air. They were driving through Chesapeake, past the fast food restaurants, the hospital. It was one of the hospitals she had looked into when she decided to leave Washington General, but the offer in the Outer Banks had come first.

“The house I grew up in was a real rat’s nest,” she began slowly. “It was very tiny. Just one bedroom, which I shared with my two brothers. My mother slept on the couch in the living room—or rather, that was where she passed out. She never remarried after my father died. She was…heavyset, and she used to say the only man who would fit on the couch with her was Jack Daniel’s.” Olivia felt her lips curve into a smile. She glanced at Alec, whose somber expression didn’t change as he stared at the cars ahead of him.

“I came home late from school one day. It was winter, and I remember it was already dark out. The boy who lived next door to us—Nathaniel—was in my room with my brothers. I was uncomfortable around him to begin with, because he was enormous. He was seventeen and probably six and a half feet tall and two hundred and fifty pounds, and his idea of fun was to shoot dogs and cats with a pellet gun. Anyhow, when I walked into the room, the three of them suddenly stopped talking and I knew they were up to something. I tried to leave, but Avery blocked the door and Nathaniel started circling around me, saying I looked good, I was really…filling out, was what he said. He started touching me as he walked around me. Just little touches—” she touched her fingertips to Alec’s shoulder, just for a second “—like that. But all over. Surprising me. I didn’t know where the next touch would get me. He was really frightening me. I started beating on Avery to try to get the door open. At one time I could actually beat Avery up, but he’d gotten too strong for me—he was almost seventeen then—and he just laughed. Someone said something—I don’t remember what—but I realized then that I was part of a deal. Nathaniel had done something for them or given them something and I was payment.”

“Jesus,” Alec said.

The air conditioner had grown sluggish again. She could barely breathe. She opened the window a few more inches, but the hot, noisy air was intolerable and she rolled it up again. “All of a sudden, Avery grabbed me and held me back against him by my arms and Nathaniel tore my blouse open.” The buttons of her blouse had landed on the wooden bedroom floor with little clicking sounds, rolling beneath the beds and the dresser. “I was fighting like crazy, kicking at him, but he didn’t even seem to feel it. He pushed my bra up.” She turned her head to look out the window again, remembering the sharp pain of her embarrassment. She had only recently taken to dressing in the closet, away from her brothers’ eyes.

“Olivia.” Alec shook his head as he turned the Bronco onto the jughandle by the tall, sky-blue water tower. “You don’t have to tell me any more. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“I wanted you to ask,” she said. She wanted to tell him all of it, to get it all out. “I want you to understand.”

He nodded. “All right.”

“Nathaniel started touching my breasts. He was really rough and I screamed for my mother, but I knew that was useless, and I screamed for Clint to help me, but he was just sitting on the bed, staring at the floor. The next thing I knew, I was on the floor and Avery somehow pulled my blouse back in a way that trapped my arms so I couldn’t move.” She shuddered. “That was the worst part, not being able to use my arms or my hands. I still…I can’t stand to feel trapped. Paul once held my arms down when we were making love—not to scare me, he didn’t mean it to frighten me, but I started screaming.” Paul had cried when he realized how he’d fed into her terror. “Poor Paul,” she said. “He didn’t have the vaguest notion what he’d done.”

She rested her temple against the warm glass of the car window and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She would need a rest room soon. Her bladder seemed perpetually full these days.

“So,” she continued, “Nathaniel pushed my skirt up and took off my underpants and Avery crammed them in my mouth so I couldn’t scream. I felt like I was choking and it was so…humiliating. I was kicking at Nathaniel with all my strength and finally Avery told Clint to help hold me down.” She looked at her hands where they rested in her lap, and an old ache started deep in her chest. “I feel sorry for Clint when I remember this,” she said. She could still see the confusion in her twin’s face as he struggled to figure out to which of his siblings he owed his allegiance. A year earlier, it would have been Olivia for sure, but now, at fourteen, his older brother’s approval meant everything to him. “He was crying himself, but he got down on the floor and held one of my legs while Avery held the other.”

Nathaniel had loomed above her like a giant and she remembered the scene as if it had happened in slow motion, his meaty hand pulling down the zipper of his pants, reaching inside to draw out his huge, dagger-straight penis. She had screamed then, the sound muffled by the cloth in her mouth. “The next thing I knew, all two hundred and fifty pounds of him were on top of me, but he couldn’t get inside.” His body had hammered against her unyielding flesh, his face growing red with frustration. “He said it was like trying to…fuck a brick wall, and I kept praying he’d give up, but he didn’t. I was crying and gagging and I couldn’t use my hands.” She lifted her hand to her throat. “He was so heavy. He was crushing me. I remember Clint saying, ‘Maybe you should stop, Nat,’ but I don’t think Nathaniel even heard him. Finally,” she shrugged, “I felt as though I…split open. The pain was so bad and it took him forever. I passed out, I guess, because when I woke up I was alone in the room. There was blood on my skirt and my legs. There was blood on the doorknob.”

Alec took his right hand from the steering wheel, reaching toward her to slip his fingers into the cup of her palm. His thumb traced the bones in the back of her hand, and she closed her own fingers gratefully over his.

“I ran to Ellen Davison’s house. She was my science teacher. I didn’t tell her what happened. I never did, but she must have known somehow. She acted as though she’d been waiting for me to show up. She had a spare room, the bed made up and everything. I just moved in, and she switched me to a school outside my neighborhood. I never saw anyone in my family again.”

“Good lord, Olivia.”

“I worried about Clint,” she said, “but I only thought of myself after I left home. I learned about my mother’s death during my first year of college, and I knew I should go back to make sure Clint was all right, but I just couldn’t. I was so terrified of Avery, and…” She wrinkled her nose. “I felt as though if I went back after all my hard work to get away from there, I would somehow be stuck there again. That I would become the old, scared Olivia. I know it doesn’t make sense, but…”

“How could you still care about Clint after what he did?” Alec interrupted her.

“He really wasn’t part of it.”

Alec glanced at her sharply. “What do you mean, he wasn’t part of it? He held you down while another man raped you.”

“But he…”

“You said he was only mildly retarded. Didn’t he know the difference between right and wrong?”

“Yes, but… Paul used to say I should give him a chance to redeem himself, that he was just a kid then, and…”

“No.” Alec squeezed her hand hard. “What happened was too big, too much to forgive, ever.”

Olivia bit her lip. “Annie would never have turned her back on her brother,” she said, “no matter what had happened in the past.”

“Annie did many asinine things in the name of charity.”

“Clint needed me, though. Once I was on my feet, once I was established as a physician, I really should have tried to see him. Avery certainly didn’t know how to take care of him. My own mother didn’t know how. We lived in a sewer, Alec. You’d be sick if you could see where I lived, and I just left him there to rot.” She pulled her hand out of Alec’s and brushed her bangs off her forehead. “A couple of years ago, Ellen wrote to tell me she’d heard he had died. Most likely he was an alcoholic, like my mother. No one ever told him it could kill him. If I’d helped him, he’d probably still be alive.” She looked at Alec. “I deserted him.”

“To survive. You had no damn choice.”

She closed her eyes, trying to take in his words, to believe them. Then she sighed. “I could really use a rest room,” she said. She pulled down the visor to look in the mirror, groaning when she saw her face. Her nose was red; her mascara had run onto her cheeks in elongated gray triangles.

“We’ll stop at the next gas station,” Alec said.

He waited for her in the parking lot of the small gas station. He cleaned the windshield of the Bronco and took off his jacket and tie before getting behind the wheel again. There really was something radically wrong with his air conditioner.

He could not scrape the image from his mind of Olivia’s brothers holding her down while the leviathan seventeen-year-old raped her. Only in his mind, it was his daughter he saw on that floor. Maybe Olivia had been right the night before when she’d said that Lacey should be reined in a little more. He had no idea where she was at night, who she was with. He was not being much more help to her than Olivia’s mother had been passed out on the couch.

Olivia got back in the car, her face scrubbed clean of makeup. Her recent sunburn had all but disappeared, and she was once again anemically pale, her green eyes and dark lashes a dramatic contrast to the whiteness of her skin. She was still pretty, though. Perhaps even more so.

“You okay?” he asked, as she buckled her seatbelt.

She nodded. She was perspiring, her bangs damp across her forehead.

“Why don’t you take off your jacket?”

“I can’t. My skirt is pinned together.”

He laughed, and it felt wickedly good—a sudden, welcome release—but Olivia didn’t smile. “Do you think I care?” he asked. “Take it off. It’s too damn hot in here.”

He held the jacket while she leaned forward to slip her arms out of the sleeves. He folded it and set it on the back seat.

“Better?” he asked, and she nodded. They were both quiet as he began driving again, and it was a few minutes before he realized she was crying, her face turned to the window, her sniffing practically silent. He pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition.

“Olivia.” He undid her seatbelt as well as his own and pulled her into his arms. For a moment, she clung to him and he felt the dampness of her skin beneath her thin white blouse.

“I’m sorry,” she said, when she could finally get the words out. She had pulled away from him slightly, her face lowered, the top of her head brushing his lips. He shut his eyes and rested his lips there, in the warm silk of her hair.

“I haven’t talked about it for so long,” she said. “I haven’t even thought about it.” She looked up at him, tears glistening on her dark lower lashes. “Thank you for saying there was nothing I could have done about Clint. I’ve always thought I should have been able to rise above what happened to me somehow. Put the past aside and help him, but…”

“But you knew you couldn’t do that and take care of your self at the same time.”

She nodded. “God, I was lucky I was raped. It got me out of there.”

“No,” he said. “You were not lucky. You would have found some other way out.”

“I don’t know.” She let go of him, sitting back in her seat, her eyes closed. “It got me out of there, but it took such a toll.” She opened her eyes, and there was a faraway look in them as she stared out the window of the car. “It left me afraid of men and terrified of sex and feeling more worthless than I already felt.”

Alec studied the steely edges of her profile. “You’ve over come all that, though, haven’t you?”

She nodded. “Paul changed it for me. He was so incredibly patient.”

Yes. He imagined Paul would be that way.

Olivia smiled, that dreamlike look still in her eyes. “I was so nervous,” she said. “I’d gotten it in my mind that I didn’t heal properly after the rape, that I couldn’t let anyone casually touch me, or try to make love to me, because I didn’t know how I would react, physically or emotionally. Paul was the first person I met who I knew I could trust, who would bear with me. I wanted to make love so badly, but it still took about four or five nights for us to…complete the act. He’d get in a little further each time before I’d freeze up.” She blushed, red blotches forming quickly on her white cheeks, and looked over at him. “Am I embarrassing you, talking this way?”

“No.” His voice was more of a whisper than he’d intended. “I like listening to you, and I need you to remind me about Paul, because sometimes when I’m with you I forget about him.”

She held his eyes for a moment before continuing. “He’d write poetry,” she said. “Every day he’d show up with a new poem, chronicling our progress. Sometimes they’d be sweet and touching, others were metaphorical—a hunter with his spear closing in on his prey.” She laughed. “Finally we did it. I was twenty-seven years old and it was my first orgasm ever, and I’d had no idea it could be so…powerful.”

“You came the first time you made love?” He knew the question was tactless the moment he’d blurted it out, but Olivia seemed unperturbed.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s pretty easy for me. I can’t not come.”

“You’re lucky. Annie…” Alec hesitated, discovering he could not talk about this quite as openly as Olivia. “It was always hard for Annie,” he said, “though I figured out after a while that she just didn’t care. Sex didn’t mean much to her. She only wanted to feel close, to feel cared about. She said being close was the medicine she needed to feel good, and sex was just a side effect.”

Olivia frowned. “All those years you were married to her, you had to put your sexual feelings on hold?”

“No. You forget I was married to the world’s most generous woman. I never went without.” He had a sudden stab of guilt for talking about Annie so candidly. “Whew,” he smiled weakly. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

Olivia returned his smile. She stretched her arms out in front of her and sighed. “How about dinner?” she asked. “I’m starving, and I could use the air conditioning.”

They stopped for dinner, switching to the safe topic of the lighthouse and their respective speaking engagements. Back in the Bronco, Olivia fell asleep, her head cradled between the seat back and the window. He woke her as they crossed over the bridge into Kitty Hawk. The sunset was too beautiful to miss, the sky surrounding them with purple and gold. They rolled down their windows to let the Bronco fill with the damp evening air and the scent of the sound. Olivia undid her seatbelt and turned around, getting to her knees to look out the rear window. There was a skewer-thin run in her stocking where it covered her calf, and her blouse puckered above the safety-pinned waistband of her skirt in a way that touched him, that made him reach over to lightly run the back of his fingers over her hair.

She sat down again as they drove into Kitty Hawk, and Alec turned onto Croatan Highway in the direction of her house.

“Will you be all right alone tonight?” he asked.

“Yes.” She reached into her purse for her keys. “As soon as you woke me up and I got a whiff of Outer Banks air, I felt better.” She leaned her head back against the seat and looked over at him. “Even though I only have one friend here—namely, you—it feels like home.”

Alec smiled at her. Then, on an impulse, he made a U-turn at the next intersection.

“What are you doing?” Olivia asked.

“I’m taking you someplace. You’ve earned the right to see it.”

“The lighthouse!” she said as he took the right turn off the highway toward Kiss River.

The road leading out to the lighthouse was dark, the trees forming a green-gray tunnel for the Bronco. Alec pulled into the small parking lot, surrounded on all sides by shadowy bayberry bushes. Night had fallen quickly over Kiss River, and the beacon was already on. It flashed as they got out of the Bronco, illuminating Olivia’s white, awestruck face.

“It’s spooky out here,” she said. The keeper’s house was dark, and no one was in sight as they walked across the field of sea oats, Olivia craning her neck to look up at the light. “Two hundred and ten feet is taller than I’d imagined.”

Alec held up one of the keys on his key ring. “I’m not supposed to have this,” he said. “Mary Poor gave it to Annie years ago.” He opened the door and stepped into the dark hallway, feeling on the wall for the light switch.

