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Praise for
Diane Chamberlain

‘Emotional, complex and laced with suspense, this fascinating story is a brilliant read’

Closer

‘An excellent read’

The Sun

‘This complex tale will stick with you forever.’

Now

‘A hugely addictive twist in the tale makes this a sizzling sofa Read … a deeply compelling and moving new novel.’

Heat

‘This exquisite novel about love and friendship is written like a thriller … you won’t want to put it down.’

Bella

‘A bittersweet story about regret and hope’

Publishers Weekly

‘A brilliantly told thriller’

Woman

‘An engaging and absorbing story that’ll have you racing through pages to finish’

People’s Friend

‘This compelling mystery will have you on the edge of your seat.’

Inside Soap

‘A fabulous thriller with plenty of surprises’

Star

‘Essential reading for Jodi Picoult fans’

Daily Mail

‘Chamberlain skilfully … plumbs the nature of crimes of the heart’

Publishers Weekly

‘So full of unexpected twists you’ll find yourself wanting to finish it in one sitting. Fans of Jodi Picoult’s style will love how Diane Chamberlain writes.’

Candis

‘The plot is intriguing and haunting revelations will have you glued to the very end.’

Peterborough Evening Telegraph

‘I was drawn in from the first page and simply could not put it down until the last. I think I have found a new favourite author.’

Daily Echo

‘[A] gripping summer read that’s full of twists and turns—5 stars’

Woman’s Own

‘The compelling story of three friends who are forced to question what it is to be a friend, mother and a sister’

Sunday World

‘A gripping novel’

The Lady (online)

‘Diane Chamberlain is a marvellously gifted author. Every book she writes is a gem.’

Literary Times

‘A strong tale that deserves a comparison with Jodi Picoult for, as this builds, one does indeed wonder if all will come right in the end.’

lovereading.co.uk

‘I couldn’t put it down.’

Bookseller

Also by Diane Chamberlain

The Lost Daughter

The Bay at Midnight

Before the Storm

Secrets She Left Behind

The Lies We Told

Breaking the Silence

The Midwife’s Confession

Brass Ring

The Shadow Wife

Keeper of the Light

The Good
Father
Diane Chamberlain
GETS TO THE HEART OF THE STORY

www.dianechamberlain.co.uk

For Nolan and Garrett, Claire and Olivia,

who are so lucky to have very good fathers!

1 Travis

Raleigh, North Carolina

October 2011

IT WAS NINE-FORTY WHEN I WOKE UP IN THE back of the van. Nine-forty! What if Erin had already left the coffee shop by the time we got there? What if she’s not there? That sentence kept running through my head as I got Bella up and moving. She’d had a dream about her stuffed lamb and wanted to tell me the whole thing, but all I could think about while I changed her into the cleanest clothes I had for her was, What if she’s not there?

On the phone yesterday, Roy had told me I was making the smart choice. “You can get rich doing this, bro,” he’d said.

I thought of the gold watch he wore. The red Mustang he drove. “I don’t care about getting rich,” I’d answered. “I just want enough money to keep me and Bella fed till I get a real job.” I felt smarmy just talking to him on the phone. The dude was a total cretin.

“You feel that way right now,” he said, “but wait till you get a taste of easy money.”

“Look,” I said, “just tell me where to meet you and when.”

“We’ll come to you about eleven tomorrow night,” he said. “You still hanging in the same place? The lot by the Target?”

“Yeah.”

“Just make sure you’ve got enough gas to get us to the Virginia border and back,” he said, and then he was gone from the line.

So, now I’d have all day to freak out about my decision and, if things went according to my plan, I wouldn’t have Bella with me. My chest tightened at the thought. I wasn’t sure I could do this. Erin was a good woman, though. I could tell. Plus, Bella knew her and liked her. The only thing was, she might be too good. The kind of person who’d call the cops on me. I just had to trust her not to.

My hands shook as I scratched a note on the back of a gas receipt and stuck it in Bella’s pants pocket, sneaking it in there so Bella wouldn’t ask me about it or try to pull it out. I remembered the tremor in my mother’s hands. “A fine tremor,” the doctor had called it and he’d said it was harmless and barely noticeable. Mine wasn’t so fine. I could hardly help Bella get her socks straight on her feet.

“I’m hungry, Daddy,” she said as she pulled on her shoes.

I opened some Tic Tacs and shook a couple into her hand. “We’ll get breakfast in a minute,” I said, as she popped the Tic Tacs into her mouth.

I pictured Erin finding the note. She would find it, wouldn’t she? If she didn’t, then what? I thought of all the things that could go wrong and my head hurt like a bitch. First things first, I told myself. First I had to get to JumpStart before Erin left or else the whole plan was going to cave in.

“I got to go potty,” Bella said.

