CHAPTER TWELVE

Elly parked on the street as far from Jake’s office as she could, while making sure she could still watch the door. A few minutes after five o’clock, she spotted Jake’s receptionist, wearing a light-colored coat that billowed like a tent around her skinny legs, emerge with a green handbag big enough to carry a toaster. The woman climbed into a sporty Dodge and zipped out of the parking lot.

The next person out the door was the dental hygienist. She wore a red cape that made her look like a superhero and carried no handbag at all. Elly watched her closely as she waited in front of the building, half expecting Jake to come out and put his arms around her—she really was beautiful.

Instead, the hygienist was picked up by an older woman in a battered sedan. The poor thing must still live with her mother.

Elly had to wait ten more minutes for Jake. She nearly didn’t recognize him. He’d ridden his bicycle to work—she had seen him leave home this morning, with his khaki pants cuffed by steel bracelets of some sort—but now he emerged from the office wearing what looked like a costume: a black motorcycle jacket and black jeans tucked into black boots. He carried a helmet under one arm that was definitely not a bicycle helmet.

Jake walked around to the back of the building. A minute later, he shot out of the alley on a red Suzuki motorcycle and made a rapid exit from the parking lot.

“What the hell, Jake?” she muttered as she pulled onto the street and followed.

Elly nearly lost track of him on the road, since she was working to stay a few car lengths behind. She was afraid Jake might recognize Laura’s car if he spotted her in the rearview mirror. Plus, he was particularly adept at weaving between lanes of traffic. Her heart was hammering and she gripped the wheel so hard that her wrists ached.

He took the ramp to Route 128, but rather than head north toward Rockport, Jake took the southbound exit toward Boston. It was easier to keep him in sight on the highway. Elly followed at a steady distance, her eyes watering from focusing so steadily on her target. She was afraid to even blink.

Jake continued south to Route 60 in Medford. She took the exit ramp two cars behind him, nearly lost him in Medford center, then caught up on one of the side streets near Tufts University. For a minute, Elly felt silly for having been suspicious. Jake was probably visiting an old dental school buddy.

Then she remembered: Tufts Dental School was actually in Boston near the theater district, on the opposite side of the Charles River from Medford.

A few minutes later, Jake turned into the driveway of a three-decker blue house with porches on all three levels. The house was identical to most of the others on the street, aside from its bright color. It had a peeling white picket fence around a tangled garden that looked as if it had once been a labor of love but was now abandoned. Container pots of dead plants sat on the steps, interspersed with jack-o’-lanterns. The faces of the pumpkins had the usual triangle eyes and jagged teeth.

The only things on the porch were a swing and a bicycle. Paper ghosts and pumpkins decorated the first-floor windowpanes, low enough to have been put there by a child.

Elly parked across the street from the house. Jake turned the motorcycle off, dismounted it, and removed his helmet before climbing the stairs to the porch. He moved quickly, bouncing up the steps two at a time; he might have been a teenager, seen from this distance.

Jake turned the knob and entered the building without ringing any of the three bells lit yellow by the black metal mailboxes. She had no way of knowing which apartment he was entering. Either the door to the front entry wasn’t locked or he had a key.

Elly glanced at her watch: five thirty. Laura, she knew, was expecting Jake home at his usual time, around nine. Until then, she’d be tending to her students and Kennedy, making dinner, doing laundry.

Laura would have food ready to put on the table when Jake arrived. She would wait to eat with him and would probably have a bottle of wine open and ready to pour. Maybe she would have poured herself a glass before Jake got home and sipped it while she was cooking. These were her sister’s habits.

Now, knowing that Laura had no idea where her husband went after work made Elly so furious that she slammed the door shut when she got out of the car. She mounted the steps to the house in a fury and tried the front door. It was locked. So Jake had a key!

Either that, or whoever lived here had been watching for him and let him in.

Damn it. Elly leaned her forehead on the cold front door. Did she really want to know what was on the other side?

For her sister’s sake, yes.