“Oh, my God,” Olivia said as light filled the hall and illuminated the circular staircase. She walked forward and looked up. “Two hundred and seventy steps.”

“They’ll probably be better to manage with your heels off.” He waited for her to slip off her shoes before he started up the stairs. “You don’t have a problem with vertigo, do you?” His voice echoed off the sloping, white brick walls.

Olivia looked straight up at the eerily lit circles of stairs above her. “I guess I’ll find out,” she said.

They stopped at the third landing for Olivia to catch her breath. From the narrow window they could just make out the outline of the keeper’s house, asleep in the darkness.

The circle of stairs grew tighter and he could hear Olivia’s breathing as well as his own. “We’re almost there,” he said.

They had reached the narrow landing, and he unlocked the door to the gallery, stepping back to let Olivia out first.

“It’s extraordinary,” she said as a warm wind swept across their faces. She looked up. “Look how close we are to the stars. Oh.” She started as the lens directly above them flashed its light over their heads, and Alec laughed.

He leaned his elbows on the railing and looked out at the ocean. The moon lit up the water, and the waves looked like glittering strips of silver rushing toward the shore.

“Once I locked Annie and myself up here for the night,” Alec said. “I dropped the key to this door over the railing.”

“Intentionally?”

“Yes.” It seemed unbelievable that he’d once had such a spontaneous idea of fun. “We couldn’t get down until morning, when Mary Poor let us out.” He smiled at the memory and felt suddenly close to Annie. If Olivia were not here, he would talk to her.

Olivia leaned on the railing next to him. “Thanks for this,” she said. “For letting me come up here. I know you think of the lighthouse as yours and Annie’s.”

He nodded, acknowledging the truth in her statement. “You’re welcome.”

They watched the lights of the boats slip across the horizon for a while longer. Then Alec filled his lungs one last time with salt air. “You ready to go down?” he asked.

Olivia nodded and stepped back through the door to the landing, but something on the ground caught Alec’s eyes. “Just a sec,” he said. He walked around to the sound side of the gallery and gripped the cool iron railing in his hands as he stared into the darkness between the keeper’s house and the woods. The flash of light cut a path between him and the ground, and in that clear white light he saw a bulldozer standing next to two fresh, deep scars in the earth.

He walked Olivia to her front door. He held one arm out to her, and she stepped into his hug. He softly kissed her temple.

“Thanks for your help today,” he said.

She took a step away from him and smiled. “Thank you for yours. It was a little more than you bargained for.” She unlocked her door, then turned to face him again. “You don’t have to call me tonight, Alec.”

“Are you saying you’ve had enough of me for one day?”

“No.” She hesitated for a moment. “It’s just that I feel very close to you today, and I’m not so sure that’s good.”

His heart did a little flip before he thought of Annie. Will you wait a year?

He nodded. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then.”

His house was empty when he got home. He heated a slice of frozen pizza in the microwave and sat down at the kitchen table to eat it, that morning’s Beach Gazette spread out in front of him. There, in the upper right-hand corner of the front page, was a picture of Annie. Alec set the pizza down and lifted the paper. The headline was bold, the letters enormous: K.D.H. EMERGENCY ROOM ACCUSED OF COVER-UP IN O’NEILL DEATH. He read through the article twice, the muscles in his hands contracting into fists. Then he picked up his car keys and stormed out of the house.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Olivia was relieved to get out of her suit and stockings and into the shower, where she scrubbed away the more painful remnants of the day. Then she put on her robe, poured herself a cup of tea, and sat down at the kitchen table with the pieces of stained glass she had cut at the studio the week before. She was wrapping the smoothed edges of the glass with copper foil when there was a knock at her front door. She looked up, startled by the anger in the sound.

She set down the piece of glass she’d been working on and walked into the living room. The room was dark, just a dim pool of light spilling across the carpet from the kitchen. She walked quietly to the window nearest the door, where she peered out to see Alec standing in the porch light. He was dressed in white shorts and a navy blue T-shirt, and he was raising his fist to knock again.

She tightened the sash of her robe and opened the door. “Alec?”

He walked into the living room and thrust a copy of the Gazette in front of her.

“Have you seen this?” he asked. He was angry, and she stepped away from him, away from the unfamiliar flame in his eyes.

She took the paper, raising it into the stream of light from the kitchen, and read the headline: K.D.H. EMERGENCY ROOM ACCUSED OF COVER-UP IN O’NEILL DEATH.

She frowned at him. “A cover-up?” she said. “I don’t have any idea what they’re talking about, Alec.”

He pulled the paper from her hands. “It seems as though you left out a few details when you told me what happened the night Annie was brought to the ER.” He spoke with a controlled sort of calm, yet she could hear anger behind the words.

She pulled her robe more snugly around her, remembering the messages from the reporter on her answering machine the night before. She was afraid she did know what lay below that headline. There certainly had been no “cover-up” of Annie’s treatment in the ER, but everyone involved had known better than to discuss the case publicly. There were people—including some of the ER staff—who thought her attempt to save Annie had been preposterous. Reckless. Alec knew enough about medicine that, with the facts presented to him by someone other than herself, he might draw a similar conclusion.

Right now, he had the same accusatory look in his eyes that he wore in that photograph in Annie’s studio, and she wished there was a way to change that, to bring back his smile. She was about to lose something that had become precious to her. Alec’s friendship. His trust.

“Shall I read it to you?” he asked, and he began reading without waiting for her reply. “Olivia Simon, one of the Kill Devil Hills Emergency Room physicians vying for the position of medical director, was involved in a cover-up in the death of one of the Outer Banks’ most beloved citizens, Annie Chase O’Neill. So states Dr. Jonathan Cramer, another emergency room physician who is also in the running for the director’s position. ‘Dr. Simon has made serious mistakes in judgment,’ Cramer said yesterday. ‘She often acts as though she owns the emergency room.’ He cited in particular the O’Neill case. Ms. O’Neill was shot last Christmas while working as a volunteer at the Manteo Battered Women’s Shelter. Cramer stated that, ‘in that type of case, usual procedure is to stabilize the patient and send them by helicopter up to Emerson Memorial, where they have the facilities to deal with severe trauma. We can’t handle that sort of thing here. I argued that we should prepare the patient for transport, but Dr. Simon insisted we treat her in the ER. Annie O’Neill didn’t stand a chance.’”

“Oh, Alec, that’s crazy,” Olivia said, but Alec continued reading, and Olivia knew this one article was enough to kill any chance she’d had at the directorship position.

“Dr. Simon worked in the emergency room of Washington General in the District of Columbia for ten years prior to coming here. ‘She’s used to the heavy stuff in D.C.,’ Cramer said. ‘She doesn’t understand the limitations of a small facility like this.’

“Michael Shelley, current director of the free-standing emergency room, denied any cover-up and said the entire case was being blown out of proportion. Dr. Simon could not be reached for comment.

“Because,” Alec said with a biting touch of sarcasm, “as we all know, Dr. Simon had unplugged her phone.” He dropped the paper on the coffee table and stared at her. “Why didn’t you tell me there was some question about how to treat her?” he asked. “Why did you hide the facts from me?”

Olivia sank wearily into the nearest chair and looked up at him. He stood in the center of the room, directly in the light spilling from the kitchen, like an actor caught in the spotlight.

“Alec,” she shook her head. “There was no cover-up. I didn’t tell you there was a question about treating her because in my mind there was no question. Jonathan Cramer dislikes me and he’s afraid I might be selected over him for the director spot. He’s looking for a way to hurt me.”

“Right this minute I don’t give a damn what he’s doing to you,” he said. “I want to know what happened to my wife.”

“I’ve explained everything that hap…”

“You made it sound like you only had one option.”

“I felt like I did.”

He paced, out of the spotlight, into it again. “It’s always struck me as insane—the idea of one lone physician performing open heart surgery, whether you had the necessary instruments or not. I tried to put that thought out of my mind, but this article just…” He shook his head and turned to look at her again. “Why didn’t you send her up to Emerson?”

This way her blood’s on your hands.

“I didn’t think she could possibly make it, and…”

Alec gestured toward the newspaper on the coffee table. “This guy obviously thought her chances were better if she went up, and he’d been working there longer than you. Didn’t you stop to consider that he might have known what he was talking about?”

“I really thought that surgery…”

“You don’t do that kind of surgery in that kind of setting, Olivia. You don’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to figure that out. You’d intubate her, put a couple of IV lines in her, and get her out of there as fast as you could.” He stood directly above her now, and his voice had risen, hurting her ears. “If you’d sent her to Emerson, maybe she would have had a chance. Maybe she’d still be alive.”

Tears spilled over Olivia’s cheeks. She looked up at Alec. “Jonathan was scared,” she said. “He’d never seen that kind of wound before, and he had no idea what to do with it. Think about it, Alec. Please. She had two holes in her heart. Jonathan neglected to mention that to the press. How do you stabilize a person with two holes in her heart? I had no choice but to operate. She would have died in that helicopter. I have absolutely no doubt about it. She was losing blood so quickly.”

Olivia paused. Above her, Alec was breathing hard, his eyes still narrowed, angry, but he was listening to her, hearing her out.

“Jonathan walked out on me when I said we should operate. He left me alone to take care of her. I realized that I was taking a risk when I elected to do surgery, especially by myself. Maybe it was crazy of me to try. I knew I was walking a fine line, legally and medically. But not ethically.” She brushed the back of her hand across her wet cheek. “Sending her up, making her someone else’s responsibility, would have been the easy way out, but she would have died. I did what I thought was right, and if we could have somehow closed that hole in the back of her heart she might very well have made it.” Her hand started to throb, her fingers grew hot with the memory. She looked up at Alec again. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

His chest rose and fell rapidly with his breathing, but his eyes had softened while she spoke. He reached down to touch her shoulders, pulling her up to him, pulling her silently into his spotlight, into his arms.

“You don’t know how hard it was, Alec,” she whispered against his shoulder. “You can’t know.”

“I’m sorry.” He kissed the top of her head. “I’m really sorry, Olivia. I read that article and just…lost it. I thought you’d lied to me. Kept things from me.” He sighed. “I guess I still need someone to blame.”

She pulled her head away to look at him. “Please, Alec, talk to Mike Shelley. Talk to the nurses who were on duty that night. I need you to believe me.”

“I do,” he said. “I believe you.” He pulled her head to his shoulder again and held her that way for a minute, maybe longer. She closed her eyes, gradually becoming aware of the depth and pace of his breathing. He drew away from her slightly, tipping her head back with his fingers to kiss her temple, her eyes, her wet cheeks, and she turned her head to catch his next kiss on her lips.

His anger was gone, and in its place was a heat. He slipped his hands between them and untied the sash to her robe, letting it fall open a few inches. Then he stepped back and stroked the back of his fingers between her breasts.

“This is nice,” he said, tracing the line of her gold chain with his fingertip. He pulled off his T-shirt and opened her robe further, until the satin had slipped over her breasts and she was bathed in the white light coming from the kitchen. Her body was so hungry for this. Alec raised his hands to her breasts, and she arched forward to meet the lightness of his touch.

He lifted the robe from her shoulders and let it drop to the floor in a soft pile around her feet. She was melting, liquid. She drew her hand to the front of his shorts, tentatively resting the back of her fingers against the unmistakable firmness of his erection beneath the cloth.

“Yes,” he said, his breath warm against her ear. “Please.”

She turned her hand and felt a tremor run through his body as he pressed hard against her palm. He lowered his hands from her breasts, and she parted her legs slightly, waiting for his touch, aching for it, but his fingers froze on the swollen rise of her belly, and everything in him seemed to cool at that moment. She tightened her hand on him, but he was already drawing away from her, and he slipped his fingers into hers and lifted them up, holding them just below his chin. The light from the kitchen glimmered on his braided gold wedding band. He looked at her squarely.

“What are we doing, Olivia?” He shook his head. “I mean, you’re a married woman. I feel like I’m still married. Your husband’s a friend of mine. You’re going to have his baby.”

His hair brushed her thigh as he bent down to pick up her robe. He slipped it onto her arms and up over her shoulders, closing it across her breasts, tying the sash. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment that he, not she, had been the one to stop. She had been so eager, so willing.

She hugged her arms across her chest as he looked into her eyes, his face once again as serious, as unsmiling as when she first met him.

“Maybe we’d better not see each other for a while,” he said. “Today was a little too intense, all the way around. It was one thing when I felt as though we were just friends, but friends don’t do what we just did and it’s… You’re vulnerable, I’m vulnerable. I’m working with your husband…” He stared at her in exasperation. “Olivia, say something.”

She looked down at the floor, still hugging her arms. My husband made love to your wife. The words were so close; she could barely hold them in. She wanted him to understand why that night in the ER had been so hard. She wanted him to share the pain with her.

“All right,” she said, raising her head, but she found she could not look at him, and she bent down instead to pick up his T-shirt.

He pulled the shirt over his head. “I’d better go,” he said. She followed him to the door, her legs shaking, and a great, vast hollowness in her chest. Her head was light. She wondered if she was about to be sick.

Alec opened the door and turned to look at her, the porch light catching the pale blue of his eyes. “Maybe you should come to the lighthouse meetings,” he said. He reached forward to lightly touch her arm. “It would help me to see you and Paul together, and it would probably be good for the two of you. You know, a shared interest.”

“No,” she said, recoiling from the image of the three of them together. “I couldn’t.” She glanced behind her at the coffee table. “Do you want your paper?”

He looked past her, back into the shadows of her living room, and shook his head. “Throw it away,” he said, and then with the barest hint of a smile, “Why don’t you use it to line Sylvie’s litter box?”

He wished she had tried to resist him, but that was hardly a fair expectation. If he hadn’t felt the small, firm sphere of her belly, that reminder of her husband beneath his palm, he would have taken it all the way. Then at the next lighthouse meeting he would not have been able to look Paul in the eye.