“Yeah, baby, me too.” I ran a comb through her dark hair, which I really should have tried to wash in the Target restroom last night like I did once already this week. Last night, though, washing her hair had been the furthest thing from my mind. She needed a haircut, too, but it wasn’t like I’d thought of bringing scissors with me when we left Carolina Beach. Her bangs were almost long enough to put behind her ears now, and I tried that, but as soon as she hopped out of the van, her hair fell into her face again. Poor kid. She looked like an orphan nobody cared about. I prayed to God she didn’t become one tonight.

I held her hand as we walked toward the coffee shop.

“You’re hurting my hand, Daddy,” she said, and I realized I was holding on to her way too tight. How could I do this to my baby girl? I couldn’t even prepare her for what was going to happen. Bella, I’m sorry. I hoped she was so young that she’d never remember this. Never think of it as the day her daddy abandoned her.

Wildflowers filled the grassy strip of land next to the coffee shop and I had a sudden idea. They were nothing but weeds, but they’d do. “Look, Bella.” I pointed toward them. “Let’s pick some of these for Miss Erin.” We stepped onto the lawn and began picking the flowers and I hoped Bella’s bladder could hold out one more minute. The flowers were the only way I could think of to thank Erin for what I was going to ask her to do.

She was sitting in the brown leather chair where she always sat, reading something on her iPad, as usual, and brushing a strand of light brown hair out of her eyes. I felt a crazy rush of relief and a crazy rush of disappointment. If she hadn’t been there, I would have no way to do what I was going to do tonight, and that would have been a good thing. But she was there and she smiled like she’d been waiting for us.

“There she is!” Bella shouted loudly enough for the two girls at the corner table to look over at us. They were close to my age. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. One of them smiled at me, then went red in the face and looked away. I hardly glanced at her. I only saw the thirtysomething woman sitting in the leather chair. I felt like hugging her.

“Hey,” I said, like it was any other morning. “How’s it going?”

“Good.” She reached out to run a hand down Bella’s arm. “Good morning, honey,” she said. “How are you today?”

“We had Tic Tacs for breakfast,” Bella said.

“Well, we’ll get something a little better here,” I said, embarrassed.

“Did you?” Erin asked. “Were they yummy?”

Bella nodded, her bangs falling over her eyes.

“We need to use the bathroom, don’t we, Bell?” I said, then I looked at Erin. “You’ll be here a minute?”

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

“These are for you.” I held the flowers toward her and wished I’d thought to tie them together with something, but with what? “Bella picked them for you this morning.”

“How pretty!” She took the flowers from my hand, sniffed them and then put them on the table. “Thank you, Bella.”

I spotted a kids’ book on the table next to the flowers. “Looks like Miss Erin has a new book to read you,” I said, hoping that was true. A book would keep Bella busy while I … I couldn’t think about it.

“I got to go potty, Daddy,” Bella reminded me.

“Right.” I reached for her hand. “We’ll be back in a sec,” I said to Erin.

In the restroom, I rushed through the teeth-brushing, the going potty and the face-washing. My hands were like a guy with DTs and I mostly let Bella brush her own teeth. It was all I could do to brush mine. I didn’t bother to shave.

Erin had moved the book to the arm of the chair by the time we got back.

“I think you’re going to love this one, Bella,” she said. She held her arms out to my four-year-old daughter, who climbed into her lap like she’d known Erin all her life. Thank you, God, I thought. What I was going to do tonight was as wrong as wrong could be, but the fact that Erin had been put in my path this week made me think maybe it was supposed to happen.

“I’m going to grab my coffee and our muffin,” I said. “Can I get you anything, Erin?” I asked, like I could actually afford to buy her something.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I picked up an OJ for Bella.”

I knew—and had known from day one—that it was Bella she was into and not me. That was fine. Perfect, actually. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

I ordered my coffee and a muffin and a cup of water for Bella. When I went to pick up the water from the counter, I knocked the damn thing over with my not-so-fine tremor. “Sorry!” I grabbed a handful of napkins from the holder on the counter and started to mop up.

“No problem,” said Nando, the barista who waited on me every morning. He called to a girl in the back who came out and cleaned up my mess while he got me another cup of water. He put the cup and the coffee and muffin in one of those cardboard carriers, and I lifted it carefully and took it back to my seat.

Erin and Bella were deep in their story. Bella asked her questions, pointing to things in the book. She rested her head against Erin’s shoulder, looking kind of sleepy. That dream had gone on and on last night, she’d said, and we woke up so late. She looked as totaled as I felt. I’d use some of the money I’d make tonight to find a clinic and get her checked out. She wasn’t exactly eating a great diet these days, either. I was about to break the muffin in half to split with her, but decided to give her the whole thing instead. I didn’t think I could eat this morning, anyway.

I sat down on the couch, wondering how to time things. I couldn’t wait too long. I had no idea when Erin would leave the coffee shop. I sipped my coffee and it felt like acid going down. You suck as a father, I thought to myself.

Erin came to the end of a chapter and said they’d take a little break while Bella ate her muffin.