She rang the third-floor buzzer, then the second floor. No answer. When she rang the first-floor buzzer—she’d chosen that one last, because of the obvious evidence of a child living there—she was admitted almost immediately to a front hall papered in a wild Chinese print: men in robes flying kites, decorative bridges, and flocks of birds on a bright gold background.

Given her suspicions about Jake, she fully expected a woman to open the door. Instead, she was greeted by a man. Thirtysomething, narrowly built. He had a cartoon hero’s jutting jaw and a shock of thick black hair that stood nearly straight up, as if he’d been tugging on it. He was the sort of man who looked like he would swagger when he walked. A swashbuckler was the odd word that came to Elly’s mind.

Then the man smiled and two deep dimples appeared on either side of his mouth, causing her to smile back despite her foul mood. He was cute and had teeth like sugar cubes. Elly could imagine sucking on them.

“Oh, hey,” he said easily, still grinning. “You’re not the pizza delivery guy. Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Jake.”

The man’s face went nearly as white as his teeth. “I’m sorry, who?”

“Jake,” Elly said. “Jake Williams.” She edged the toe of her boot toward the door in case he tried to close it. “Tell him Elly’s here.” She thought about adding, “His sister-in-law,” but decided to let the guy wonder if she was Jake’s wife.

The man glanced down at her boot, then back up at her face. He had beautiful eyes, dark and soft. His expressions were so transparent that it was easy for Elly to track his thoughts: he was thinking about denying that he knew Jake but then decided to concede without a fight.

He sighed heavily, and it was as if all the air went out of him. His shoulders rounded over his skinny chest. Now Elly recalculated his age as more like late twenties.

“I guess you’d better come in,” he said.

“Pizza guy, pizza pie! Pizza guy, pizza pie!” a child cried from within the apartment. This chant was followed by a sharp screech that could have been made by a parrot.

A small boy ran into the room from the opposite side just as Elly entered from the front door. He was the source of the screeching.

The boy was a miniature of the handsome man. Dark hair, dark eyes, dimples. He even wore the same sort of outfit, a snug bright T-shirt and jeans. He was still shrieking. Elly covered her ears as the child ran smack into the man’s legs, where he clung for dear life.

“I’m going to get you!” a man growled from the other room, and Jake came barreling after the toddler, hunched low in a monster pose, arms swinging heavily in front of him. He nearly ran into the other man, too, when he noticed Elly and almost failed to stop in time.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said, still hunched over, peering up at her. He straightened slowly. “Oh, God, Elly. What are you doing here?” He worked his jaw, as if it were threatening to seize up. “Is everything all right at home? How did you find me?”

Both men and the boy stared at her, wide-eyed, as if Elly had suddenly beamed into their living room from outer space. Which she might as well have, because Elly could make no sense at all of what she was seeing. She could be in a parallel universe.

Was Jake here doing pro bono dentistry work? Was this man a cousin she didn’t know about?

Then Jake touched the man’s arm and she understood. Elly felt her mind go blank with shock. Her knees threatened to give out.

Jake stepped forward and took her arm, guiding her gently across the room to a couch strewn with tiny metal trucks. He brushed a few vehicles to the floor and sat her down.

“Is everything all right at home?” he repeated. “Are Laura and Kennedy okay?”

Elly wondered how to answer this as the little boy tugged at Jake’s arm, begging, “Chase me, chase me!” How could Laura and Kennedy be okay? How would they ever be okay again, if this was the lie Jake had been living?

“They’re fine,” she said. “They don’t know I’m here.”

“Hey, Brad,” the other man said. “Let’s go outside and watch for the pizza guy!” He opened the front door again.

The little boy ran to him and took his hand. “Pizza guy, pizza pie!”

Jake stood up, still looking agitated. “Wait. His jacket,” he said. “It’s getting cold out.”

“He’ll be fine for a few minutes. We’ll just be right out front,” the man said over his shoulder to Jake, then closed the door behind him.

Elly glanced around the apartment. The furniture in the living room was inexpensive but comfortable: a faux leather couch and recliner, an artificial Oriental rug in bright orange and blue, framed prints on the walls.