He punched the buttons on the car radio, trying to find a song he could sing along with to clear his head, but the airwaves were filled with classical music and advertisements and songs he didn’t know. He took a shower when he got home, the water just cool enough to chill him, but by the time he had dried himself off, all he could remember was the sensation of Olivia’s hand on him, squeezing him, stroking him through his shorts. He wanted to obliterate the feelings in his body, the thoughts in his head. He hunted through the pantry until he found what he needed—a bottle of tequila, left over from one of his and Annie’s parties last summer when they’d served margaritas. He uncapped the bottle and took a swallow. Shit. The stuff was poison. He forced down another mouthful and went into his bedroom, where he undressed and got into bed, still clutching the neck of the bottle in his fist.

He remembered that party. Annie had grilled chicken for fajitas, while he made the margaritas. Tom Nestor had gotten ferociously drunk, and Annie had watched him carefully, finally telling Alec to water down his drinks. Tom was one of those people who underwent a complete change of personality after one drink too many. He’d grow weepy, pouring out his personal problems to anyone who would listen, and on that night he was bemoaning a fight with a woman he was seeing, clearly sapping the life out of the party. Annie had tried to shut him up. “You say too much when you’re drunk, Tom. You say things that will get you into trouble once you're sober.” Tom, however, could not seem to help himself, and he continued his lamentations until the early hours of the morning. Annie wouldn’t let him drive home. She made up the guest room for him, but in the morning they found him curled up on the floor of the living room, beneath the oval stained glass windows.

Alec lay perfectly still, letting the memories come and go, but the alcohol was having no effect whatsoever on his erection. Instead, it was garbling his thoughts, taking away his control over the images that came into his head: Olivia’s breasts, white and smooth in the light pouring from the other room; the thin line of liquid gold as it dipped between them; the firm nuggets of her nipples beneath his fingertips. He swallowed another mouthful of tequila, struggling to conjure up Annie’s face, Annie’s presence, but without success. He slipped his hand beneath the sheet with a sense of resignation, knowing that it would not be his hand he sank into, but the imagined warmth and comfort of Olivia’s body.

He came, explosively, angrily, a warm stream of tears slipping into his hair. “Annie,” he whispered. “I don’t want to be alone anymore.”

He fell into a deep, restless sleep. He dreamt they were lifting the lighthouse from the ground, twenty men or more, lifting it to their shoulders, then setting it, wobbling and creaking, onto the track. People cheered, while Alec’s heart pounded in his ears. The men attached a system of ropes and pulleys to the lighthouse, and the noble, tall white tower began its slow journey inland along the track. Alec was first to hear the cracking, first to see the mortar between the bricks turn to powder. He waved his arms at the men, screaming for them to stop, but they couldn’t hear him over the cheers of the crowd. Huge chunks of the lighthouse broke off, crashing to the sand in slow motion. Alec started to run toward it, but Annie was there. She caught his arm, and he saw her mouthing the words, although he couldn’t hear them above the crashing sound of the lighthouse: “…we should just let it go.”

“No!” Alec sat up in the bed. He was sweating. Breathing hard.

“Dad?” Lacey was calling to him from outside his bed room door. It must have been her voice that woke him up.

He ran his hands over his face, trying to rub away the dream. “Yes?” he answered, his voice so soft and tight that he wondered if it would carry through the door.

“Can I come in, please?” She sounded like a child. If he opened the door she would be standing there with her curly red hair, six or seven years old.

Alec’s head throbbed. The room was black except for the light from the digital clock. 2:07. There was a cold circle of wetness next to him on the mattress, and for a moment he thought he’d gotten so drunk that he’d wet the bed, until he remembered. The room smelled of tequila and sweat and semen. He could not let Lacey in here.

“Daddy? I need to talk to you, Daddy, please.”

“Give me a minute, Lace, and I’ll come out.” He got out of bed and hunted in the darkness for his shorts. He pulled them on as the room spun around his head. He was going to be sick. He made it to the bathroom in time and vomited twice before lowering himself to the floor and leaning back against the welcome coolness of the tile wall. He would sit for just a few minutes until the room stopped spinning.

He stood up after a while, testing his legs, testing his equilibrium. He was okay. He brushed his teeth, then found his T-shirt. The clock on the night table read 3:15. 3:15? He must have passed out. He opened his bedroom door, but the hallway was dark. One of the cats whisked by his legs, startling him, as he made his way down the hall to Lacey’s room. He knocked on her door, opening it when there was no answer. Her overhead light was on, but she lay fully dressed and asleep on top of her bedspread, one of her china-faced dolls clutched tightly in her arms. The smell of beer emanated from her, as if she’d bathed in it.

Alec got a blanket from her closet and laid it over her, tucking it around her shoulders. Then he sat on the edge of her bed and gently shook her arm.

“Lacey?”

Her eyes remained shut, her breathing deep and regular. He’d really blown it. She’d wanted to talk to him tonight. She’d needed to, isn’t that what she said? She’d even called him Daddy, but he had not been there for her.

She’d been drinking. It was undeniable now. He would have to talk to her, somehow preventing the discussion from turning into one more fight. It was good she was asleep. It would give him time to think through how to handle this. He wouldn’t come down hard on her tomorrow. He wouldn’t come from a place of anger. He would try to handle it the way Annie would have, and he’d tell her he loved her before he said anything else.

He leaned forward to brush the dark hair off Lacey’s forehead and saw the clean, straight line of red roots at her scalp. He stood up with a sigh and turned out the light, leaving his daughter alone, with her chin pressed against the cold china cheek of her doll.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The call from Nola woke him the next morning. “Did you get a chance to see yesterday’s Gazette, hon?” she asked.

Alec rolled over to look at the clock, wincing as the bottle of tequila connected with his ribcage. It was nine-thirty, and there was a jackhammer in his head.

“Yeah, I did,” he said.

“I got so furious when I read it. I can just imagine how terrible you must feel, Alec. Do you think you should sue?”

He looked up at the ceiling. “I’ve spoken to Olivia Simon,” he said. “It was a judgment call, and she did what she thought was best. I’m convinced she was right. By the way, do you know who she is?”

“Olivia Simon?”

“Yes. She’s Paul Macelli’s wife.”

“You’re kidding. I didn’t know he was married.”

He thought he detected some disappointment in Nola’s voice. Perhaps she’d been interested in Paul herself. “They’re separated, but I think it’s temporary.” He drew in a breath, bracing himself for her reaction to what he was about to say. “She went up to Norfolk with me yesterday.”

Nola was quiet for so long that he wondered if she was still on the line. “She did?” she asked finally.

“Mmm. She’s had public speaking experience, so I had her take the radio interview.”

Nola hesitated again. “I could have done that, Alec.”

He had not even considered asking Nola. He could not imagine spending that much time alone with her. “Well, Saturday’s your big day at work.”

“True, but what does Olivia Simon know or care about the lighthouse? And with this brouhaha about her mishandling of Annie’s treatment—it’s a little like sleeping with the enemy, don’t you think?”

He laughed. “No, Nola, your metaphor’s a bit off base.”

“Well, hon, I think there are going to be some repercussions from this. I got a lot of phone calls yesterday from people who are upset over it and want to do something about it.”

Alec sighed. “Try to diffuse it, okay, Nola? Annie’s gone. Nothing’s going to bring her back.”

Clay was alone at the kitchen table when Alec came downstairs. He was eating half a cantaloupe filled with cottage cheese, and Alec’s stomach turned at the sight. He put a couple of pieces of bread in the toaster and poured himself a cup of black coffee before taking a seat across from his son.

“Is Lacey up yet?”

“Uh-uh.” Clay looked up at him. “You look like you crawled out of a toxic waste dump.”

“Thanks.” Alec rubbed a hand over his chin. He hadn’t bothered to shave this morning. Hadn’t even showered yet. He didn’t want to miss seeing Lacey.

Clay stuck his spoon upright in the cantaloupe. “I’ve made a decision, Dad,” he said. “I’m not going to college this year.”

“What?” The toast popped up in the toaster, but Alec didn’t bother to take it out.

“I’m going to stay home a year. Lots of kids do that.”

“You have a straight-A grade point average and a scholarship to Duke and you’re going to stay home and sell surfboards?”

Clay looked down at his cantaloupe. “I think you need me here,” he said. “I think Lacey needs me.”

Alec laughed. “You and Lacey get along like oil and water.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t care what happens to her. I’m afraid if I go away I’ll come back and she’ll be pregnant and using coke or something.”

Alec reached across the table to lay his hand lightly on his son’s arm. “Clay, what is it? Are you afraid to leave home?”

Clay drew his arm away. “Yeah, I’m afraid, but not for myself.”

“You’re going to college. I can certainly take care of a fourteen-year-old girl.”

Clay looked up at him, and Alec was surprised at the tears in his eyes. He had seen Clay cry only once since he was small, and that was the night Annie died. “You used to be the greatest father in the world,” he said, “but now I’m not so sure you can take care of a fourteen-year-old girl. I’m not so sure you can even take care of yourself.” He leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “Dad, listen to me, all right?” he said. “I was at a party last night and some guys I know came in and told me they’d just come from a party where they saw Lacey. She was ripped, Dad. Wasted. They said she went into one of the bedrooms with some guy and then later with another. And that’s just while they were there.”

The coffee started to burn a hole in Alec’s stomach. He stared wordlessly at his son.

“They didn’t know who the guys were or I would have found them and beat the shit out of them.”

“Okay,” Alec said. “Thank you for telling me. Let this be my problem, though, all right? I’ll handle it. I’m her father, not you.” He reached for the toast, thinking of Annie. She would never have forced Clay to go to school if he didn’t want to. “The choice is yours about college, Clay, but don’t stay here because of Lacey.”

He turned on his answering machine to take the calls from friends and acquaintances incensed over the way Olivia had managed Annie’s case in the ER, angered by something they knew nothing about. Then he showered and shaved in an at tempt to pull himself together, struggling unsuccessfully to keep his mind off the image of Lacey in a strange bedroom, being pawed at. Used.

He woke her at noon. Her face was puffy and pale, and she groaned when she opened her eyes. He’d left the overhead light off and the shades pulled, but still the faint light made her wince. She sat up slowly, leaning against the headboard, the china doll lying face down at her side.

“You wanted to talk to me last night,” he said. He would be careful not to call her Annie.

“I don’t remember,” she said in the sullen voice he had come to equate with her lately. There was a string of hickeys, red and round, on her neck, disappearing under the neckline of her T-shirt.

“I think we do need to talk.”

“Not now. I don’t feel well.”

“You’re hungover, and that’s one of the things we need to talk about. You’re way too young to be drinking.” He cursed himself as she frowned. Wasn’t he going to start this conversation by telling her he loved her?

“I only had one beer,” she said, and tempted though he was to accuse her of lying, he bit his tongue.

He picked up the doll and rested it on his lap. Its brown eyes were painted on; they stared blankly at the ceiling. Alec looked back at his daughter. “I was thinking last night that it’s been a while since I told you I loved you,” he said.

She dropped her eyes to the blanket covering her knees and picked at a thread coming loose from the binding. She’d made a tactical error in cutting her hair—it was no longer long enough to cover her eyes.

“I do, Lace. Very much. And I’m worried about you. Clay told me that some of his friends saw you…go into a bedroom with a couple of different guys last night.”

Her face shot up. There was alarm in her eyes, but she attempted a laugh. “They must have me mixed up with someone else.”

“You’re a smart kid, Lace, but I think drinking throws your judgment off and you end up doing things you wouldn’t ordinarily do. Guys will take advantage of you. You’re too young to…”

“I’m not doing anything, and even if I was, so what? Mom turned out okay.”

“She did start young, that’s true, but it was because she was searching for love. You know what her parents were like—she never felt loved by them. You know you’re loved, don’t you Lace? You don’t have to have sex to get guys to like you.”

“I’m not.”

Alec’s eyes were drawn to the wall above Lacey’s head where a long-haired musician, his leather pants stitched into a genital-hugging cup at the crotch, smirked at him. He looked back at his daughter. “I guess we should talk about birth control,” he said.

Lacey flushed, her cheeks the color of the welts on her neck. “Please shut up.”

“If you need birth control, you can get it. Do you want me to make a doctor’s appointment for you?”

“No.”

He looked down at the doll, touching the delicate little white teeth with the tip of his finger. “Well, maybe it’s not negotiable. If you’re getting involved with…boys, you probably should see a doctor whether you want birth control or not.”

She stared at him incredulously. “Mom would never have made me go.”

He felt his patience slipping. “Look, Lacey, if you want to act like an adult, then you’re going to have to face the responsibilities that come along…”

“Mom would never have gotten on my case like this, either,” she interrupted him. “She would have believed anything I said. She would have trusted me.”

He threw the doll down hard on the bed and stood up. “Well, I’m not Mom,” he said, unable to keep the anger out of his voice. “And she’s not here. You’re stuck with me because she thought a bunch of goddamned battered women needed her more than we did.”

Lacey flung her blanket aside and jumped to the floor, turning to glare at him across the bed. “Sometimes I think you wish Zachary Pointer had killed me instead of her,” she said. “I bet you lie awake at night and think, why couldn’t it have been Lacey? Why did it have to be Annie?”

He was too astonished to speak. He stared after her as she ran out of the room, her footsteps quick and sharp in the hallway, and the bathroom door slammed shut so loudly he winced.

He stood there for a few minutes more before beginning to make her bed. He folded the edge of the sheet neatly over the blanket, tucked the spread under her pillow, and sat the doll up against the headboard. Then he walked downstairs to the den, where he could spend the rest of the day lost in his work on the lighthouse.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

They gave her the tourists in the emergency room over the next couple of days, because the locals—at least those coherent enough to be choosy—refused to see the doctor who had taken Annie O’Neill from them.

On the Tuesday after Jonathan’s vitriolic story appeared in the Gazette, Mike Shelley asked to see her. He was on the phone when she walked into his office, and he gestured for her to sit down. She watched the lines deepen in his forehead as he listened to his caller. Whatever he had to say to her wasn’t going to be good.