“Come over here to eat so you don’t get it all over Miss Erin,” I said to Bella.

“Oh, she’s fine here,” Erin said. “Just set the water on the table.”

I did, although I wanted Bella back right then. Yeah, I was glad she was so happy on Erin’s lap and all that, but I wanted to hold her right now. I’d scare her, though—holding her too tight the way I’d squashed her hand when we walked across the parking lot. It was better this way. Now, how to make my graceful exit. I hadn’t quite thought through that part. Maybe I’d say I needed to use the restroom again, but they’d be able to see me if I left the restroom and went out the door.

“So, just a couple more days till you go back to work?” I asked Erin. I needed to make sure she didn’t need to go back to the pharmacy any sooner than that. I hoped I’d figured this out right.

“Don’t remind me.” She rubbed Bella’s back. Bella had blueberry stuck in her teeth and I was glad I’d remembered to put her toothbrush in her little pink purse.

“Do you ever feel, you know, tempted being around all those drugs all the time?” I asked. Why the hell did I ask her that? I had no idea. Nerves. I was a frickin’ mass of nerves.

She gave me a look like I was a total lowlife. “Not even a little bit,” she said. “And please don’t tell me you would be tempted.”

I tried to smile. “No way,” I said, “It’s not my thing.” Why’d I even go there? I worried she could see how I was shaking today and think I was using something. Suddenly, I knew how to handle the next few minutes. “I’ve got another interview today,” I said.

“Great! You found something on Craigslist?”

“No, my friend came through.” I tapped my sweaty fingers on my thighs. “I hope this one works out.”

“Oh, me too, Travis. I guess it’s in construction? Is it for a business? Or residential? Or—”

“I’ve got the info in my van,” I said, getting to my feet. “Can you watch Bella a sec and I’ll go get it? I can tell you the address and maybe you can tell me how to get there.”

“Sure,” she said. I couldn’t move all of a sudden. I wanted to take Bella back into the restroom and hug her so hard, but I had to get this over with. Just do it. I bent over and kissed Bella’s head, then walked away fast. Out the door, across the parking lot, into my van. Fast, fast, fast, before I could change my mind. I turned the key in the ignition. I couldn’t leave the van here where Erin and Bella would be able to see it when they came out of JumpStart. I drove all the way to the other end of the lot, nearly crashing into parked cars, my foot jerking all over the gas pedal, the whole wide world a blur in front of me and one word on my mind.

Bella Bella Bella.

2 Travis

Six Weeks Earlier

Carolina Beach, North Carolina

YOU KNOW HOW EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE happiness kind of comes over you like a bolt of lightning, surprising you so much it makes you laugh out loud? That’s how I felt as I worked on the molding for the kitchen cabinets of the oceanfront house. I’d been doing construction four years and always thought of it as a job I hated, just something I had to do to put food on the table for me and Bella and my mom. But construction jobs were hard to find at the beach these days, especially in Carolina Beach, which wasn’t exactly overflowing with high-end properties even though the ocean was just as blue and the sand just as white as the rest of the coast. Plus, it would always be my home. The foreman on my last job watched me work on a deck addition for a few days and he must have seen something in me because he asked me to do some custom work inside the house. He was teaching me stuff, like the detailing on this molding. He was grooming me. I didn’t know I was learning skills that, on this late August day, would make me laugh out loud when I realized I was actually enjoying the work. I was glad I was alone in the kitchen so I didn’t have to explain my reaction to any of the guys.

I was on the ladder working on the molding when I heard sirens in the distance. A lot of them, but far away and echoey, hardly loud enough to cut through the sound of the ocean, and I didn’t pay all that much attention. After a while, they became part of the white noise of the sea as I kept working. I was climbing down from the ladder when I heard someone rushing up the stairs to the living room.

“Travis!” Jeb, one of my coworkers, shouted as he ran into the kitchen. He was red-faced and winded, bending over in the middle of the room to catch his breath. “It’s your house, man!” he said. “It’s on fire!”

I dropped my hammer and ran for the stairs. “Are they safe?” I called over my shoulder.

“Don’t know, man. I just heard and ran here to tell—”

I didn’t hear the rest of what he said as I nearly slid down the stairs, stopping a fall with my hand on the banister. My brain was going crazy. Was it the screwed-up electrical in the living room? Or one of those scented candles my mother liked to burn to get the musty smell out of the air of the old cottage? Or maybe it was her damn cigarettes, though she was careful. She wasn’t the type to fall asleep smoking, especially not with Bella in the house.

Bella. Oh, shit. Let them be okay.

I ran out to my van and as I turned it around to head toward my house, I saw smoke in the sky. It was the pale gray of a fire that had burned itself out, not the black you’d see if the fire was still raging, and that gave me hope. The gray billowed into the sky and then hung in an air current drifting toward the mainland. I made the four miles to my house in three minutes flat.