In the next room, she could see a table laid with three red place mats. A crystal vase of fall flowers stood in its center, and the floor beneath the table was occupied by a complicated wooden train track looped around the table legs. Train cars were scattered beneath the table as if they’d tumbled off bridges.

“Brad’s very into vehicles,” Jake said, following her glance as he sat down beside her again. “I’m sure he’s going to be an engineer or construction worker. My son’s all boy.” He said this last sentence wistfully, startling Elly into wakefulness again. It felt that way: as if she’d been dreaming and was only now returning to consciousness.

“Brad’s your son?”

Jake nodded, a flicker of pride in his eyes. “We had a surrogate. I’m not the biological father, of course,” he added quickly, seeing her expression. “I’ve just been helping Anthony raise him.”

“And Anthony is?”

“You just met him,” Jake said.

“We didn’t actually meet.”

“Ah. No. I guess you didn’t. All right. Anthony and I, we’re, he’s,” he said, and stopped to take a deep breath before finishing. “We’re in love,” he said finally. “Oh, Jesus, Elly. I can’t imagine what you must think of me.” Jake rubbed his hands on his black jeans vigorously, as if trying to warm them up, though the apartment was overheated. “Or maybe I can.”

Surrogate mothers were expensive. Elly thought of Laura’s consignment clothing, of her sister’s determined efforts to keep the heat low to save money. Of Laura asking their mother for Kennedy’s tuition money. “I don’t think you should worry about what I think, Jake. You need to worry about Laura.”

“She doesn’t know about any of this.”

“Obviously. But you have to tell her.”

“I can’t!” Jake’s face was pinched. “I’ve tried, Elly. A million times, I’ve tried! But I can’t do it. I can’t hurt her!” His voice was desperate. “I’ll lose everything! Kennedy would hate me. And what would she tell her friends at school?” He shook his head. “I know what that school’s like.”

Elly stared at him in disbelief. “But you can’t keep up this charade. What about Laura?”

“Do you think she’d really want to know?” Jake’s face was so drawn that the outline of his skull seemed to press outward from beneath the skin, as if at any moment his cheekbones might jut through the flesh. “What would Laura do if she and I split up? I know she loves me. Look at all we’ve built together. The house. Her business and mine. Kennedy! I can’t give all of that up, Elly. I don’t think Laura would want to, either. At least not until Kennedy goes to college. Anthony understands. He’s willing to wait.”

Elly wondered about this. Anthony had let her inside rather than keep her standing in the hall: maybe he’d wanted exactly this sort of confrontation to bring things to a head. He was a young man and still handsome. He and Jake had a child together.

Then she thought of Anne, and of Laura’s suspicions. “What about Anne?” she asked. “What was all that about? Did anything really happen?”

Jake’s lips had gone the same putty-white as his complexion. “Something. But not what you think.”

“You don’t know what I think. So tell me.”

“I approached Anne. I did what she said.”

“But why, Jake? When you’re so obviously attracted to men?”

“I wasn’t always attracted to men.” He offered the ghost of a smile. “Or I didn’t let myself know I was. With Anne, I was testing myself. Trying to manufacture something that wasn’t there.”

Elly still felt confused. Unbalanced. “Manufacture what, exactly?”

“Desire for a woman.” He had calmed down now, his breathing more regular, though again he had to rub his hands on his jeans. “I met Anthony at that conference I went to in Las Vegas, the weekend Anne came to take care of the horses for Laura. He was a blackjack dealer in one of the casinos. I don’t know if it’s because I was so out of my element or what, but things got complicated. Fast.”

“So you came home and decided to bait yourself with Anne, is that it?” Elly didn’t want to understand, but somehow she did. She could see it all: Jake’s dogged and hopeless determination to turn himself into something he was not—a straight man—as he had probably been trying to do all his life.

“Yes,” he said. “Anne happened to be there. I needed to tempt myself with someone who wasn’t my wife. Part of me still hoped, I guess, that it was marriage that had robbed me of desire. Not the fact that I wanted to be with a man instead of a woman.”

Elly considered this. Jake had grown up in a conservative Catholic family. Played lacrosse in college, joined a fraternity. What torture it must have been to be gay yet afraid to explore his sexuality. He’d made himself miserable trying to do the right things for his family. As Laura had. What a sad mess.