She had felt very much alone these past couple of days, despite a reserved sympathy from most of the ER staff. “We’re behind you,” Kathy Brash said to her. “We know what you went through that night,” Lynn Wilkes added, but their voices were whispers, as though they were afraid of being too public with their support. Jonathan had his allies as well—people who watched her every move, who waited for her to make another error in judgment.

She had heard nothing from Paul since he’d left for Washington, and nothing from Alec since the night she’d stood naked and willing in his arms. She cringed to remember that night. He’d been serious when he said they should avoid each other. For the past couple of nights she lay in bed, waiting for ten-thirty to come, hoping that the phone would ring. She’d finally drop off to sleep, waking up in the morning to the realization that he hadn’t called. Perhaps by now he blamed her too.

Mike hung up the phone and gave her a tired smile. “I need to show you something I received this morning,” he said. He pulled a sheaf of paper from a large envelope and pushed it across the desk to her. “A petition. Three hundred names, all asking for your resignation. Or, I guess, asking me to force you to resign.”

She looked down at the yellow lined paper. Across the top of the first sheet someone had typed: In light of her inadequate handling of the medical emergency which resulted in the death of valued community member Annie Chase O’Neill, the following people call for the immediate resignation of Olivia Simon, M.D.”

She let her eyes brush over the names, lifting the second sheet, the third, trying to determine if Alec’s signature was among the many, but she could not read that quickly, and the names began to blur in front of her. She looked up at Mike.

“I have no intention of asking you to leave, Olivia, but I thought you should know what we’re up against. I’m sorry this has gotten so out of hand.”

Mike had made his own statements to the press, and although he vehemently denied any cover-up, he was reserved and cautious in the words he used. Olivia understood. His position was political as well as medical, and he couldn’t afford to alienate the community. It didn’t matter what he said, anyway. People were hearing only what they wanted to hear. Even after all these months, they wanted a scapegoat, someone to blame for the loss of their beloved Saint Anne.

“Have you heard anything from her husband?” she asked. “Do you know where he stands?”

“Well, I don’t thinks he’s behind this petition. I just hope he’s not talking to a lawyer.”

“Mike, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. What you did may have been unwise from the standpoint of liability, but it took courage. I’m not at all certain I would have had the guts to do something for her here.”

She stood up, and he followed her to the door.

“Keep your chin up,” he said. He gestured toward the petition on his desk. “I’ll figure out what to do about this. You just concentrate on your work.”

She stopped by the studio that evening to show Tom her design for a new stained glass panel—multicolored hot-air balloons above a green meadow. A little more of a challenge. She could already picture it in the window of the nursery.

Tom looked up from the work table when she walked into the studio.

“Hi.” She pulled the roll of graph paper from her tote bag and set the bag itself on the empty chair by the table. “How are you doing?”

“I’m not sure.” Tom’s voice sounded tight, and when she looked down at him, he crossed his arms across his chest.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, Olivia,” he said, “and I’m just not sure I can teach you any longer.”

She stared at him, wondering if his signature was on the petition. “Because of the things Jonathan Cramer’s been saying about me?”

“Because I don’t know what to believe. Because I think you took a risk with the life of a very good friend of mine. A very precious friend.” There were actual tears in his eyes, ready to spill onto his pale eyelashes.

Olivia put her hands on her hips. “I did everything I could for her, Tom. I didn’t kill her. I feel like people are blaming me because Zachary Pointer’s too far away and too invisible—blaming him doesn’t give them much satisfaction. So I’ve become the scapegoat, but I swear to you, Tom, I did the best I could.”

“Maybe you did, Olivia. I can’t judge. All I know is, I can’t sit here with you week after week, letting you use Annie’s glass and Annie’s tools and Annie’s…”

“All right.” She reached for her tote bag. “You’ve made your point.”

“I could give you the names of a few other people who could teach you, but I have to warn you that the art community here’s pretty tight, and I really doubt any of them would be willing to take you on right now.”

She slipped the graph paper back into her bag, and without another word, left the studio. She let the door slam behind her, and a few people in the parking lot turned to stare at her. Did they know who she was? Did everybody know? She got into her car, and just in case someone was watching, waited until she was out in the street before she let herself cry.

Her shift in the emergency room was nearly over the following night when they got a call about a head-on collision out on the main road. One driver had walked away with scratches, but the driver of the other car, a woman in her early twenties, was seriously injured and was being brought in by ambulance.

“We’ll need a second physician,” Olivia said to Kathy as she readied the treatment room.

“I know,” Kathy said, her voice hesitant, “but it’s Jonathan who’s on call.”

Olivia was at the scrub sink. “Well,” she said, “you’d better get him over here.”

The injured driver and Jonathan arrived at the same time. Jonathan plowed into the treatment room, barking orders, looking as though he were already director of the ER. The patient—a twenty-one-year-old woman—was brought in taped to a backboard and wearing a cervical collar. There was a dark bruise already spreading across her abdomen. She was conscious, though not too coherent, and she moaned with pain.

“Wasn’t wearing a seatbelt,” said the paramedic. “She was lucky she got caught on the steering wheel or she would have gone through the window.”

“Get a C-spine,” Olivia said to Kathy, “and a CBC and type and cross. And do a blood alcohol level, while you’re at it.” She thought she smelled alcohol on the young woman’s breath.

Jonathan started an IV in the woman’s arm. “Is the helicopter on its way?” he asked Lynn Wilkes, who nodded. “We’ll stabilize her and send her up,” he said. Then he looked across the patient at Olivia, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “Or do you want to play doctor on her?”

Olivia did not respond. She felt uncertain of their next move with this patient. Her blood pressure was ninety-five over sixty. She was a slender woman who appeared to be in good physical condition. Was that pressure normal for her or an indication of something more ominous? “Pulse is one-ten,” Kathy said, glancing at Olivia.

Olivia carefully palpated the woman’s abdomen. “Abdomen’s firm,” she said, moving her fingers to the woman’s left side. Suddenly the woman groaned, trying to roll away from Olivia’s touch. Was she simply recoiling from pressure on the bruise, or could her spleen be ruptured?

“Let’s tap her abdomen,” Olivia said.

Jonathan scowled at her. “We don’t have time. You want another dead lady on your hands?”

Olivia said nothing more. She followed Jonathan’s lead, helping him prepare the woman for transport, and she felt dizzy as she watched the emergency technicians transfer her to the waiting helicopter. By the time she returned to her office, her legs were weak and rubbery. She sat down at her desk, leaning back in the chair and closing her eyes. She’d been a coward. Why was she letting Jonathan intimidate her?

She should have fought him, but she was terrified now—not of Jonathan, not of losing her job—but of her own judgment. If anyone were to ask her just at that moment, as she sat nauseated and trembling at her desk, if she was certain she’d made the right decision in Annie’s case, she could not have said.

She called Emerson Memorial that night and learned that the woman had indeed suffered a ruptured spleen. Jonathan had been right—the extra minutes it would have taken to tap her abdomen could have cost the young woman her life. Olivia wept, partly from relief that the patient was all right, and partly from the realization that she’d been wrong, that right now she could not trust her own ability to make sound decisions in the ER.

She went to bed, overwhelmed by her solitude. At twelve-thirty, she lifted her phone from the night table to her bed and dialed Alec’s number. His voice was thick with sleep when he answered, and she hung up without saying a word.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

August 1991

Paul walked across Connecticut Avenue, struggling to pull the District of Columbia’s thick, sodden night air into his lungs. You needed gills for this sort of weather. The pink neon sign for Donovan’s Books sprouted from the side of a building half a block in front of him, and he quickened his pace.

Once inside the store he stood by the door for a moment, mopping his forehead with his handkerchief and drinking in the unmitigated splendor of his favorite bookstore in all the world. Olivia’s favorite as well. He missed living here, and he was beginning to miss Olivia.

Nine-thirty at night and the store was packed. Joy. What was open in the Outer Banks at nine-thirty except, perhaps, the bait shops?

He walked slowly through the store, touching books with his fingertips. He’d had poetry readings here on a fairly regular basis. Sunday afternoons, Tuesday evenings. The crowd was always eclectic, always appreciative. Always on his side.

He reached for the stairs in the rear of the store and climbed up to the loft, where he ordered mineral water and a slice of cheesecake from the man at the service counter. Then, carrying his tray, he searched among the small, crowded tables for an empty seat. Two men were just vacating a table near the railing. They offered it to Paul, and he sat down, realizing as he surveyed the store below him that this was the table where he and Olivia had always tried to sit. For the first two years of their marriage, they had lived in an apartment directly across the street. Even after they’d bought the house in Kensington, they’d meet a few times a week at this table, spending hours over mineral water and avocado sandwiches as they worked together on The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit. God, how he had loved writing that book with her.

He’d been at Washington General to cover the illness of a senator when he got word of the train plunging into the Potomac. He was the first reporter to reach the emergency room, and in the chaos of that moment, and during the hours that followed, no one seemed to notice him or monitor his actions.

He saw Olivia for the first time when she was meeting a stretcher-borne victim of the train wreck at the automatic doors to the ER. She was grabbing her long brown hair up into a sloppy, off-center ponytail, slipping a rubber band from her wrist to her hair to hold it in place. Then she and the paramedics whisked the elderly woman past Paul on their way to the trauma room, Olivia pressing a piece of bloody gauze to the wound in the woman’s side, talking calmly to her all the while. Dozens of doctors and nurses worked hard in that ER over the next few days, but Paul could not shift his focus from Olivia. He watched her tell families that their loved ones would either live or die. He watched her softly touch their arms, or hold them when they needed to be held. By the end of those few frightening days, her hair hung limply down her back and her bangs were swept by sweat and grime off her forehead. Her green scrubs were streaked with blood, and dark circles ringed the delicate alabaster skin around her eyes. He thought she was entirely beautiful.

He wished he’d been drawn to Olivia because he was finally ready for someone new, but he knew it was her utterly selfless compassion in the ER that had seduced him, because it reminded him of Annie. The comparison was ridiculous. Annie, with her disregard for time and her totally chaotic approach to life, would have created havoc in an emergency room. It was Olivia’s cool, clinical efficiency that made her so good. It took him a while to realize she was not at all like Annie, but by then he had genuinely fallen in love with her.

Some evenings he and Olivia would sit at this table and page through books she’d plucked from the shelves on her way through the store. She usually selected books on nature, or medicine. Early in their relationship, she went through a phase of reading every book she could find on sex. Having denied any sexual thoughts or feelings for much of her life, she was unstoppable once she’d been set free. Sex with Olivia had been like teaching a child a new game—at first she’d been uncertain of her ability, but once the rules were mastered, she wanted to play it continually. And she’d played it very well indeed.

During the last few years of their marriage, though, the books she’d bring to the table were filled with the sobering, sometimes hopeful, sometimes disheartening information on infertility.

Paul ate the last bite of his cheesecake, letting it melt in his mouth as he studied the gold band on his finger. He had put it on just that morning, and although he had not worn it in many months, it comforted him to see it on his hand. He and Olivia would not have drifted away from each other if they’d been able to have a family. He’d felt cheated when he learned she was incapable of conceiving. He struggled not to let his feelings show. It was not in any way her fault, and her own disappointment was keen. He was nearing the point of pulling himself together from that blow when she announced she had received the job offer in the Outer Banks.

He was incredulous. He knew Annie lived in the Outer Banks with her husband and two children, and he was filled with an odd mixture of excitement and terror. He tried to talk Olivia out of taking the offer, but she returned from her interview raving about the uniqueness of the area and the quiet challenge of the position being offered to her. It’s too isolated, he said. Too far from his family and their friends. He knew in retrospect his argument had been weakly offered, that in truth, he was electrified by the idea of being close to Annie. As his fantasies grew of what it would be like, how he might see her, might just bump into her at the grocery store or on the beach, he withdrew further and further from Olivia. When he spoke to her at all it was with a sharp edge to his voice. He was angry with her for putting him in this situation.

Once the move was complete, he managed to wait all of a week before looking up O’Neill in the phone book. She was listed both at her home address and at her studio. He waited another day before driving past the studio, and one more before going in.

She’d been alone, adjusting a photograph on the far wall, and the look on her face when she turned to see him could not have been more horror-filled if he had walked in sporting two heads.

“Don’t panic,” he said quickly, holding up a hand to ward off anything she might say. “I’m not here to cause you any trouble. I’m married too. Happily. My wife is a physician at the emergency room in Kill Devil Hills.” He rambled on about Olivia, partly to fill the silence, partly to convince her he had no intention of being a threat to her or her marriage.

She flattened herself against the wall of photographs as she listened to him, her arms folded protectively across her chest. Her hands hugged her elbows so tightly that he could see the whiteness of her knuckles from where he stood on the other side of the room.

She looked extraordinary. A little heavier than the last time he’d seen her. Not overweight, but she had a woman’s body now. Still the same hair, though not quite so wild, and the red was softened by those occasional strands of silver. Her skin was as dewy and fair as it had been when he first met her.

When he finally paused for breath, she spoke. “You’ll have to tell her you can’t stay here,” she said. “It won’t work, Paul. Please. It would be impossible for you to live here without us constantly bumping into each other.”

Her words only served to encourage his fantasy. Why would she care where he lived if she didn’t fear being tempted by him?

“I didn’t want to move here, believe me,” he said. “I tried to talk Olivia out of taking the job, but she was sold on it.”

“Does she know about me?”

He shook his head. “She doesn’t even know about the summer I lived here. I started to tell her about you once, long ago, but Olivia’s one of those people who wants to leave the past in the past.” Olivia’s own past had been so weighty, so painful, that it had absorbed nearly all their energy in the early days of their relationship. He’d had to undo all that had been done to her, and after that she wanted to put the past behind her. She knew only that he’d had a very serious relationship long before he met her. She wanted to know no more than that.

He walked to the back wall of the studio to study the breathtaking stained glass. “Your work is beautiful, Annie. You’ve come a long way.”

“I’ve changed, Paul,” she said. “I’m not the woman you used to know. Please don’t have any illusions that you and I can have a relationship again.”