There were two fire trucks, a couple of cop cars and one ambulance in front of the charred shell of the small cottage that had been my home for the past eight years and would never be my home again. Right then, I didn’t care. I jumped out of my van and headed straight for the ambulance. Ridley Strub, a cop I’d known since we were in middle school together, showed up out of nowhere and grabbed my arm.

“They took your mother to the hospital,” he said. “Bella’s in the ambulance. She’s going to be fine.”

“Let me go!” I pulled away from him and ran to the open rear of the ambulance, jumping inside without waiting for an invitation.

“Daddy!” Bella’s cry was muffled by an oxygen mask, but it was strong enough that I knew she was okay. I sat on the edge of the stretcher and pulled her into my arms.

“You’re all right, baby.” My throat was so tight that baby came out like a whisper. I looked up at the EMT, a girl of about twenty. “She’s okay, right?”

“She’s fine,” the girl said. “Just needed a little O2 as a precaution, but—”

“Can we take the mask off?” I asked. I wanted to see her face. To check her all over for damage. I wanted to make sure the only thing she’d suffered was a scare. I noticed she had her stuffed lamb clutched tight in one arm, and on the floor of the ambulance I spotted her little pink purse. The two things she was never without.

“I want it off, Daddy!” Bella picked at the edge of the plastic mask where it pressed against her cheek. She hiccupped like she always did when she cried.

The paramedic leaned over and slipped the mask from Bella’s face. “We’ll leave the O2 monitor on her finger and see how she does,” she said.

I smoothed my hands over my daughter’s brown hair. I could smell the smoke on her. “You’re okay,” I said. “You’re perfect.”

She hiccupped again. “Nana fell down in the living room,” she said. “Smoke comed out of the windows.”

“Came,” I said. “That must’ve been scary.” My mother fell? I remembered Ridley saying she was in the hospital. I looked at the EMT again. She was checking some monitor on the wall above the stretcher. “My mother,” I said. “Is she okay?”

The EMT glanced toward the open doors and I didn’t miss the relief in her face when she saw Ridley climbing into the ambulance. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Need to see you a sec, Trav,” he said.

“What?” I didn’t look up from Bella, who was clutching my hand like she’d never let it go.

“Come outside with me,” he said.

Mom. I didn’t want to go with him. I didn’t want to hear whatever he was going to tell me.

“Go ahead,” the EMT said. “I’ll be here with Bella.”

“Daddy!” Bella clung harder to my hand as I stood up, knocking the monitor off her finger. “Don’t go away!” She tried to scramble off the stretcher, but I held her by the shoulders and looked into her gray eyes.

“You have to stay here and I’ll be right back,” I said. I knew she’d stay. She always did what I told her. Nearly always, anyway.

“How many minutes?” she asked.

“Five at the most,” I promised, glancing at my watch. I’d never once broken a promise to her. My father’d never broken a promise to me, and I remembered how that felt, knowing I could always trust him no matter what.

I leaned down to hug her, kissing the top of her head. The smell of smoke just about seared my lungs.

Outside the ambulance, Ridley led me to the corner of the lot next door, away from the fire trucks and all the tourists who’d gathered to watch somebody else’s disaster.

“It’s about your mom,” he said. “Neighbor said she was outside hanging laundry when the fire started and it went up like a … just real fast. Your mom ran in for Bella and she was either overcome by smoke or maybe had a heart attack. Either way, she fell and—”

“Is she okay?” I wanted him to get to the point.

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Trav. She didn’t make it.”

“Didn’t make it?” I asked. The words weren’t getting through to me.

“She died on the way to the hospital.” Ridley reached a hand toward my arm but didn’t touch me. Like he was just holding his hand there in case I started to keel over.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Bella’s fine. How can Bella be fine and my mother’s dead?” My voice was getting loud and people turned to look at me.

“Your mom saved her. They think she fell and Bella knew enough to get out of the house, but your mom was—”

“Shit!” I pulled away from him. Looked at my watch. Four minutes. I headed back to the ambulance and climbed inside.

“Daddy!” Bella said. “I want to go home!”

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying. “One thing at a time, Bell,” I said. “First we make sure your lungs are okay.” And then what? Then what? Where would we go? One look at the house and you knew everything we owned was gone. I closed my eyes, picturing my mother running into the house through smoke and flames to find Bella. Thank God she had, but God had done a half-assed job this time. I hoped my mother had been unconscious when she fell. I hoped she never had a clue she was dying. Please, God, no clue.

“I want to go home!” Bella wailed again, her voice loud in the tiny space of the ambulance.

I held her by the shoulders and looked her straight in the eye. “Our house burned down, Bella,” I said. “We can’t go back. But we’ll go to another house. We have plenty of friends, right? Our friends will help us.”

“Tyler?” she asked. Tyler was the five-year-old boy who lived a few houses down from us. Her innocence slayed me.