“So what really happened?” she asked.

“I went into the guest room while Anne was asleep and pulled the covers down to look at her. I touched myself. But that’s all that happened. I swear! I never meant for her to wake up.” He pressed a hand to his face, covering his eyes for a moment, then dropped it. “I told Laura about it so she wouldn’t know what I’d done with Anthony in Las Vegas or guess what I really was. What I am. It’s the same reason I kissed Anne at that Christmas party. I wanted to tell Anne the truth. That’s why I went looking for her at the pub. I was hoping she’d understand. Forgive me, maybe.”

“That’s pretty twisted, Jake.”

“I know. I know. But I didn’t want to be gay! I’d been with only one man and a couple of women in college. I wasn’t sure of anything for years.” Jake was talking fast now, his words slamming into one another. “I fell in love with Laura. With who she is! Laura’s everything I’ve always admired in a person: brave and honest. Smart. True to herself.”

“She is,” Elly said.

“I thought I could control my feelings for men. When Laura got pregnant in college, I took that as a sign that I was on the right path. I always wanted to be a father. I thought, all right, I’m attracted to men sometimes, but I knew I could control my feelings. And I did, until Anthony.”

“But Laura miscarried. Didn’t you take that as a sign, too?”

Jake shook his head. “No. Anyway, I couldn’t leave her. Laura was so down. She’d stopped riding competitively because of me. And I knew she’d be a wonderful wife and mother.” He sat back against the couch, his eyes bright, his jaw clenched. “But I’ve been a shit husband.”

He looked so pained that Elly wanted to comfort him. Jake was right: her sister loved him. Thought he was good and kind and hardworking. And he was, in most ways.

On the other hand, she wanted to kill Jake for lying. For hurting Laura. Even though Laura didn’t know where he was right now, or where her husband had presumably been spending most of his evenings and probably some weekends, Laura was in pain. She already knew that Jake didn’t love her in the way she needed to be loved.

That was not necessarily unforgivable. But it had to be remedied.

The door opened and Anthony appeared, holding a box of pizza. Brad was at his side, pink-cheeked and excited. “We got it, Daddy!” he yelled. “We got the pizza guy, pizza pie!” Then he ran straight into Jake’s arms.

“What am I going to do?” Jake asked, raising his eyes to Elly above the little boy’s head.

“What we’re going to do right now is eat some pizza,” Anthony said, hurrying over to set the box on the table in front of them. “Then we’ll figure it all out together. Right, Elly?”

She sat stunned on the couch, all three of them looking at her now, and nodded.

•   •   •

Lucy went to sleep just after six. Anne settled on the couch to read her e-mail.

She’d had two responses from teaching jobs, but now that her mother had offered her a job in the kitchen, she wondered whether she should stay in Flossie’s place and work here. That would make the most financial sense.

Flossie had made it clear that she’d be happy to watch Lucy if Anne wanted to work at the inn. This would give her a chance to try cooking full-time. Rodrigo could teach her a lot. And, frankly, any other option seemed too exhausting. Other jobs she’d found would require her to commute long distances or pay an astonishing amount of rent.

Then there was the daunting matter of day care. Anne didn’t even know where to begin with that. She hated the idea. She wanted Lucy to be with family while she was still so small.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. She answered it and was surprised to see Sebastian. “You and your dog are off the hook,” she’d told him as they’d said good-bye the last time she’d cooked for him. “I’m completely healed! No more guilt. No more stopping by with pity meals or wine, thank you.”

She hadn’t seen him since, and that was four days ago. Now Sebastian held a bottle of white wine in one hand and a bag from the local Chinese place in the other. “I hope I’m not intruding.”

Anne smiled. “Are you kidding? Lucy fell asleep early, so I didn’t bother cooking. I was about to forage for crackers.”

He laughed. “This is only from the local place, but I think it can compete with crackers.” Sebastian followed her into the living room and made himself at home in the galley kitchen, heating the food in the microwave and opening the wine while she took down a pair of plates and laid silverware on the counter.