“Just friendship.”

“No. It’s impossible.” She lowered her voice, and he knew someone else must be in the studio. “There was too much between us for us to simply be friends.”

He was close enough to her now to see fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. He wanted to see her laugh, to hear her ringing giggle bounce off the glass.

“I’m working for the Gazette,” he said, “and freelancing. I’d like to do an article on you for Seascape Magazine.”

“No.”

“I’ve already spoken to the editor about it. Please, Annie. It would help me get my name known here.”

He started as a door creaked open behind him, and he turned to see a large, ponytailed man walk into the room from what must have been a darkroom. Annie stepped toward him. “Tom,” she said. “This is Paul Macelli. He’s a journalist who wants to do a story on me in Seascape.”

“Hello,” Paul said as he shook Tom’s hand. He would play her game. He would act as though they were strangers to one another if that was what she wanted.

“Well, you couldn’t pick a better person to write about,” Tom said. “She’s a real Jill-of-all-trades. Anything going on in the community, she’s a part of it, and you can see for yourself what a talented artist she is.” He talked on, telling him little details about her work that Paul began jotting down in a notebook, while Annie lowered herself behind the work table, looking up at both of them, her eyes resigned and unsmiling.

The interviews began. He let her talk about her son and daughter, about Alec. Those meetings fed the roots of his obsession. He sent the Seascape photographer to her studio and demanded he take dozens of pictures, far more than Paul would ever need for the article, so that he could keep them for himself. He could pretend the smile she showed the camera was meant for him, because he was seeing so little of it in real life. She wanted him again; he was certain of it. There was no other reason why she should be afraid of his being nearby. She had to want him.

He had no friends. A growing number of acquaintances, but no one to confide in, and he was bursting to talk. And there was Olivia, ready to listen.

Olivia. How had she tolerated him all those weeks, those months, when he was wrapped up in Annie, when he spoke of nothing else?

It had been a terrible sickness in him. From this distance he could see it for what it was: a pathetic obsession that was costing him his sleep, his self-respect, his marriage. A few days earlier, Gabe had called him at the hotel to tell him about the Gazette article in which Jonathan Cramer accused Olivia of mishandling Annie’s case. He’d thought about it all night and he knew Cramer was wrong. He only had to think back to the wreck of the Eastern Spirit to know how wrong he was. He would trust Olivia with his own life, with the lives of anyone he loved. Annie had stood a better chance of survival under Olivia’s care than she would have with any other physician in the state. He could see that now, from this distance, as surely as he could feel Olivia’s presence in this bookstore. He had been satisfied during those years he and Olivia lived up here. With Olivia, he had finally been a man in control of himself and his demons, and he’d been grateful to her for freeing him from his obsession.

For her trouble he’d repaid her with pain, with coldness, with cruelty. Now she was handling harassment by the paper he worked for, as though he was still hurting her even when he was not physically there.

He looked at his watch. She would still be up by the time he got back to the hotel if he left right now. He paid the bill and hurried out into the hot night air.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The phone rang at ten-thirty-five. Olivia was lathering her hair in the shower, and she stepped out quickly, drawing a towel around her as she raced into the bedroom to answer it before the machine picked it up.

It was Paul’s voice, not Alec’s, that greeted her, and for a split second, she was disappointed.

“Are you back?” she asked.

“No. I’m in a hotel in D.C. I’ll get back tomorrow.” He sounded tired. A little tense.

“How are you?” she asked.

He was quiet for a moment. Then she heard a slight laugh, or maybe a cough. “Physically, I’m fine. Emotionally, I’m coming to grips with the fact that I’ve been out of my mind.”

The shampoo was beginning to drizzle down Olivia’s back. “What are you talking about?” She stretched the phone cord down the hall to the linen closet, where she pulled out a towel and draped it around her neck.

“I talked to Gabe at the Gazette and he told me about the flak on Annie’s case. I’m sorry, Olivia. I didn’t think the Gazette was capable of yellow journalism. Maybe if I’d been there I could have prevented it somehow.”

She walked back into the bedroom and sat down on the bed. “You thought I was to blame too,” she said.

“For Annie dying? No, Liv, I know you too well to have seriously thought that. I did wonder how you could have done it, though. How you could work on her when I’d been so obnoxious about the way I felt about her, but I know you did your best. I’m sorry I ever accused you of anything less.”

She cradled the receiver between her palms. “It means a lot to me to hear you say that.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I’ve been doing some thinking up here,” he said. “D.C.’s loaded with memories of you—of us together. I stopped in Donovan’s Books tonight.”

“Oh.” The sights and sounds and warm-coffee smell of Donovan’s filled her head.

“I wish we’d never left here. Things were good for us here.”

“But we agreed we didn’t want to raise a family there, whether we had our own children or adopted or…”

“I know, I know.” He paused. She heard him let out his breath. “Can I see you when I get back?”

“Of course.”

“I mean, a date? We’ll go out someplace, get to know each other again.”

“I’d like that.” She matched the tenderness in his voice with her own.

“I should be there around five.”

“I work until seven.” She cringed, waiting for him to chastise her for allowing her work to interfere with her marriage again.

“Seven is fine,” he said, then he hesitated for a moment. “Liv? Why aren’t you fighting this thing with Cramer? It’s so unlike you to just sit back and take it.”

She ran her hand over her bedspread. He was right. She usually took her adversaries head-on, battling them just as she had battled every other obstacle in her life.

“My only recourse would be to ask for a medical review panel,” she said, “but I’m not sure I have the strength right now to go through that process.”

“Do it, Liv. I’ll be behind you all the way. I promise.”

She thanked him, surprised and somewhat guarded, unable to completely trust his words, his warmth. Yet by the time she’d hung up the phone, she’d made a decision, and despite the hour, she called Mike Shelley.

Mike listened quietly as she told him her plan. She could guess what he was thinking. A review panel would not only put her on the line, but the emergency room itself.

“Please hold off a day or two on taking any action, Olivia,” Mike said finally. “Let me think about it a bit.”

She got off the phone, feeling better, feeling less helpless than she had a half hour earlier. She stood in front of the full-length mirror on her closet door. Her hair was white with lather. She let the towel drop to the carpet and turned to look at her profile. There was no denying the slight protrusion of her belly. If Paul touched her, he would know. It had been enough to make Alec pull away from her.

Instead of putting on her nightgown, she dressed in a T-shirt and the only pair of jeans she could still zip closed. Then she walked outside to the storage closet and took a couple of screwdrivers and a wrench from the small hardware kit Paul had left her when he moved out. She carried them into the nursery, along with the radio and a glass of ginger ale, and settled in for a long and satisfying night of crib construction.

At the change of shift the following evening, Mike called Olivia and Jonathan into his office. Jonathan sat near the window, wearing the sour smirk that was a permanent part of his demeanor these days, while Olivia took the chair closest to the door.

Mike leaned forward, his forearms on his desk. “Jonathan,” he began, “I want you to retract your ‘cover-up’ statement to the press.”

“I’m not going to retract something I think is the truth.”

Mike shook his head. “Olivia is planning to request a medical review panel, and if that occurs, I will be telling that panel the truth as I see it, which is that both of you were right in the O’Neill case.” Mike spoke slowly, as if he expected Jonathan would have difficulty following him. “Olivia was right to take the action she did because she has the skill and the experience to perform that type of surgery. A case could be made for malpractice if she had not attempted to save Ms. O’Neill’s life in that way. But you, Jonathan, were also right. Do you know why?” He didn’t wait for Jonathan to respond. “You were right because you do not have the skill or experience to perform that procedure. It would have been malpractice if you had attempted it. So.” Mike sat back again, his eyes on Jonathan. “Is that what you’d like this community to hear?”

Jonathan’s eyes had narrowed. There was a thin bead of sweat above his upper lip. “You’re twisting the…”

“I’m twisting nothing,” Mike growled, leaning forward again, and Olivia was as surprised as Jonathan by the force of his reaction. “You make that retraction or Olivia is calling for a review panel to clear her name. And clear it she will, which isn’t going to make you look too good, is it?”

She felt Jonathan’s eyes on her, felt his burning, penetrating glare. “Don’t bother,” he said to her, standing up. “I’m resigning, effective immediately. Then you can tap abdomens till your heart’s content, for all I care.” He took off his stethoscope, and in a exaggerated gesture, slapped it down on the desk before storming out of the office.

Mike looked at the stethoscope, and Olivia thought he was trying not to smile. He raised his eyes to hers. “I apologize for not doing that sooner, Olivia. Please wait on the review panel until we see what the outcome of this is.” He nodded toward his phone. “Shall I call the Gazette and tell them the news?”

She changed her clothes in the lounge for her date with Paul, ignoring the rumors that were already crackling through the ER about what had taken place in Mike’s office. She dressed in a blue skirt that masked her expanding middle, and a white, short-sleeved sweater. When she stepped out of the lounge, she spotted Paul in the waiting room and felt a nearly forgotten flutter of longing for him.

He’d brought her a delicate blue tea rose in a silver bud vase, and she recognized it as the rare variety she had grown in the yard of their old house in Kensington. Her throat ached to see it, the remnant of a happier time.

“I cut it this morning,” he said as they walked out to his car. “Snuck into the yard before the sun was up.”

His out-of-character wickedness made her smile.

He started the car and pulled out of the parking lot, glancing over at her once they were on the road. “You look good,” he said.

“Thanks.” She noticed he was wearing his wedding ring again. He was serious about this, about missing her, about getting back together. She studied his profile. He had a lovely chin with the suggestion of a cleft, and a fine, straight nose, but he really did not look well. He had lost a good deal of weight these last few months. His skin was sallow, his cheeks drawn, and she felt a little sorry for him.

She told him about her meeting with Jonathan and Mike, thanking him for his encouragement. “I’d gotten sort of paralyzed, I guess,” she said.

“What’s it been like for you since the story came out in the Gazette?”

She described the bilious letters to the editor that had appeared in the last two issues of the Gazette. Their irate tone and the mushrooming of negative sentiment toward her were humiliating. She told him about her stiffness at work and her sudden lack of faith in her own judgment, surprising herself with her willingness to talk to him so openly. Then she told him about the petition. “I expected to see your name at the top,” she said. “I figured the only reason you weren’t on it was because you were out of town.”

He reached over to squeeze her shoulder. “Forgive me for ever thinking you wouldn’t do your best with her. It hurts me to see your name dragged through the mud this way, Liv. Really, it does.”

At the next stoplight, he pulled out his wallet and handed her a picture of Joe Gallo’s granddaughter. He told her about his conversation with Joe and how proud he had felt to be her husband, but she only half listened.

She would have to tell him she’d gone to Norfolk with Alec, that she’d done that talk show. He was sure to hear about it at the next lighthouse meeting, and it would be better if he heard it from her. Not now, though. She didn’t want to damage the closeness she felt to him here in his car.

When they pulled into the restaurant parking lot, she turned to lay her sweater on the back seat of the car and saw the small oval of stained glass attached to the window. It was too dark to see the design, but she had no doubt it was one of Annie’s, and the hope she’d felt these last twenty-four hours was abruptly tempered by reality.

She carried the rose into the restaurant, exchanging it for the carnation on their table. After their drinks had been served, she folded her hands on the edge of the table and drew in a breath.

“I was on a radio talk show in Norfolk last Saturday,” she said. “About the lighthouse.”

“What?” His eyes widened behind his glasses. “What do you mean?”

“Alec O’Neill called me. He was supposed to make two appearances up there on the same day, so he asked me if I’d be willing to handle one of them since I had experience doing that sort of thing.”

“That’s ridiculous. You don’t know a thing about the lighthouse.”

“I do now.”

Paul pumped the stirrer up and down in his drink. “Did you and Alec drive up together?”

“Yes.” He let out his breath, ran a hand over his chin. “What have you told him, Olivia? I mean, does he have any idea why we’re separated?”

“He doesn’t know anything about you and Annie.”

“Well, what did you talk about for…what is it, two hours each way?”

She thought back to all she had told Alec, to how thoroughly she had let him into her personal life. “We worked on our presentations going up and talked about how they went coming back. That’s all.”

Paul sat back in his chair and shook his head. “I don’t get this at all. Why you? Why do you care about the lighthouse enough to speak about it?”

“Why do you care so much?”

He colored quickly. “I’ve always had a fascination with lighthouses,” he said. “You just didn’t know about it because we lived in the District, where lighthouses are few and far between.” He bent his stirrer between his fingers until it snapped. “It just makes me uncomfortable to know you’re talking to O’Neill. Do you have any more of these speaking engagements lined up?”

“No.”

“Don’t take any more, all right?”

She folded her arms across her chest. “If I have the time and interest, I’m going to do it, Paul. You really have no right to tell me not to.”

The woman at the next table glanced over at them, and Paul lowered his voice. “Let’s not talk about this now, okay?” he said. “I wanted tonight to be good. Let’s talk about Washington.”

“All right.” She leaned away from the table as the waitress set her salad in front of her.

“I felt good there, Olivia. I haven’t felt that way in so long. I’ve been back just a few hours and I’m already tensing up. It’s this place.” He shuddered. “The Outer Banks. It reminds me too much of Annie here. It’s too small. Everywhere I go there are reminders of her. The way the air smells makes me think of her.”

“I love the way it smells,” she said, alarmed with herself for baiting him. The way the air smelled made her think of Alec and the evening they stood on the balcony of the Kiss River Lighthouse, the beacon pulsing above them. Every time she stepped outside now, she breathed in the air in huge, cleansing gulps.

Paul looked down at his salad. “If you and I get back together, we’ll have to leave here.”

She felt stricken. “I love it here, Paul, in spite of the fact that half the populace would like to see me lynched. I’m hoping that will blow over. I think this would be the perfect place to raise a family.”

“What family?” he asked, and the woman at the next table could not resist glancing at them again. “You’re thirty-seven years old and the surgery only gave you a twenty percent chance of conceiving. Not very good odds.”