“All our friends,” I said, hoping I wasn’t lying. We were going to need everyone.

I saw something in her face I’d never seen before. How had it happened? She was two weeks shy of her fourth birthday, and overnight she seemed to have grown from my baby daughter to a miniature adult. In her face, I saw the girl she’d become. I saw Robin. There’d always been hints of her mother in her face—the way her eyes crinkled up when she laughed. The upturn at the edges of her lips so that she always looked happy. The rosy circles on her cheeks. But now, suddenly, there was more than a hint and it shook me up. I pulled her against my chest, full of love for the mother I’d lost that afternoon and for the little girl I would hold on to forever—and maybe, buried deep inside me where my anger couldn’t reach, for the teenage girl who’d long ago shut me out of her life.

3 Robin

Beaufort, North Carolina

JAMES AND I STOOD UP WHEN DALE WALKED into the waiting room. Dale always seemed to have a gravitational field around him and sure enough, the seven other people sitting in the room turned to look at him as he walked toward us. They would sail right through the air toward him if they hadn’t clutched the arms of their chairs. That was the sort of pull he had on people. He’d had it on me from the first moment I met him.

Now, he smiled at me and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, then shook his father’s hand as if he hadn’t seen him at home only a few short hours ago. “How’s she doing?” he asked quietly, looking from me to his father and back again.

“Eight centimeters,” I said. “Your mom’s with her. Alissa’s miserable, but the nurse said she’s doing really well.”

“Poor kid,” Dale said. He took my hand and the three of us sat down again in the row of chairs. Across from us, an older woman and man whispered to one another and pointed in our direction, and I knew they’d recognized us. I had only a second to wonder if they’d approach us before the woman got to her feet, ran her hand over her flawlessly styled silver hair and headed toward us.

Her eyes were on James. “Mayor Hendricks.” She smiled, and James immediately stood up and took her hand in his.

“Yes,” he said, “and you are …?”

“Mary Wiley, just one of your constituents. We—” she looked over her shoulder at the man, most likely her husband “—we have such mixed feelings about your retirement,” she said. “The only good thing about it is that your son will take over.”

Dale was already on his feet, already smiling that smile that made you feel special. I once thought that smile was only for me but soon came to realize it was for every single person he met. “Well, I hope that’s the case,” he said modestly. “Sounds like I can count on your vote.”

“And the vote of everyone I know,” she said. “Really, it’s a given, isn’t it? I mean, Dina Pingry? She’s completely wrong.” She gave a little eye roll at the thought of Dale’s opposition, a woman who was a powerhouse Realtor in Beaufort. Of course, the people we hung out with were all Hendricks supporters, so it was sometimes easy to forget that Dina Pingry had her own fans and they were fanatical in their support. But James had been mayor of this small waterfront town for twenty years, and passing the torch to his thirty-three-year-old attorney son seemed like a done deal. To us, anyway.

“It’s never a given, Mrs. Wiley,” Dale said. He was so good at remembering names! “I need every vote, so promise me you’ll get out there on election day.”

“Oh, we work the polls,” she said, nodding toward her husband. “We never miss an election.” Her eyes finally fell on me, still in my seat between the two men. “You, dear, are going to have the wedding of the decade, aren’t you?”

I didn’t stand, but I shook the hand she offered and gave her my own smile—the one I had quickly learned to put and keep on my face in public. It came pretty naturally to me. That was the thing Dale said first attracted him to me: I was always smiling. For me, it had been his gray eyes. When I saw those eyes, I suddenly understood the phrase Love at first sight. “I’m very lucky,” I said now, and Dale rested his hand on my shoulder.

“I’m the lucky one,” he said.

“Well, we’re waiting for our daughter to have her third.” The woman gestured toward the double doors that led to the labor rooms. “And I guess you’re waiting for Alissa …?” She didn’t finish her sentence, but raised her eyebrows to see if she was right. Of course she was. Alissa was the Hendricks’ barely seventeen-year-old daughter, my future sister-in-law and the poster child for Taking Responsibility for your Actions. The Hendricks had turned what might have been a scandalous event into an asset by publicly supporting their unwed pregnant daughter. This was a family that didn’t hide much, I’d discovered. Rather, they capitalized on the negative. To the outside world, their actions might have looked like complete support, but I was privy to their inside world, where all was not so rosy.

“Mrs. Hendricks is with her,” James said to the woman. “Latest report is she’s doing very well.” He always called Mollie, his wife, Mrs. Hendricks in public. I’d asked Dale not to do the same to me after we were married. I’d actually wished I could keep my maiden name, Saville, but that wasn’t done in the world of the Hendricks family.

“Well, now,” the woman said, “I’ll leave you three in peace. It’s the last peace you’ll have for a while with a baby around, I can tell you that.”

“We’re looking forward to the chaos,” Dale said. “So nice meeting you, Mrs. Wiley.” He gave a little bow of his head and he and his father sat down again as the woman returned to her seat.

