In the northeast corner of the United States of America, Leah was engaged in a game of smashball with Dylan. The two of them played barefoot on a wide strip of grass situated between their trailer’s spot in the RV park and the dusky blue of Moosehead Lake, Maine.
Had they been keeping score, Dylan would have been beating her one hundred to zero. Happily, they were working as a team, their objective to keep the ball going back and forth between them.
She’d been unable to afford some of the more expensive items and activities Dylan had wanted on this trip. But at $10.95, the price of smashball had been right, so she’d purchashed the two wooden paddles and rubber ball in Bar Harbor a week ago.
They’d hiked in Vermont. Gone canoeing in New Hampshire. Followed a walking tour map of Boston.
Without the pressure of schoolwork, friend dynamics, and football, Dylan had been more communicative. Another bonus—Leah hadn’t had as many reasons to worry about him because he was usually within her line of sight.
The Airstream had turned out to be more difficult to tow than anticipated. Twice she’d needed the help of a passerby to navigate her way through gas stations. Once—horror of horrors—she’d been forced to back the trailer up. Also, she now knew more about emptying the trailer’s sewage tank than she’d ever wanted to know.
Overall, though, the trip had been everything she’d hoped.
She hit the ball back to Dylan too softly. He made a comical dive forward and popped the ball into the air. Hampered by amusement and poor athletic reflexes, she couldn’t get her paddle under it in time. The ball plunked to the earth.
She set her hands on her knees and laughed.
“You’re tragic at this,” he pointed out helpfully.
“I know. I’m tragic at every sport I’ve ever attempted. Take pity.”
“No pity.”
She fed the ball to him. He hit it straight back to her. Her return shot sprang up, and he had to do an acrobatic leap to knock it back. Her next shot went wide right.
He lunged and got his paddle on it. “Aim toward me!”
“I’m trying!” She hit another sky ball. He leapt into the air again but this time missed. He gave her a mock glare.
“You’re breathing hard,” she observed. “Is it taxing to play a team game with me?”
“The best athlete in the world isn’t in good enough shape to play a team game with you, Leah.” He served the ball to her again.
Thwap, thwap, thwap.
“Do trips like this make you miss Mom and Dad?” she asked over the sound of the ball. Leah brought their parents up from time to time so he’d know he could talk to her about either of them whenever he wanted to.
“No. I don’t even remember Dad.”
“Mom, then? It’s been a long time since we’ve seen her. It’s okay, you know. To miss her. That won’t hurt my feelings.”
“It’ll be fine when she comes for her next visit. But I don’t miss her.”
“She told me she’s planning to come for Christmas again this year.”
“’Kay.” He shrugged as if he truly didn’t care one way or another. The heart of a teenage boy was a difficult thing to understand.
“Have you thought any more about our dinner conversation last night?” she asked.
“About colleges.” They’d already visited four that fell within the overlapping parameters of her budget and his GPA and test scores. They had a few more to visit. So far he didn’t seem enthusiastic about any of them, and she couldn’t tell if that was because of his glum-colored glasses or because he didn’t want to expend energy writing essays and answering application questions.
“It’s too early to think about college,” he said.
“It’s the middle of July, and many colleges open applications in August.”
“Yeah, but applications stay open until December or something.”
“When do you intend to submit your applications?”
“December or something.”
She let the ball fall to the ground and put her hands on her hips. “If you apply early, I suspect that you’ll give yourself an advantage.”
“I don’t want an advantage. I’ll just wait.”
She gave him a look of outrage.
“It’s too early to think about college,” he repeated.
“It’s exactly the right time—”
“Too early,” he said stubbornly.
“In that case, let’s at least talk more about fields of study and possible career paths.”
“Yawn. C’mon. Feed me the ball one last time, then I’m gonna go.”
“And do what?”
His face said, duh. “Check my phone.”
“Yes, because why would you want to experience this lake in Maine when you can stare at your phone?”
“I’ve experienced this lake in Maine enough. C’mon.”
They volleyed the ball.
They’d stay here another two nights, then point the Airstream south and begin the three-day journey home. She was simultaneously sorry that their trip was drawing to a close and ready to return to a space larger than twenty-three by eight feet, her shower, her home’s valley views, the cinnamon rolls at Sugar Maple Kitchen. And, of course, in Misty River, she’d be closer to Sebastian—
Confound it.
Look where she was! New England! With the person who was closest to her in the world. Who cared about proximity to Sebastian Grant?
Oddly . . . she did.
“I’m done,” Dylan declared when she once again failed to control the trajectory of her strike. He handed her his paddle and headed to their trailer.
Leah drifted to the lake’s edge and sat. Placing the paddles and ball to the side, she leaned against her wrists. Large rocks the color of pewter descended to the mirror-like surface of the lake, which reflected the clouds. Trees crowded the shoreline. Someone rowed a distant boat in her direction.
She imagined that it was Sebastian rowing. He’d moor the boat, then stride toward her. . . .
She’d have been more successful at avoiding daydreams of Sebastian while on this trip had she not had so many night dreams of him.