Olivia leaned closer to him to avoid being overheard. “I’m more convinced than you are that I could conceive. If I don’t, we could adopt. We’ve talked this out before. It’s nothing new.”

“Things have changed since the last time we talked about a family.”

The waitress delivered their entrees, and Olivia watched the muscles in the side of Paul’s jaw contract as he waited out the intrusion.

“You don’t understand,” he said, once the waitress had left. “I have to get out of here, Olivia, that’s all there is to it. Whether it’s with you or without you, I have to leave. I drove down here today feeling good and optimistic about us and looking forward to seeing you, but as soon as I crossed the bridge into Kitty Hawk, this black cloud dropped over my head. My mood got worse and worse as I drove down the island, and by the time I got to my house and out of the car…” He shook his head. “It’s like she’s still here, more powerful than she ever was when she was alive.”

Olivia felt her patience slipping. “What do you expect? Your house is full of reminders of her. Maybe if you got rid of…all the icons, all the tangible evidence that you ever knew her, you’d start to forget about her.”

He looked, briefly, angry, and she suddenly realized she could not just forgive him and go on. She was filled with her own anger.

“There’s nothing I want more than for us to get back together,” she said, “but I refuse to live in Annie’s shadow again.”

“Then we have to leave here.”

“I’m not going to leave a place I’ve come to love until I see real evidence that you’re over her. Throw out the stained glass. Break it into pieces.”

He started visibly.

“Oh, Paul.” She crumpled her napkin and set it next to her plate. “You’re not ready, are you?”

“Not to destroy the stained glass, no.” He looked exhausted, his eyes red and half-closed behind his glasses. She thought of Annie as a succubus, coming in the night to drain the life out of him. Perhaps Annie was more Paul’s nemesis than she was hers.

He drove her back to her car in the emergency room parking lot after dinner. She was glad he was not driving her home, where she would have felt the need to invite him in, where the night before she had worked on the crib until she was giddy. He walked her to her car, holding her hand. He kissed her lightly on the lips, and she turned abruptly to unlock the door of the Volvo. She would give him no chance to touch her, no chance to discover her secret.

She arrived home to find a message on her answering machine from Clark Chapman, the medical director of Emerson Memorial. She frowned as she listened to his deep, resonant voice.

“Please give me a call when you get in tonight,” he said. He left a number and told her he would be up until eleven. It was not quite ten now.

She dialed his number, curious.

“Dr. Simon!” He sounded delighted to hear from her, as if they were old friends. “How are you?”

She hesitated, wondering if perhaps she had met him somewhere and had forgotten. “I’m fine, thank you,” she said.

“You’re wondering why I’m calling, right?”

“Well, yes.”

“I’d rather have this conversation in person, of course, but I didn’t want to put it off that long. I’ve been following your story, Dr. Simon. It was more than idle curiosity on my part, of course, since your patient—Mrs. O’Neill—would have ended up in our trauma center had you opted to transport her.”

“Yes.”

“And you and I both know she would have come to us DOA.”

Gratitude and relief rushed through her, and her eyes threatened to fill. She cried too easily these days. “You and I seem to be the only people who are certain of that,” she said.

“I’ve spoken to some colleagues of mine at Washington General,” Clark Chapman continued. “People who can attest to your clinical skill and sound judgment. You made the far more difficult choice with Mrs. O’Neill, didn’t you? You demonstrated initiative and courage, at considerable personal risk.” There was a smile in his voice. “Are you wondering what I’m leading up to?”

“Yes.”

“I’m offering you a job. You’d be co-director of our trauma team. It’s a great group of people. They already think you’re a bit of a hero.”

It was perfect. One of those weird serendipitous occurrences that suddenly made everything fall into place. She and Paul could be together in a new location, without the rush of Washington, yet without reminders of Annie for either of them. Still, aside from feeling vindicated by Clark Chapman’s words, she felt no enthusiasm.

“I’m very flattered,” she said, “but I’m not sure I’m ready to leave the Outer Banks. I don’t want to simply run away from my problems here.” It was not exactly the truth, but Clark Chapman seemed to accept it.

“It’s an open invitation,” he said. “Come visit us.” He gave her his work number, and she jotted it down in her appointment book. “The position would be created for you,” he added. “It doesn’t exist right now, but we’ve got a few extra bucks for that department, so it’s yours whenever you say the word.”

She hung up the phone, feeling strangely flat. Wary. She couldn’t allow herself to hope, couldn’t give herself over to a new dream of the future when she didn’t yet trust her husband to be a committed, contented part of it. But Paul was back, she told herself. Paul had missed her. Surely they would be able to work things out.

Once in bed, though, once she had closed her eyes, all she could see was that telltale oval of glass on the window of his car.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Paul Macelli was back, more nervous than the first time, if that was possible. Mary had been waiting weeks for him and was beginning to think he wouldn’t come again, that he’d lost his courage after his first visit. She hated waiting. She was ninety years old. It seemed like all she did these days was wait.

Paul adjusted his glasses and took the tape recorder from his briefcase, setting it once again on the broad arm of Mary’s rocking chair. He pressed the button to begin recording.

“I’d like to hear about you today,” he said. “They used to call you the Angel of the Light, didn’t they?”

“So they did,” she said, a little surprised, but pleased all the same. “What do you want to know?”

“You said you met your husband in Deweytown. Is that where you grew up?”

“Oh, yes. Deweytown was just about cosmopolitan compared to Kiss River, I can tell you that. My father owned a little grocery store over there. Caleb was worried I wouldn’t want to leave Deweytown, but I had plenty of spunk in those days. I thought it would be an adventure living in Kiss River.”

“And was it?”

Mary smiled. “At times, yes. At other times—well, it didn’t matter. I was always one for having a good imagination. I knew how to keep myself occupied when there was nothing more exciting going on than watching the beacon go round.” Mary clamped her lips shut. She’d better watch how much she said. She looked over at him as he adjusted his glasses again. He was jiggling one leg up and down, sending an irritating vibration into the floor of the porch.

“So,” he said. “Tell me how you came to be known as the Angel of the Light.”

“Well.” Mary looked out at the street. “I guess you could say I had a way with people, and living out at Kiss River, you got real hungry for company. So any time I’d hear someone in the village was sick, I’d take them food and make sure they had whatever it was they needed. Sometimes I’d carry them across the sound to the doctor in Deweytown in our little boat. I guess I just got a reputation for helping people out.”

Mary shifted in the rocker. It had bothered her that people thought she was so good. They hadn’t known her, really.

“Caleb and I made a good team,” she continued, looking once again at Paul. “We were both hard workers, and we both loved the lighthouse. Anytime I’d see a ship, I’d go out on the gallery and wave. So I guess I got myself a reputation that way, too. Sailors would ask each other who that lady on the lighthouse was, and they’d say, why, that’s Mary Poor, who’s always friendly, always doing a good turn for someone. Sailors watched for me then, hoping I’d be out waving when they went by.”

She looked toward the harbor and closed her eyes to block out the view of the boats, imagining in their place the towering white spire of the lighthouse.

“I could cook, too.” She opened her eyes again and smiled. “I was a bit famous for my persimmon cakes and puddings. I believe you’ve had a taste of one of my persimmon cakes, haven’t you?”

“Uh.” Paul dropped his pen, bent over to pick it up. “I don’t recall,” he said, straightening up again.

“Too bad I couldn’t make one right now,” Mary said, “but they don’t allow us to cook. Or drink. Or smoke. You have a cigarette with you today?”

“Sorry, no. I don’t smoke.” He shifted in the rocker and pushed the recorder a little closer to Mary. “Tell me about the work you did with the Life Saving Service.”

Mary felt herself color and hoped that Paul Macelli did not notice. “Well, I guess that’s another reason they got to calling me the Angel. A more important reason, really.” She sat up taller in the chair, straightening her spine. “I was very strong, you see. I could swim better than most men. I’d be out in the ocean nearly every day, swimming back and forth, back and forth. My arms were solid as brick, and my legs too, from climbing up to the top of the tower.” Mary smiled to herself. “I had a dream of working with the Life Saving Service, you see. We knew a lot of the men who worked over at the station and I’d ask to go out with them when they were rescuing someone. Of course they just laughed at me. But in 1927, I finally got my chance. Caleb and I were down a mile or so on the beach because we heard there was a boat stranded on the bar. When we got there, the boys from the Life Saving Station had just sent out their power boat to try to save the crew. It was real squally that day, and the power boat got hit straight on by a big breaker and started going to pieces. There were just a few of the men left on the beach with their old surfboat. They quick got in and headed out to sea, and I saw my chance.” Mary smiled to herself. “I just jumped in with them, in my skirt and all. They were too shorthanded and too shocked to stop and tell me to get out. I’ll tell you, those oars felt right natural to me, and we managed to load the fellas from the power boat into the surfboat without a hitch. I was stiff in the shoulders for a few days, but I didn’t care. After that, the Life Saving crew sometimes called on me—unofficially, of course—when they needed an extra pair of hands.”

Mary rested her head against the back of the rocker. All this talking was wearing on her.

“Would you like to stop for today?” Paul asked.

Mary shook her head. “I’m not finished just yet,” she said. There was one last story she needed to tell—and a story it was, more fiction than fact. She’d told it this way for so long now, she could hardly remember the truth anymore. “You see, in the end it was my courage—or maybe my foolhardiness—that cost me my husband. In July of 1964, I was up in the tower when I spotted a man swimming off Kiss River and it looked like he was in trouble. I ran down to the beach and went in after him. He was unconscious when I got to him and he was just too heavy for me and I started getting crampy and going under. Caleb somehow caught sight of us and he came out to the beach and jumped in after the both of us. He managed to get us out, too, but it was all too much for him. He was sixty-four years old. His heart stopped right there and he fell out on the sand.”

“I’m sorry,” Paul said. “That’s a tragic way to lose someone.”

Mary stared into space for a moment. “Yes, it was,” she said finally. She raised her hands and dropped them on her thighs. “Well, that’s all for today, I think.”

“Of course.” Paul turned off his recorder and stood up. “Thanks again for your help,” he said.

Mary watched him walk down the sidewalk to his car. The stories had tired her, made her remember things about herself she did not like to remember. And they made her remember a night long ago when she’d told those same stories to Annie.

She’d known Annie for only a few months then, but already she’d felt a comfort with her young friend she’d never known with another soul, woman or man. She had never had the luxury of a close woman friend, and despite the difference in their ages, she knew she could confide in Annie. She could tell Annie the truth.

It was on a cold evening in January, one of many evenings Annie had spent with her back then. Alec was struggling to make a go of a veterinary practice, but the Outer Banks were so sparsely populated that he spent most of his time treating farm animals on the mainland. He was gone often in the evenings, pulling calves, or tending to colicky horses, leaving Annie with entirely too much time on her hands.

She had Clay with her, as she often did, on that night in January. Clay would totter around the keeper’s house, talking gibberish and getting into things. Finally, Annie would lay him down in the small upstairs bedroom, setting pillows at the edge of the bed so he couldn’t roll out. She’d sing to him in that soft, dusky voice that made Mary’s heart ache as she listened to her from the chair by the fire. She could picture the room—the room that had been Caleb’s as a child—filling with light every few seconds. Annie might pull the shades and draw the curtains, but the light would still find cracks to pass through, and Clay would slip under its hypnotic spell. He would be asleep quickly, more quickly than he ever fell asleep at home.

After a bit, Annie would come downstairs, where Mary had the fire raging and the brandy poured. For the first time in a decade, she had a bond with another human being.

Most nights were filled with Annie’s chatter, and Mary loved listening to her, to the way she mangled words with her accent. She spoke about Alec, whom she adored, or about Clay, or the stained glass. Sometimes she spoke of her parents, whom she had not seen since meeting her husband. Her phone calls to them were not returned, she said; the letters she wrote them were sent back unopened. Once, she and the baby flew to Boston, thinking her parents surely wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to see their only grandchild. But she was turned away at their front door by a maid who told her she was no longer welcome in her parents’ home.

She worried about Alec, driving so much in foul weather, working outdoors with huge animals. His hands were chapped and raw most of the time, she said, and once his arm had been broken by the ferocious contractions of a cow in labor. She’d gone with him a few times, but he’d said it was no place for her—and certainly no place for Clay—out in the middle of nowhere with the wind tearing at their clothes and stinging their eyes. So she ended up with Mary at the keeper’s house more often than not.

As Mary felt the brandy warm her on this particular night in January, it was her voice, not Annie’s, that echoed softly in the living room of the house. The fire crackled and spit, and the ocean roared not far from where they sat, but Mary’s voice was calm and steady. She could not have said why she poured it all out to Annie that night, that secret side of her self she had never bared to a soul, except that with Annie’s silence, her loving gaze, she spurred her on.

Mary told her the same tales she’d told Paul Macelli—how she had come to be known as the Angel of the Light through her acts of kindness and caring.

“You remind me of myself in that way, Annie,” she said. “You have such a good heart. You go out of your way for folks, with never a thought for yourself.” She sipped her brandy, feeding herself courage. “But that’s where the comparison ends. You’re really a far better person than I ever was. A far better woman.”

Annie looked over at Mary, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the fire. “Why do you say that?”

Mary shrugged as though what she had to say next was easy for her. Insignificant. “I had another side of me,” she said, “a side I never let anyone see.” She looked hard into Annie’s eyes. “You see, my husband was the best husband a woman could ask for. Patient and kind and strong. But it never felt like enough for me. Maybe it was the isolation. I don’t know. But I wanted to…” She pursed her lips, staring into the orange flames in the fireplace. “I wanted to have other men,” she finished.

“Oh,” said Annie. “And so…did you?”

“Only in my imagination.” Mary shut her eyes. “It was the strongest feeling. The strongest yearning. I’m ashamed to talk about it.”