I was tired and wished I could rest my head against Dale’s shoulder, but I didn’t think he’d appreciate it here in public. In public were words I heard all the time from one Hendricks or another. I was being trained to become one of them. I think they’d started grooming me from the moment I met them all two years earlier, when I’d applied for the job to assist with running their Taylor’s Creek Bed and Breakfast at the end of Front Street. It was a job I’d handled so well that I was now the manager. I’d met with all three of them in the living room of Hendricks House, their big, white, two-story home, which was right next door to the B and B and almost identical in its Queen Anne–style architecture. They told me later that they knew I was right for the job the moment I walked in, despite the fact that I was barely twenty and had zero experience at anything other than surviving. “You were much younger than we’d expected,” Mollie told me later, “but you were a people person, oozing self-confidence and full of enthusiasm. After the interview, you left the room and we all looked at each other and knew. I picked up the phone and canceled the other applicants we’d scheduled for interviews.”

I’d wondered later if they knew then I would become one of them. If they’d wanted that. I thought so. It had been funny getting that glowing feedback. I was only beginning to know the real me. I was only starting to live. I was one year out from my heart transplant and still learning that I could trust my body, that I could climb a flight of stairs and walk a block and think about a future. If I wore a perpetual smile, that was why. I was alive and grateful for every second I’d been given. Now I was living that future. There were days, though, when it felt as though my life was no more in my control than it had been when I was sick. “Everyone feels that way,” my best friend, Joy, told me. “Totally normal.” I’d had so little experience with “normal” that I could only hope she was right.

Mollie walked through the double doors into the waiting room. She wasn’t smiling and I suddenly felt afraid for Alissa. This time, I was the one to get to my feet. “Is everything okay?” I asked. I loved Alissa. She was so real. So down to earth. She was five years younger than me, but I felt as though we were kindred spirits—in ways only I truly understood.

“She’s very close,” Mollie said, “but she wants you with her.” She looked at me. “You want to go in?”

“Me?” From the start, the plan had been for Mollie to be in the delivery room with her daughter. “She wants you, honey.” Mollie sounded tired.

Dale stood up and put his hand on the small of my back. “You okay with that?” he asked quietly. He was always protective of me. Sometimes I appreciated it. Other times it reminded me of my father, cutting me off from the world.

“Sure,” I said. I was no stranger to hospitals, though a delivery room was unfamiliar territory. I hoped someday to have a career in medicine, though Dale said I’d never have to work if I didn’t want to. My only hesitation in being with Alissa was stepping into a role that had so clearly belonged to Mollie.

“I’ll show you where,” Mollie said, and she led me through the waiting room and the double doors and into a hallway. She pointed toward a doorway. “Just hold her hand. Be there for her. She’s tired of me.” She gave me a smile that let me know she was a little bit hurt that Alissa wanted me with her rather than her mother.

I heard Alissa the second I opened the door. She was halfway sitting up, panting hard, a look of intense concentration on her face, and I guessed she was in the middle of a contraction. “Robin!” she managed to say when she could catch her breath. Her face was red and sweaty, her forehead lined with pain.

“I’m here, Ali,” I said. One of the nurses motioned toward a stool at the side of the bed and I sat down and took Alissa’s hand in both of mine. I wasn’t sure what to say. How are you feeling? seemed like a ridiculous question to ask. It was pretty clear how she was feeling, so I just repeated myself. “I’m here,” I said again. Someone handed me a damp, cool washcloth and I pressed it to her forehead. Tendrils of her auburn hair were plastered to her face and her brown eyes were bloodshot.

“I couldn’t take one more minute of my mother.” She spoke through clenched teeth, then let out a long, loud groan. I watched the monitors on the other side of the bed. The baby’s heartbeat was so fast. Was it supposed to be that fast?

“I think she’s okay with it,” I lied.

“I hate her right now. I hate them. All of my stupid family. Except you.”

“Shh,” I said, pulling the stool closer to her. I wondered if delivery room nurses had to keep things they heard confidential. I bet they heard all kinds of gossip in here. The last thing Dale needed was for the world to know all was not well with Beaufort’s first family.

“Will should be with me,” Alissa whispered. “That’s how it’s supposed to be. Not like this.”

I was surprised. Will Stevenson was completely out of the picture and I’d thought she was finally okay with that. He’d created a mess the Hendricks family had needed to clean up, but now wasn’t the time to get into a big discussion with her about it. I’d never even met Will. Alissa had kept that relationship even from me, and I had to admit I was hurt when I found out about it. I’d thought we were closer than that. But she’d done me a favor. I didn’t want to feel as though I was keeping secrets from Dale—at least, no more than the secrets I was already keeping.

She had another contraction and nearly broke my fingers as she squeezed them. The baby’s heartbeat slowed way down on the monitor and I glanced nervously at the nurses, trying to gauge if something was wrong, but no one except me seemed concerned.