Anne ate hungrily and asked what he’d been working on today. He was excited, Sebastian said, because he’d gotten permission from the city to continue the research he’d started in Dogtown for another year.

“You know Dogtown’s haunted, right?” she said.

“Of course. Don’t forget I grew up around here, too,” he said.

“I was always spooked by that one story about James Merry,” she said.

“Who?”

“That guy who raised a bull in Dogtown so he could wrestle it every year, until it eventually killed him in 1892 when he tried it the third year in a row.”

“Not that you can blame the bull for that, I guess.”

“Right. The guy was asking for it,” Anne said. “The creepiest bit is that there’s a rock with Merry’s name and the date of his death-by-bull written in red paint to look like blood.”

Suddenly they were both laughing so hard at the absurdity of the story that Anne had to put down her wine before she spilled it. “So why are you so excited to keep working here?” she asked. “I mean, you’ve traveled all over the world. Why stay in Massachusetts?”

“I realized that no matter how far away you go, sometimes you have to go home to figure things out,” he said. “Besides, for a tree guy like me who’s interested in the intersection between climate change and natural resources, Cape Ann has a fascinating history. Think about it: just twenty thousand years ago, New England was covered by a huge glacier. Then the glacier melted and exposed all sorts of rocks and boulders in this area.”

They discussed the history, then, of people who’d been landing on Cape Ann for eleven thousand years, starting with the Vikings and the French. “They were followed by John Smith and the European settlers who fished and farmed and cut lumber,” Sebastian said.

Then came the granite quarries, he added: paving stones made from Cape Ann granite were used in New York, Boston, and other cities. He grinned. “Obviously, I could talk history all night. Sorry. But the point is, you and I are just the tiniest blip in our history. Working in Dogtown reminds me of that every day.”

“That certainly puts our petty problems in perspective,” Anne said. When Sebastian fell silent and started poking at the food on his plate, she nudged him with her elbow. “Why are you really here tonight? You look like you have something on your mind.”

Sebastian ran a hand through his auburn hair, streaked with lighter copper strands from spending so much time outdoors. “I do. My sister Paige saw Elly today.”

“Really? That’s good. Elly hasn’t seen any of her old friends. She’s feeling a little lost, I think,” Anne said. “I haven’t been much good to her because I can’t go out at night. Also, she’s doing all this shopping for Mom’s birthday celebration, which is turning into a circus. Elly thinks we’re all going to sing and dance to songs from An American in Paris because that movie was made the year Mom was born.”

Sebastian was looking at her with one eyebrow raised, obviously waiting for her to finish. “I’m babbling. Sorry,” she said. “What does Paige seeing Elly have to do with you coming here tonight?”

“Paige told Elly that I’ve been seeing you.”

Immediately, Anne wanted to lodge protests: he was coming around to check on her, no other reason. By the way Sebastian cleared his throat and then hurriedly stood up to scrape the plates, though, Anne knew he had more to say.

God. She hoped this wouldn’t turn into a conversation about Jake. What if Laura had told Paige the same awful story, and Paige had repeated it to her brother? Sebastian had witnessed that horrible confrontation with Jake and Laura in the bar. What if he believed Laura’s version of things?

Now he suggested they move to the couch. “I always feel like I’m on an interrogation stool here at the counter,” he said, pointing to the low-hanging light.

She’d never noticed it before, but Sebastian was much taller than she was. So tall that when she sat on the couch, Anne curled her legs beneath her to avoid touching him, because his body seemed to fill the room.

How did they have sex in that car? They were almost twenty years younger then, of course. More flexible. Sebastian probably had no idea he was her first lover.

Thoughts of that night flooded Anne’s memory, unbidden, causing her face to burn so hot that she put her palm to one cheek to cool it.

“You okay?” Sebastian drew his dark brows into a frown.

“I’m fine. Just nervous. You’re acting very strange,” Anne said, though she supposed he could say the same of her.

“Sorry. I don’t mean to act strange. Sometimes I can’t help it.”

“Join the club,” Anne said, and tried to smile, but felt her lower lip quiver and bit it instead.