“You don’t need to be ashamed. Lots of women think about…”

Mary brushed away whatever Annie was about to say with a wave of her hand. “Not the way I did. I’d lie awake at night, imagining being with other men I knew. I’d be with Caleb…lying with Caleb…and I’d imagine he was someone else. Sometimes I couldn’t do my work. I’d go up in the tower to polish the lens, and instead I’d sit on the gallery and daydream. I’d wave to the sailors and imagine them returning at night, coming up on the beach to look for me. I used to think about hanging a red cloth from the gallery to let them know when Caleb was gone, when I would be…available. Once I went so far as to buy the cloth.”

Mary felt the color in her cheeks. How foolish she must seem, a seventy-three-year-old woman talking this way.

“But you never hung the cloth?” Annie prodded.

“No.”

“It must have hurt,” Annie said, “wanting to do something so badly, but thinking that you couldn’t.”

Mary smiled. Annie did understand. “That was the real reason I wanted to work with the Life Saving crew,” she said, “so I could be around the men, so I could feel the excitement of what might happen. But I’d come to my senses every time I came close to going through with it. What right did I have to be so dissatisfied, I’d ask myself? To want more than I had?”

Mary tapped her fingertips against the glass. She would have liked a cigarette, but she knew it distressed Annie when she smoked.

“Sometimes I’d force myself to stop thinking about other men, but it felt like I was cutting off a leg or an arm, it was so much a part of me. We’d go to church and even there I couldn’t stop myself from imagining. People would say that Caleb wasn’t good enough for me. Some of them would ask me what I saw in him, me being such a fine woman—so they thought—and Caleb just a plain man, solid and steady.” She shook her head. “He was a thousand times better than I was.”

Annie leaned forward in her chair, the fire throwing gold light into her long red hair. “You are far too hard on your self, Mary.”

Mary took a full swallow of the brandy, thick as honey as it warmed her throat. She looked up at Annie. “It was my nonsense that killed Caleb,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

Mary shook her head. “Even at sixty-three, my head was still full of that schoolgirl silliness. No one knows this—the truth of how Caleb died, I mean. Can you keep it here in this room?”

Annie nodded.

“Well, there was a fisherman who’d taken a shine to me when I was in my thirties, and we talked off and on over the years, teasing each other about how one day we’d do more than just talk. Finally he persuaded me. He told me I wasn’t getting any younger, and I thought to myself. He’s right. It’s got to be now or never. We planned to meet one evening when Caleb was away for the night. Only Caleb didn’t go. So when I went out to the beach, it was to tell Chester it was off for that night. He didn’t believe me, I guess. Thought I was weaseling out of it. So he started kissing me right there on the beach, and I was fighting him, afraid Caleb might be up in the tower. And that’s just where he was. He saw it all and thought Chester was attacking me. He flew down those stairs and out to the beach and started sparring with Chester. Two gray-haired old men.” She shook her head. “They ran into the water, pounding each other in the waves. Caleb was just too old for that. They both were really, two old coots going at it like a couple of wild Indians. By the time Caleb drug himself out of the water, he couldn’t get his breath and he just fell dead at my feet.” Mary winced, recalling her initial disbelief that Caleb was dead, and, later, her self-loathing.

“A few weeks after Caleb was buried, Chester had the nerve to ask me to marry him. Needless to say, I turned him down. I’d finally found the cure for my wicked imagination, but it came with a big price tag.”

Mary talked a while longer and felt a change in Annie, a silent drawing in. Annie had wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and now she pulled it tighter, staring at the flames as Mary spoke. After a while, they heard a faint cry from upstairs.

“He’s awake,” Annie said softly.

Mary nodded. “You’d better get home.”

Annie rose, letting the shawl drop from her shoulders to the chair. Her footsteps were heavy and slow on the stairs. Mary listened to her reassuring Clay with her cooing and clucking.

When Annie returned downstairs, she handed the baby to Mary, resting him on the older woman’s lap. “Let me stoke the fire for you before I go,” she said, as she always did. She stirred the wood for many minutes, and Mary watched the flames leaping around her head. When Annie finally stood up and lifted Clay into her arms, her face was flushed, and heat poured from her hands and her clothes. She didn’t meet Mary’s eyes, and for a moment Mary wished she had not spoken so freely. She had risked too much in telling her. She had risked this special friendship.

Mary stood up and walked Annie out onto the porch. Annie turned to face her, hugging her baby close to her against the wind.

“Mary,” she said. “Your longings…your fantasies…they didn’t make you a bad person.”

Mary breathed in a quick, silent sigh of relief. “No,” she said.

She watched as Annie walked through the darkness toward her car. Halfway there, she turned back to Mary, and in a voice so soft she could barely be heard over the sound of the sea, said, “Mary. We are more alike than you know.”

For just a moment she was illuminated by the beacon of the lighthouse and Mary saw the shine of her cheeks, the stubby hand of her child coming up to touch her chin, and then the world was dark again.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Paul’s car was in her driveway when she got home from the emergency room that Thursday evening. Olivia felt a disconcerting mix of joy and anger. Should he be allowed to come and go as he pleased? What if he’d walked into the room that was to become the nursery and discovered the crib?

Inside, the house smelled of garlic and olive oil and wine, familiar smells of Paul’s cooking. She walked into the kitchen, and he smiled at her from the stove where he stood over the skillet, a fork in his hand like a conductor’s baton and his old red smock apron tied around his waist.

“Hi,” he said. “I thought I’d surprise you. Scampi.” She had told him once, long ago, that his scampi was an aphrodisiac.

She set her purse on the table. “Could you let me know before you come over in the future?” she asked. “I don’t think it’s fair for you to…just walk into this house.”

He looked surprised that her first words were critical, that she did not appear overjoyed to see him. “I’m still paying my share of the mortgage,” he said.

“It isn’t a matter of money,” Olivia said. “You left me. I’m entitled to at least some privacy.” She wanted to look down at her stomach to see if there was any telltale bulge.

He rested the fork on the counter and turned to face her. “You’re right. I didn’t think. I just wanted to surprise you. I wanted to do something nice for you, Liv. Do you want me to leave?”

She shook her head. “No.” There was a surly edge to her voice that surprised her as much as it did him. “I want you here,” she said, gently now. “Let me change my clothes.”

Once in her bedroom, she put on the one pair of jeans she could still fit into and a long, baggy T-shirt. Soon, she was going to have to give in and buy maternity clothes. People would know then. Paul would know.

She returned to the kitchen. “Can I help?” she asked.

“It’s ready,” he said. “Just sit down.” He gestured toward the kitchen table. She still had not replaced the table in the dining room.

She sat down, and Paul set a plate covered with fat garlicky shrimp and wild rice in front of her. He was a natural cook, one of those people who could turn out stunning meals without ever consulting a cookbook. He had always been far more domestically inclined than she. Their plan had been for him to stay home with their children while she went off to work.

He tilted the bottle of wine above her glass but she held her hand over the rim. “No thanks,” she said, and he looked down at her in surprise. “I’ve stopped for a while.”

“Why?”

It would have been easier just to let him pour the wine. She didn’t have to drink it.

“Cleaning up my act a little,” she said.

He sat down. “I was hoping to get you drunk tonight so I could seduce you.”

She felt her cheeks redden and looked down at her plate.

Paul leaned across the table to rest his hand on her arm. “You’re really furious with me,” he said.

“You’ve done some things that are hard for me to simply overlook.”

He nodded and leaned back again, pouring wine into his own glass. “I guess I can’t blame you,” he said, “but I did something today you’ll approve of.”

“What’s that?”

“I donated two of Annie’s stained glass panels to the library.”

She was truly surprised. “You did?”

He sipped his wine. “I can’t just quit cold turkey, Liv, but I’m working on it. The two underwater scenes in my living room. Plus the little oval in my car. The librarian was thrilled. Those panels are probably worth a lot more now that she’s…been gone awhile.” He pursed his lips for a second, as though acknowledging that Annie was dead still hurt him. “I’ll get rid of the rest of them in a week or two, as soon as I find the right place to donate them.”

“That’s good, Paul.” She tried to smile at him. “Whether we get back together or not, you really need to put her behind you.”

He flushed. “What’s your game, Olivia? Are you playing hard to get or what?”

“I’m not playing any game at all.” She looked at him, at the warm hazel eyes behind his glasses. “This is hard for me, trying to figure out how to behave with you. I’m terrified of trusting you, of letting my guard down around you. I’m afraid to commit myself to you when I’m not certain you can make a commitment yourself.”

“It worked before,” he said. “We just need to get away from here.”

She ate in silence for a moment before looking up at him again. “I’ve received a job offer,” she said. “At Emerson Memorial.” She described the call from Clark Chapman, as a smile spread across Paul’s face.

He set down his fork and leaned across the table again, reaching for her hand this time. “It’s a sign, don’t you think? A good omen. We move to Norfolk and start over. Start fresh. Tell him yes, Liv. Call him tonight and tell him.”

She shook her head, but left her hand in his. “I need to think about it,” she said. “I can’t jump into it that quickly.”

After dinner, he served her strawberry mousse in the living room, she on one end of the sofa, he on the other. She wondered how she could get him out of the house before he tried to touch her. He seemed to have no intention of leaving. He took off his shoes and raised his legs to the couch. “I reread The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit last night,” he said.

“Why?”

“I wanted to feel good. To feel close to you. It made me remember how I felt during those days when I was watching you in the ER and falling in love with you. Remember how wonderful it was?”

She laughed, bitterly. “It was wonderful all right. Forty-two people died. It was fantastic.” She regretted her nastiness as soon as she spoke. Paul stood up, a hurt expression on his face.

“You’ve changed,” he said. “You’ve become…callous.”

“I’m just afraid to feel close to you.”

“What do I have to do, Liv?”

“To start with, you could get rid of the rest of the stained glass.”

He nodded. “All right. Tomorrow.”

An arrow of fear passed through her, as she realized that even if he got rid of every tangible trace of Annie O’Neill, she still might not want the man who was left. “You made love to her,” she said softly. “That’s what hurts most. You can’t throw that away, and I’m always going to feel like that memory is still with you. If we ever make love again, I’ll think you’re comparing me to her. Or imagining I’m her.”

He looked stricken. “Oh, no.” He sat down, pulling her into a hug. “I love you, Liv,” he said. “I just lost my mind for a while, that’s all.” He tipped her head back to kiss her and she allowed the kiss, hoping she would feel something tender for him, but she wanted to bite his lips, to draw blood. She pulled her head away, awkwardly crossing her arms low on her stomach to keep him from touching her.

He leaned away from her. “I guess you don’t want me to stay over tonight.”

She shook her head.

“I miss you.”

She looked up at him. “I miss you too, Paul,” she said. “I’ve missed you very, very much, but I need to be sure of you. Call me again when you’re over Annie, when you’re one hundred percent finished with her.”

She stayed seated on the sofa while he put on his shoes. Then he leaned over to squeeze her knee, not speaking to her, not looking at her, and she knew he was close to crying, that once outside, he would probably let the tears come.

She unzipped her jeans when he left, sighing with relief as she drew in a long, deep breath. She rested her hand on her gently rounded stomach and her eyes went to the phone. It was ten-thirty-five and it hadn’t rung.

Alec.

She had to admit the truth to herself: She was four months pregnant by a man she was no longer certain she loved, and she loved a man still in love with his dead wife.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The baby moved.

Olivia lay very still. Outside her bedroom window, the first pink light of dawn tinged the sky above the sound.

Again. The flutter of bird wings.

It stopped. She closed her eyes, resting her hands flat on her stomach. Had she dreamt it? No. Too real. Paul’s child.

When she opened her eyes again, the sun was full in the sky, and her room glowed with a clear yellow light. She lay still for a moment, struggling to feel…something. Maybe it had been a dream. Maybe her imagination.

She had the day off, and so she was still in her robe a half hour later when she picked up the Beach Gazette from her front deck and carried it into the kitchen. She’d been tense reading the paper lately, but this morning there should be some mention about Jonathan leaving the ER.

Indeed, there was an article on the front page. Jonathan Cramer had resigned suddenly, the article stated, offering little else except a recap of the mud-slinging situation, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions about his sudden retreat. This would not be enough, she thought, disappointed.

She was halfway through her blueberry muffin when she came to the letters to the editor. She would skip over them today. There were usually half a dozen furiously assailing her for her handling of Annie’s case. She was about to turn the page when she noticed the name at the bottom of the last letter. Alec O’Neill. She flattened the page out again and began to read.I’m writing to express my dismay over the negative press and outpouring of hostility toward the Kill Devil Hills Emergency Room physician who tried to save the life of my wife, Annie Chase O’Neill. As a veterinarian, I’m well aware of human fallibility in making medical decisions, particularly under the stressful conditions a trauma case presents. Even so, I feel assured that the best possible decisions were made in Dr. Simon’s attempt to save Annie’s life. I understand the anger and readiness to find a scapegoat in the community because I’ve experienced those feelings myself in the last seven months, but those of you familiar with Annie’s generous spirit know that she never would have maligned another person or harmed his or her career. If you trace Annie’s activism in the Outer Banks, from her advocacy for the Kiss River Lighthouse keeper, Mary Poor, to last year’s fight to keep a child with AIDS in school, you will see that she focused her energy only on helping others. Attacking the very person who risked her own well-being to try to help her is not a way to honor Annie’s memory.It’s ludicrous to think that a woman with two holes in her heart could possibly have survived the forty-five-minute flight to the nearest trauma center. Dr. Simon went beyond the call of duty to treat Annie in our local emergency room rather than wash her hands of the case by transporting her to Emerson and certain death on the way. She deserves our support, not our criticism.

Olivia read the letter through twice, her muffin forgotten. She called Alec’s house, but hung up when the message on his machine clicked onto the line. She called the animal hospital, panicking when the receptionist answered the phone. She couldn’t interrupt him. Surely he was busy.

“I’m concerned about my cat,” she said, realizing as she spoke that she had learned this idiotic ruse from Alec him self when he’d told her he’d made an appointment to see his father-in-law. “I was wondering if I could get in to see Dr. O’Neill today?”

“What’s the problem?”