“This baby’s going to wreck my life!” Alissa nearly shouted when the contraction had ended.

“Shh,” I said. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard her say that and it worried me. If Alissa had had her way, she’d be putting this baby up for adoption, but that would never have been acceptable to her parents. “You’re going to love her,” I said, as if I knew about these things. “Everything’s going to work out fine. You’ll see.”

An hour later, baby Hannah was born and I watched my future sister-in-law change from a screaming, fighting, panting warrior to a docile and beaten-down seventeen-year-old. The doctor rested the tiny infant on her belly, but Alissa didn’t touch her or look at her. Instead, she turned her head away, and I saw two of the nurses exchange a glance. I wanted to touch that baby myself. How could Alissa not want to?

One of the nurses took Hannah to the side of the room to clean her up and I leaned my lips close to Alissa’s ear. “She’s beautiful, Ali,” I said. “Wait till you get a good look at her.” But Alissa wouldn’t even look at me, and as I wiped her face with the washcloth, I wasn’t sure if it was perspiration or tears I was cleaning away.

The nurse brought the baby back to the side of the bed. “Are you ready to hold her?” she asked Alissa, who gave the slightest shake of her head. I bit my lip.

“How about you, auntie?” the nurse asked me. “Would you like to hold her?”

I looked up at the nurse. “Yes,” I said, draping the washcloth on the metal bar of the bed. I reached out my arms, and the nurse settled Hannah, light as feathers, into them. I looked down at the tiny perfect face and felt the strangest emotion come over me. It slipped into my body and locked my throat up tight. I’d rarely related Alissa’s pregnancy to my own. That denial had been easy, since I’d blocked so much of my own experience from my mind. The baby I’d had didn’t exist for me. But suddenly, holding this beautiful little angel in my arms, I thought, This is the part I missed. This was the part I’d never realized I was missing and that no one must ever know that I missed. And as I pressed my lips to the baby’s warm temple, I cried the first tears ever for the empty place in my heart.

4 Erin

Raleigh

MICHAEL SET ONE OF THE BOXES ON THE granite counter of my new, small kitchen. Through the window over the sink, I could see the sun disappear behind dust-colored clouds. The sky would be opening up soon with a late-summer storm. I was glad we’d gotten all the boxes in before the rain started.

“This is the last one,” Michael said, brushing his hands together as if the box had been dirty. He walked into the attached dining area and looked out the window with a sigh. “You’re way out in the boonies here,” he said.

I knew what he was seeing through that window: the sprawling Brier Creek Shopping Center. Acres and acres of every big box store and chain restaurant you could imagine. Hardly the boonies.

“It’s not that far,” I said, although it was a good fifteen miles from our house in Raleigh’s Five Points neighborhood.

“You don’t know anyone out here,” he said. “I don’t get it.”

“I know you don’t,” I said. “That’s okay. It’s what I want, Michael. What I need right now. Thanks for just … for tolerating it.”

He looked out the window again. The gray light played on his ashy brown hair, the same color mine would be if I didn’t lighten it. The color my roots were. I was really late for a touch-up, but I didn’t care.

“Let me be the one to live here,” he said suddenly.

“You?” I frowned. “Why?”

“I just …” He turned his head toward me. “I don’t like to think of you in a place like this. You’ve worked so hard on the house. You belong there.”

“It’s perfectly nice,” I said. “It’s new, for heaven’s sake.” I was deeply touched; he still loved me so much that he’d be willing to live in this bland little furnished apartment so I didn’t have to. But he didn’t understand. I couldn’t be in our house any longer. I felt Carolyn’s absence everywhere in that house. Her room, which I hadn’t walked into once in the four months since she died, taunted me from behind the closed door. Michael had actually suggested we turn her room into an exercise room! It was like he wanted to erase Carolyn from our lives. He found this apartment depressing. I found it safe, away from my old life. My Carolyn life. The friends and their children I could no longer bear to be around. The acquaintances I didn’t want to bump into. The husband I no longer felt I knew. I didn’t think my friends wanted to be with me any more than I wanted to be with them. They’d been wonderful in the beginning, but now they didn’t know what to say to me. I was a horror to them, a reminder of how quickly their lives could change.

“What do I tell people?” Michael asked. “Are we separated? Getting a divorce? How do I explain to people that you’ve moved out of the house?”

“Tell them whatever makes you comfortable.” I didn’t care what people thought. I used to, but everything was different now. Michael still cared, though, and that was the difference between us. He was still living in our old lives, where what people thought mattered and where he wanted to find a way back to normal. I’d given up on normal. I didn’t care about normal. My therapist Judith’s reaction when I told her that? “That’s normal,” she said, and the old me would have laughed, but I didn’t laugh anymore.

Michael gestured to one of the boxes on the stool by the breakfast bar. “This one says bedroom. I’ll carry it in for you.”