Sleeping in the bedroom of the Airstream that smelled of barbecue smoke and orange-scented Pledge, her customary anxiety dreams about Dylan had given way to dreams about Sebastian. Burnished, marvelous dreams, rippling with sensations. In them, Sebastian had slow danced with her. He’d sat next to her and looked across his shoulder into her eyes, laughing. He’d run a fingertip down the inside of her arm.
She’d entirely forgotten how wonderful dreams could be. So wonderful that the instant her conscious mind interrupted one of her dreams of him—even before she was fully awake—she started regretting the dream’s end.
Physical attraction was, it turned out, quite a delightful thing to undergo. Like eating an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie. Or calculating partitions of a number.
Physical attraction was also a perplexing thing to undergo, seeing as how she had informed Sebastian that she was missing the attraction gene.
It wasn’t that she’d never experienced tugs of interest toward men. She’d experienced tugs of interest in the past and even gone on a few dates in her early twenties. However, it had been clear to her that none of those flickers of chemistry had the potential to convert into an actual relationship, because the flickers had been so extraordinarily temporary in nature.
She’d certainly never felt a fraction as strongly about any man as her friends felt for their boyfriends and husbands. She’d concluded that she was wired differently than other women . . . much less prone to the type of deep and long-lasting attraction and love that led to marriage.
Leah was already unusual in several ways. Her brain was unusual. The fact that she’d begun raising a child at the age of eighteen—unusual. The fact that she’d been working as a teacher and pursuing a master’s degree when her peers had been graduating from high school—unusual. It hadn’t been a stretch to accept that she was unusual when it came to romance, too.
She’d decided to place the idea of a boyfriend on the shelf and simply go without. She was proud of that choice in the same way that she was proud of herself for going without the type of luxuries that had the power to destroy her monthly budget.
She wasn’t fated to fall in love. She’d made peace with that.
And yet, here she was: sitting on this lakeshore during her vacation, envisioning Sebastian Grant rowing a boat toward her.
She’d been very aware of her powerful responses to him the times they’d met at Magnolia Avenue Hospital and at the Colemans’ barbecue. Her reactions to him had been different than anything she’d experienced before. Even so, she’d expected them to prove fleeting.
Instead, a peculiar thing had occurred. An unprecedented thing. It had been more than two weeks since she’d seen him, yet her conscious and unconscious mind returned to him often. If anything, her draw toward him was intensifying.
Had she reached a hasty conclusion when she’d determined that she wasn’t capable of feeling the way other women felt?
No self-respecting mathematician ever trusted a hasty conclusion. So, if that’s what had happened here, she’d made an error.
Admittedly, her data set of romantic interactions was small. In order to test her conclusion about her wiring, she’d need to enlarge that data set. To do that, she’d need to see Sebastian again.
She had no expectation of acquiring Sebastian as a boyfriend. For one thing, he’d given her no reason to think he liked her in that way. For another, Ben was romantically interested in her, and Sebastian was his best friend. So even if Sebastian did like her in that way, nothing could come of it.
Which was actually . . . freeing.
She could talk with Sebastian, measure her responses, and indulge her curiosity without worrying that he might get the wrong idea.
The following night before leaving the hospital, Sebastian drew to a halt at Isabella Ackerman’s bedside.
He’d told Isabella’s parents that he expected their daughter to make it through surgery, and she had.
Isabella occupied the same room Josiah Douglas had occupied weeks ago. Before and after Josiah, numerous other babies had been treated in this room. As soon as they discharged one, others always arrived.
Josiah had been a full-term newborn. Tiny Isabella weighed less than six pounds. A cap covered her bald head. Long eyelashes rested against the ivory skin of her face.
Outwardly, she looked like a perfectly formed preemie. Her exterior didn’t reveal her life-threatening interior flaw.
Megan, Isabella’s mother, had told him they were trusting God to give their daughter a new heart. But Sebastian knew that one in four babies in need of a transplant would die before a donor organ could be found.
He pushed the thought from his head.
When Megan had asked him if he was a believer, he’d said that he was. Which was true. Yet his history with God was not clear-cut.
He’d had zero familiarity with God during his early years. Then the worst thing that could have happened to him—his only parent’s death—had happened. He’d landed with Christian foster parents who’d taken him to church. There, people had occasionally said things to him like “God’s ways are mysterious.” Or “God is with you in your grief.”
He hadn’t believed in God’s existence, so Christianity had seemed like an idiotic waste of time. But even if he had believed God existed, he wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with a supposedly all-powerful God who could have kept his mother alive and hadn’t. Mostly, the idea of God made him angry.
Then he’d been forced to take a scholarship slot on a junior high mission trip to El Salvador, which had only made him angrier. Their group had just finished running a kids’ sports camp for the day when a counselor had asked him and a few others to return equipment to a nearby building. He’d been carrying stacks of orange cones through a basement hallway when the earthquake hit and everything had gone black.
The floor and walls jerked and jerked. Terror subsumed him. Escape. Get out!
A girl was panting and gasping behind him.
Dropping the cones, he stumbled toward the dim light ahead. His shoulder rammed into the wall. Dust rattled over him, clogging his nose and mouth. Why won’t it stop?