“Some skin thing.” Olivia glanced into the living room where Sylvie was curled in a contented ball on the rattan chair. “She’s been scratching madly for a few days now.”

“We could squeeze you in around four-thirty this afternoon. Can you make it?”

“Yes.”

“And your name?”

“Mrs. Macelli.” She was afraid the name Olivia Simon would be too familiar to this young woman.

There were three dogs in the waiting room at the animal hospital, and Olivia wondered if she was being fair to Sylvie to use her this way. The cat trembled in her arms, but she settled down once they had been moved into the small examining room to wait for Alec. This was a mistake, Olivia thought. She would not appreciate anyone intruding on her work time with personal business. She had her hand on the doorknob when Alec walked in from the opposite side of the room.

“Olivia?” He looked puzzled. He also looked extremely well. It had been nearly a week and a half since she’d seen him, and his tan was deep in contrast to his white coat. “What’s wrong with Sylvie?”

“Absolutely nothing.” Olivia smiled foolishly. “I’m sorry, Alec. I just wanted to thank you for writing that letter to the Gazette, and there was no answer at your house, and I felt like I couldn’t wait.”

Alec smiled. He reached out to take Sylvie from her arms and the little cat curled up against his chest while he stroked her ears. “You didn’t need to make up an excuse to see me,” he said.

She felt the color rise in her cheeks. This was so adolescent. “Your letter was such a relief to me,” she said.

“You haven’t deserved the public flagellation.”

“Well, whether your letter changes that or not, I just wanted you to know how grateful I am that you wrote it. That you feel that way. I wasn’t sure.”

Alec looked down at Sylvie. She had started to purr, kneading her paws against the chest pocket of his white coat. “I’m sorry I haven’t called you,” he said, raising his eyes to Olivia again. “I’m sure you could have used some support the past week or so, but…”

“Don’t apologize. I didn’t come here to get an apology out of you.”

“We were just getting a little too close for comfort,” he said.

“You must think I’m horrible for letting it go as far as I did.”

“Of course I don’t think you’re horrible. You haven’t had much of a husband lately, and I haven’t had anything in the way of a wife, and… Are you upset about it?”

“Embarrassed.”

“Please don’t be.”

“Well, let me get out of here so you can see your real patients.” She reached for Sylvie, but he turned to keep the cat in his own arms.

“Not so fast,” he said. “Tell me how you’ve been.”

The crush of news from the past week raced through her mind. Paul was back; Paul was remorseful. But she didn’t want to talk about Paul.

“I was about to start on a new stained glass project,” she said, “but Tom’s decided he can’t teach me any longer.”

“How come?” Alec’s eyes suddenly widened. “Not because of the situation with Annie, I hope.”

She nodded.

Alec scowled. “That’s ridiculous. I’ll talk to him.”

“No, please don’t. It might just make things worse.”

“What will you do about the stained glass then? Are you going to quit?”

“I’ll find a way.”

“I’ve got a bunch of Annie’s old tools just sitting at the house. Why don’t you stop by and see if there’s anything you need.”

The relief she felt was completely out of proportion to his offer. “Did she have a grinder at home?”

Alec nodded. “Come over tonight.” He handed Sylvie back to her, and his fingers lightly brushed the top of her breast through her blouse. “My kids will probably be there. They can chaperone us. Keep us out of trouble.”

She set her hand on the doorknob, but made no move to leave. She looked up at him. “I felt the baby move early this morning.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, and she couldn’t read his expression. She shrugged, embarrassed. “I just wanted to tell someone,” she said as she opened the door.

“Olivia,” he said, and she turned to look back at him. “It’s Paul you should be telling.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

He took Annie’s tool case and grinder down from the hall closet for the first time in seven months and carried them into the den. The case was made of soft brown leather, dusty now, and the sight of it was enough to start an aching deep in his chest. He dusted it off with a tissue before opening it, spreading it flat on Annie’s old work table, steeling himself against the odor, an old, familiar smell, at once metallic and soapy, a mixture of Annie and her tools.

The tools were not in their little pockets but strewn haphazardly as she had left them. Pliers, glass cutters, rolls of solder and copper foil, three-bladed scissors. He was a little embarrassed to have Olivia see this, to see exactly what Annie had been like in all her disorganized glory. He could picture her sitting here in the den, continually fighting with her hair as it slipped into the path of her work. She’d grab the bulk of it in her hands, give it a twist, and toss it over her shoulder, an unconscious gesture he had seen in her since the first night they’d met. It would be good to have Olivia take some of these tools. Put them to good use. Give them a second life.

“Why do you have Mom’s tools out?”

He turned to see Lacey standing in the doorway. Her hair was growing out into an almost comical pattern of red and black.

“Olivia Simon’s going to borrow some of them.”

“Why can’t she use Tom’s?”

“Tom’s not teaching her right now, and she’s to the point where she needs some tools of her own, so I suggested she come over to take a look at Mom’s.”

“She’s coming here?” Lacey’s eyes widened. “I thought you weren’t going out with her anymore.”

“I was never actually going out with her, Lace. She’s a friend. I explained that to you.” He wondered if asking Olivia over here tonight had been a mistake. He could have dropped the tools by her house. The memory of the last time he was in her living room slipped through his mind, and he shook his head. Well, he could have dropped them by her office.

The doorbell rang, and he heard Clay sprint down the stairs to answer it. He’d spoken to Clay earlier, letting him know Olivia was coming over and why, and Clay had responded with an uncharacteristic, positively lecherous grin. Now Alec heard Olivia’s voice in the living room, and Clay’s laughter in reply.

“I have to study,” Lacey said, taking the door that led to the kitchen rather than the living room so she would not have to pass Olivia on her way upstairs.

Olivia and Clay walked into the den.

“I’m on my way out, Dad,” Clay said.

Alec looked up from the tools. “Okay. Have fun.”

Olivia smiled as she watched Clay leave the room. She had on a pink and white striped jersey dress with a dropped waist. It was perfect for her, he thought, the perfect camouflage. No one would know if she were pregnant or not.

“Your son looks so much like you it’s uncanny,” she said, setting her tote bag on the chair by the work table. She dropped her eyes to the tool case. “Wow.”

“These are kind of a mess,” he said. “Annie would have been able to pick out what you need without any problem, but I can’t begin to tell you.”

“I think I can figure it out.” She glanced up at him and caught sight of the oval windows through the door of the den. “Oh, Alec.” She walked into the living room and over to the windows. It was still light enough outside so that the designs and their colors were vivid. “They’re beautiful.”

He stood next to her. “Your husband was fascinated by them, too.”

“Was he?” She pointed to the one in the center. “Why did she make this one clear?”

“She didn’t. I broke it a couple of weeks ago. I threw a glass at it.”

She looked at him. “I didn’t think you were the violent type.”

“I’m not, ordinarily.”

“Were you aiming at someone?”

“At God, I think.” He laughed, and she touched his arm.

“Tom’s trying to put it back together for me.” He started toward the kitchen and she followed him. “Want some iced tea?”

“Please.”

He took the pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator and got two of the green tumblers from the cabinet over the sink. “So, how’s Olivia doing?” he asked as he poured. “I really haven’t spoken to you since the day we went to Norfolk.”

She took the tumbler of iced tea from his hand and leaned back against the counter. “Olivia’s a little mixed up.” She looked down at her glass, and her eyelashes lay dark and thick against her cheeks. “A lot’s happened since the last time we spoke, besides the fact that I’ve become the least popular physician in the entire Outer Banks.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“But the other day I got a job offer. The medical director of Emerson Memorial called to offer me a position in their trauma unit up there.”

“Really?” Alec set his tea on the counter, a little disconcerted. “Will you take it?”

“I don’t know. I like it here, and I’ll like it even better if I begin to feel trusted as a physician again. But there’s more.” She sipped her tea, looking at Alec over the rim of her glass. Her eyes were the same green as the tumbler. “Paul returned from his trip a changed man,” she said. “He’s being very attentive.”

Alec’s smile froze into place. “That’s great, Olivia. Is he over…old what’s-her-name?”

“I don’t think he’s completely through with her, but he’s really trying. The thing is, he says the Outer Banks make him think of her, so he wants us to leave here.”

“Ah. So the job in Norfolk would be ideal.” He picked up his tea and started walking toward the den. “I thought it was just a matter of time,” he said. He wanted to know more. He wanted to know if they’d made love. “Have you told him about the baby?”

“Not yet.”

They were back in the den, back above Annie’s old tools, and the scent of them was almost too much for him. “That would do it, Olivia,” he said. “Paul’s such a romantic. If you told him…”

“I can’t yet.”

“He’s going to figure it out soon enough, don’t you think?”

She glanced down at the pink and white stripes of her dress where they hung loosely across her stomach. “Is it that obvious?”

“Not at all to look at you. But…I’m assuming…he’s your husband…” He felt himself flush, and Olivia smiled.

“I’m not letting him get that close to me yet.”

“Ah, I see.” He moved her totebag from the chair to the table. “Well, have a seat.”

The phone rang just as she sat down, and Alec picked it up on the desk. There was an emergency at the animal hospital, the operator told him. A dog with a burr in its eye.

He hung up and explained the situation to Olivia, smiling. “You’re the one who talked me into going back to work,” he said. “Take your time with this.” He gestured toward the tools. “I don’t know how long I’ll be, so don’t feel as though you have to wait. Lacey’s here if you need anything.”

He went upstairs to tell Lacey he was going. She was sitting on her bed, books and papers spread out in front of her and nerve-jangling music blaring from her radio. “I have an emergency at the hospital,” he said. “Olivia’s still here looking through Mom’s stained glass stuff. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

“Dad,” she whined. “Make her go if you’re not going to be here.”

“She just got here, Lace. I’ll call if I’m going to be really late.”

He left her room before she could offer anymore objections and walked down the stairs. He stopped in the doorway of the den, but Olivia was deep in concentration. A sheet of graph paper lay on her lap, and she bent over it, her lower lip caught pensively between her teeth and a pair of Annie’s scissors in her hand. He left without disturbing her.

Outside, the damp, salty air enveloped him. It covered Olivia’s Volvo with a faint mist, glistening in the pink light of the sunset, and he ran one hand down the warm, slick side of the car as he walked out to the street and his Bronco.

Lacey appeared in the doorway of the den. Olivia looked up from the tool case and was struck by how much older she looked than fourteen. “Hi, Lacey,” she said. “How are you?”

“Okay.” Lacey slipped into the den and pulled her father’s chair from his desk to the work table. She sat down, hugging her knees, her bare feet up on the chair. It was difficult to look at her hair and keep a straight face. “What are you working on?” she asked.

Olivia thought for a minute. She couldn’t tell her she was making a panel for a nursery—she could hardly let Lacey know she was pregnant when her own husband had no idea. “I’m making a panel for one of the bedrooms in my house,” she said.

“Do you have a design? Mom always worked with a design.”

“Yes.” Olivia lifted the graph paper from her lap to the table. The hot-air balloons probably looked simplistic to Lacey after the kinds of things her mother had done. But Lacey smiled.

“That’s nice,” she said, and she sounded sincere. She watched as Olivia pulled a roll of copper foil from the case. “You never told my father you saw me in the emergency room,” she said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because what happens in the ER is confidential.” She looked up at Lacey. “How’s your friend doing? The boy who used crack?”

Lacey wrinkled her nose. “He wasn’t my friend. He’s gone back to Richmond. He was an asshole, anyway.”

Olivia nodded. “He took a major risk with his life.”

“He didn’t care. Some people’s lives are so screwed up they don’t care.” Lacey picked up one of the spools of solder and began playing with it. Her fingernails were chewed short; a couple of her fingertips looked red and sore. There was a scared little girl behind that tough facade.

“Your father told me you have a collection of antique dolls,” Olivia said.

“Yeah.” Lacey didn’t look up from the solder. “My mother used to give them to me for my birthday.”

“Could I see them?”

Lacey shrugged and stood up, and Olivia followed her up the stairs. They passed what had to be the master bedroom, the bed a beautiful four poster covered by a quilt. Lacey opened her bedroom door and Olivia could not prevent a laugh. “Oh, Lacey, this is great,” she said. There was a shelf going three fourths of the way around the room on which delicate, ruffle-dressed dolls sat, wide-eyed and prim. Above and below the dolls were posters of rock groups—young men in leather pants and vests, bare-chested, long-haired, ear-ringed and insolent-looking.

Lacey smiled at her reaction.

“Is this room a good description of you?” Olivia asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean half angel, half devil.”

“Three quarters devil, I guess.”

Olivia saw the textbooks on her bed. “What are you studying?”

Lacey groaned. “Biology and Algebra.”

Olivia picked up the biology text and skimmed through the pages, remembering how enthralled she’d been by her own biology book in high school, how she had read the entire book by the end of the first week of school. “What are you up to?”

“Genetic stuff.” Lacey picked up a worksheet from her bed. “This is my homework. I hate this stuff. I’m supposed to make this pedigree study into some kind of chart or something. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Olivia looked at the sheet, then at Lacey. “Let me help you with it.”

The girl colored. “You don’t have to.”

“I’d like to.” She kicked off her shoes and sat down on Lacey’s unmade bed. “Come on,” she said, patting the space next to her.

Lacey joined her on the bed, and Olivia talked about Punnett squares and dominant and recessive genes until Lacey had a grasp of the concepts herself. They were comparing earlobes and trying to roll their tongues—which she could do, but Lacey could not—when they heard Tripod barking downstairs.

“Anybody home?” A female voice called out from the kitchen.

“It’s Nola,” Lacey said. She raised her voice. “We’re up here, Nola.”

They heard footsteps on the stairs and then an attractive blond woman dressed in a dark blue suit appeared at Lacey’s door, holding a pie in her hands. This was the woman who had “designs” on Alec, Olivia remembered.

“Oh, excuse me, Lacey,” Nola said. “I didn’t know you had company.”

Olivia leaned forward on the bed and lifted her hand to shake Nola’s. “I’m Olivia Simon,” she said.

“She’s a friend of Dad’s,” said Lacey.