“Great. Thanks.” I watched him lift it into his arms. I used to love his arms, probably more than any other part of his body. He worked out every day and his arms were undeniably ripped. Michael was that rare combination of brains and brawn. “A geek with a great body,” one of my friends had once told me, when we were watching our husbands playing with our kids in someone’s backyard pool. Watching him now, though, I felt nothing.

I walked the few short steps to the living room windows and looked at the reassuringly unfamiliar landscape. Absolutely nothing to remind me of my bubbly and beautiful daughter. You want to run away, Judith had said when I told her my plan to rent this apartment. There was no accusation in the way she said it, although I knew she didn’t think it was a good idea. But she didn’t do the lecture bit like Michael did. “You might be able to run away from home,” he’d said, “but you can’t run away from what’s inside your head.” I’d wanted to slug him for saying that. I was sick of his advice and his finding fault in my own personal style of grieving. Never mind that I found plenty of fault in his. I had deep questions he simply couldn’t relate to. Mystical questions. Would I ever see Carolyn again? Was her soul someplace? I felt her around me. I heard her voice sometimes. When I asked him if he did, he said, “Sure” in a way that told me that he didn’t.

Michael came into the living room and stood next to me at the window. He put his arm around my shoulders and I felt the tentative nature of the touch. He no longer knew what I would welcome and what I would shrug off. Judith tried to get me to have some sympathy for him, but I was too busy having sympathy for myself. I had no energy to pay attention to what Michael needed these days. He’d turned into someone I’d once loved but could no longer understand. I knew he could say the same about me.

“I’m worried about you,” he said now. His arm felt too heavy across my shoulders.

“Don’t be.”

“I think it’s wrong for me to let you do this.”

“‘Let me’?” I walked away from his arm and sat down on the sofa. It was uncomfortably firm, nothing like the big, cushy sofa we had at home. “What are you? My father?”

“When are you going back to work?”

“If you ask me that question one more time …” I shook my head in frustration. I’d tried going back to work. I’d lasted half a day. I made a mistake with a medication that could have cost a person his life and I took off my white coat, turned the order over to the other pharmacist, and walked out of the building without looking back.

“You’re going to sit here in this—” he waved an arm through the air to take in the combined living room/dining room/kitchen “—this place and ruminate. And that scares me, Erin.” He looked at me head-on then and I saw the worry in his eyes. I had to look away. I stared down at my hands where they rested flat on my thighs.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“You need to stop going over every detail of it the way you do,” he said, as though he was telling me something he hadn’t already said twenty times. “You have to stop asking yourself all the what-ifs. It happened. You need to start accepting it.”

I stood up. “Time for you to go,” I said, walking to the door. I’d moved into this apartment, in part, to get away from exactly this. “Thank you so much for helping. I know it was hard for you.”

He gave me one last frustrated look before walking to the door. I followed him, opening the door for him, and he leaned over to hug me.

“Do you hate me?” he whispered into my hair.

“Of course not,” I whispered back, even though there were moments when I did. I could honestly say he was the only man I’d ever loved and if anyone had told me we would one day fall apart the way we had, I would have said they just didn’t know us very well. But here we were, as fallen apart as we could be.

I opened the door and he walked into the hallway.

“Bye,” I said. I started to close the door behind him, but felt a sudden rush of panic and pulled it open again. “Don’t touch her room!” I called after him.

He didn’t turn around. Just waved a hand through the air to let me know he’d heard me. I knew he was in pain—maybe tremendous pain. But I also knew how he would deal with it. He’d invent some new video game or work on a repair project. He’d lose himself in activity. He certainly wouldn’t ruminate. He didn’t even know how. I had it down to an art. It wasn’t deliberate. It just happened. My mind would start one place—making a grocery list, for example—and before I knew it, I’d be going over every detail of what happened as if I were describing it to someone. Who was I telling it to inside my head? I needed to relive the details of that night the way an obsessive-compulsive person had to wash her hands over and over again. Sometimes I felt crazy and I’d make myself think of something else, but the minute I let my guard down, I’d be at it again. This was why I loved the Harley’s Dad and Friends group I’d found on the internet. It had been started by the father of eight-year-old Harley, a little girl who was killed in a bicycling accident. The group was full of bereaved parents I’d never met face-to-face but felt as though I knew better than I knew anyone. Better than I knew Michael. They understood my need to go over and over what had happened. They understood me. I spent hours with them every day, reading about their struggles and sharing my own. I actually felt love for some of those people I’d never met. I didn’t even know what most of them looked like, but I was coming to think of them as my best friends.

So, now I was safe. I was creating my own world, in a new neighborhood, with new friends in the Harley’s Dad group and a new apartment. I turned around to take in the living room, thinking my escape. But instead of the bland furniture and the small room, I saw a sky the color of black velvet and the long, illuminated ribbon of the Stardust Pier, and I knew that no matter how far from home I ran, that horrible night would always, always be with me.