Sebastian watched her mouth as he said carefully, “Paige didn’t know you had a baby. She was surprised to hear that from Elly.”

This was unexpected. “Why didn’t Paige know? You never told her?”

He shook his head. “I figured that was your business.”

“Does Paige mind that you and I are starting to be friends?”

He smiled. “No. I think she’s glad, actually.”

“Oh. That’s a relief.” Anne felt her shoulders relax a little.

Sebastian leaned forward and clasped his hands around his knees, his hair falling over his eyes. “Paige wants me to tell you about my wife. I’m just struggling to find the right way to start.”

“There’s no need,” she said. “I mean, talk, if you want. Otherwise, it’s okay if you never tell me.”

“My sister’s right. I need to tell you,” he said.

Sebastian began hesitantly at first, the words coming two or three sentences at a time, with long pauses as he felt his way through his history with Jenny: how they’d met in El Salvador, where he’d fallen ill with typhoid fever and nearly died. Might have, if Jenny hadn’t cared for him. His decision that theirs was a partnership where each could make the other a better person and the world a better place.

“I’m speaking in clichés—I know,” he said. “But we were young and unbelievably idealistic.”

When they returned to the States, Jenny had trouble adjusting, he continued. Depression took root. She wore the same clothes day after day. Dishes piled up in the sink until Sebastian came home from work to clean the house and see that she ate something. She saw one therapist after another, and was institutionalized for a few weeks after they’d been married five years. Medication seemed to help.

Then, when Jenny got pregnant, she stopped taking the pills, he said, because she was afraid of hurting the baby. “I’d come home from work and she’d be curled on the bed, as if she were literally trying to hold herself together,” he said.

“The poor thing,” Anne said. “It sounds like she was in hell. You, too.” She felt tension in her own shoulders, watching him.

“Yes,” he said. “‘Hell.’ That’s the right word for it.”

Once, when Jenny was about seven months pregnant, Sebastian arrived home to find her on the kitchen floor, a carving knife in one hand. She’d made several cuts along her wrists, though nothing deep. “At that point I called 911,” he said. “She hated me for that, but I was terrified.”

The EMTs convinced Jenny to check herself into the psych ward of the local hospital, but it was a pointless exercise, Sebastian said. “Jenny managed to check herself out and disappear.”

When he fell silent, staring across the room with a bleak expression, Anne finally touched his hand. It was cool, rough from his work outdoors. “Where did she go?”

He shrugged. “I still don’t know. She came back three days later, wearing the same clothes she’d had on when she left. She was probably on the street somewhere.”

That night, Sebastian had talked to Paige on the phone. They’d discussed having Jenny committed; he was worried not only for her safety, but for the baby’s. Jenny, who never left the house, took his car keys after they went to bed and drove off.

“She left me a note. I found it when I woke up and she wasn’t in bed with me.”

“What did it say?” Anne was nearly holding her breath. The tension was unbearable.

“That I shouldn’t worry.” He shook his head. “As if that were even possible. But the note said Jenny planned to visit her parents for a couple of days. If they agreed with me, she promised to check herself into another psych facility. And, God help me, I chose to believe her. I went back to sleep, figuring I’d call her parents in the morning and check on her.”

“You were able to sleep?” Anne was shocked. Then again, who could predict how you’d act during an event that extreme?

He nodded. “I was wiped out. Mentally and physically exhausted. An hour or so later, I got the call from the ER.”

Jenny had driven up to New Hampshire along Route 1, and had apparently aimed the wheels of her Toyota straight for the railing while crossing a bridge she must have crossed a thousand times before, Sebastian said. She was going ninety miles an hour. According to the police report, it had been deliberate.

“I might as well have killed her myself,” he said.

“Don’t say that. It wasn’t your fault!” Anne said. “You did everything you could to take care of her.”

“No,” he said. “I should have gone after her that night. Called the cops. Something!”

“But if you’d tried driving when you were that tired, it might have been you going off the road!”

Sebastian turned to her, his hazel eyes the color of damp bark. “No. Any way I look at it, it was my fault, Anne. Jenny knew that the only reason I didn’t leave her was because she was pregnant.”

Jenny must have overheard him talking to Paige on the phone about having her committed, he added.

“I thought Jenny was asleep. But she was probably listening from the top of the stairs when I told my sister that I didn’t think I could go on being responsible for Jenny’s life. My wife killed herself because she knew I’d lost faith in her. In us.”

“Oh, Sebastian,” Anne said softly. “Don’t you see? You had no choice but to demand that she get help. You couldn’t have trusted her around the baby otherwise. Or had any sort of marriage.”

He looked at her, his eyes bloodshot. “Thank you for saying that, but you’re being too kind.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m just sorry you went through all this. You must have felt so alone.”

Sebastian was rocking a little next to her on the couch, still bent forward, his elbows on his knees. “What I felt was useless,” he said.

Anne touched him again. His arm first, then his back. The heat of Sebastian’s skin through his flannel shirt was like an electric charge on her palm, but she kept her hand there.

“Listen,” she said fiercely. “Every single thing you did for Jenny and your child, you did out of love. But sometimes loving people isn’t enough to save them. They have to save themselves.” She wrapped one arm around him and rocked with him, her hip and thigh pressed against his.

“You see why my sister said I needed to tell you,” Sebastian said, breaking free of her embrace. He went to the counter, where he poured them each more wine.

“No,” she said. “Not really. But it’s good you did. You’ve been carrying all this around for a very long time. It’s time you shared it.”

He nodded, then pushed his hair out of his eyes with an impatient gesture that by now was familiar to Anne. “I went to therapy for a while. That helped until it didn’t. I told a few friends. But you know what’s helped the most? Being alone in the woods, doing my work. When I’m outside, I feel more insignificant, somehow. I don’t know why that makes me feel better, but it does.”

Anne smiled. “I know what you mean. That’s why I sit outside on the porch with Lucy or walk with her as often as I can. I feel unimportant in the scope of things when I’m in the woods or near the ocean. Less weighed down by my own stupid little problems.”

“You haven’t ever told me about Lucy’s father.” Sebastian was still leaning against the kitchen counter. “Did you meet him in Puerto Rico?”

She nodded, missing the warmth of Sebastian on the couch beside her and wishing she knew how to ask him to sit beside her again. “We were living together when I got pregnant. I thought he was getting divorced. Turns out, he had other ideas.”

“Must be nice to be here around family after going through that.”

“Yes.” Anne wasn’t going to get into the ridiculous thing between herself and Laura, or tell him about her mother’s odd behavior toward her and Lucy.

Sebastian crossed the room and knelt before her on the braided rug. “I’m glad,” he said. “And I’m glad to be spending time with you. I can’t lie, though: it’s hard sometimes, being around you and Lucy. Painful. I’m afraid I’ll never get to experience that sort of bond with a child. At the same time, watching you makes me dare to believe it might be possible someday.”

“Good.” She said nothing more. She didn’t need to: it was as if Sebastian had suddenly invited her inside his thoughts and heart. As if he’d unbuttoned his flannel shirt and drawn her against him. Anne couldn’t stop feeling the heat of his skin through that soft fabric against her palm even now, even though she wasn’t touching him anymore.

She thought about reaching for him but kept her hands clasped in her lap. It wasn’t a good idea. Sebastian was too wounded. So was she.

But sometimes your bad ideas are the ones you feel most compelled to follow through on anyway, she thought, as Sebastian regarded her a moment longer with those changeable hazel eyes, now warmed through with gold, before leaning in slowly to kiss her.

He smelled of wine and pine trees, of seaweed and damp leaves. She gasped in surprise at the warmth of his lips. Then his hands were on her breasts, her breasts so full that he groaned.

Anne leaned forward, wanting to press her breasts into his hands and longing to feel more of him against her. Sebastian caught her as she nearly fell against him.

He lowered her to the rug beside him, then rolled on top of her and kissed her hair, her face, unbuttoning her shirt as she undid his. Then their chests were bare, pressed together, and she thought she’d never been warmer, or more alive, than this.