A hand wrapped around Sebastian’s forearm and yanked him forward, then forward again. He staggered into a small central room where two hallways met. Rectangular windows at sidewalk level above revealed the scene. A kid named Luke had pulled him out. Ben and Natasha stared at him with terrified eyes, their arms spread for balance as they fought to stay upright.
The building groaned and metal screamed. Pieces of the ceiling crashed down. Two of the room’s concrete walls collapsed inward, crashing into each other and forming a tent shape above their heads.
His heart roared. We’re going to die.
He’d continued to believe that for every one of the eight days he’d spent underground. Ben, Natasha, Genevieve, and Luke had families who loved them and were desperate for their safe return. Next to them, he was the broken toy nobody wanted.
We’re going to die.
When the search and rescue team took the building apart in an effort to reach them, he’d been sure the structure would cave in and they’d be crushed. Instead, God had protected them in the clearest way possible.
Sebastian had come face to face with the God he’d denied.
God did exist. He’d been wrong about that. But what was he supposed to do with a God who hadn’t saved his mother but had saved him?
After returning from El Salvador, he, Ben, Natasha, and Genevieve spent months traveling around and telling their story to reporters, churches, authors, screenwriters. The Colemans brought him to church with them on Sundays, sent him to church camp in the summers, took him on another mission trip, talked with him again and again about faith.
When he was a teenager, he’d prayed for salvation. His motives had been partly good. He’d honestly wanted God to fill the hungry hole within him that longed for security. But his motives had also been partly selfish. He’d been a practical, street-smart kid who’d seen the wisdom in hedging his bets for eternity.
To this day, he attended church semi-regularly. However, he’d never gotten over all of his resentment toward God. Nor could he bring himself to trust God fully.
In high school, he’d worked for a college scholarship. In college, he’d worked for a med school scholarship. In med school, he’d worked to become a surgeon. Himself, his degrees, his job, his bank account. Those things he could trust in.
Yet even though he’d gotten everything he’d ever wanted, his life had been flat for months. Now that he could finally stop clawing and scraping for the next achievement, he was realizing that . . .
It still wasn’t enough. Which infuriated him and left him feeling betrayed. Deceived.
No one would look at him these days and think of him as a broken toy nobody wanted.
No one, that is, except him.
He’d worked incredibly hard to prove everything he’d had to prove. By rights, his accomplishments should have made him feel secure and given him vengeance over his mother’s death and repaid the loss he’d suffered when he was young.
But that’s not how things had gone down. He might look healthy on the outside, just like Isabella Ackerman did. But, like her, he was flawed on the inside.
As flawed as he’d always been.
He smoothed the tubes draping over the side of Isabella’s bed.
The team at the Clinic for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Diseases had helped Isabella as much as she could be helped at this point. Their task now? Keep her alive until she reached the top of the transplant list.
The intensivists and the experienced group of nurses here made it their business to know every detail about every child. The best nurses came to care for each patient and, often even more so, their parents, because the parents were the ones who talked with them, who shared their stories and their fears.
Sebastian couldn’t afford to invest too much of himself in any one patient. Or, after the things that had happened to him, in any one person.
Leah included.
So how come he still couldn’t let her go?
“There’s something special about you, Sebastian. Something appealing.” Her words to him were nothing, really. Yet, he’d replayed them over and over. When stressed. When he couldn’t sleep. When he retreated to his office after receiving bad news on one of his patients.
The memory of her saying that to him loosened the hard knot at the center of his chest.
But as soon as the knot loosened, he’d remember how Ben felt about Leah, and shame would twist his stomach.
He had more than enough to keep him busy here at the hospital. His life should be complete. But it was as if Leah’s reentrance into his world had shined light on the emptiness that had been inside of him for a long time.
He’d been pretending the emptiness didn’t exist and doing a semi-decent job of that.
Until her.
The morning after Leah and Dylan returned to Misty River in late July, Dylan rushed off to see his friends as purposefully as a baby animal seeking its mother.
Once Leah had clothes tumbling around inside the dryer, the fridge stocked, and her suitcase stored in the garage, she turned her attention to her search for her birth parents.
So far, the only thing she’d decided concerning Trina and Jonathan was that she wanted to see them. Live and in person. In order to accomplish that, she needed a current address.
She placed a call to her Misty River real estate agent. After what felt like more than enough time exchanging empty pleasantries, but may not have been enough time (Leah never knew), Leah informed the older woman that she had a question.
“All right. How can I help?”
“Is there a way, using home ownership records, for me to type in the name of a person who lives in a certain town, and discover which house is theirs?” She winced. The question sounded ripe with unpleasant, potentially illegal motivations. Perhaps the opening pleasantries had been wasted on this conversation.
“Are you thinking about investing in real estate?” the agent asked. “Oftentimes investors will want to access to the names so they can send notes to owners, letting them know they’re interested in buying their home.”
“No, I’m not interested in investing in real estate at this time. Maybe someday.”
A few confused seconds of silence passed.
“You can access a seller’s name on MLS,” the older woman said, “which is used by real estate agents.”
“And if the property is not for sale?”
“Some appraisal districts have websites. In that case, you’d go to the appraisal district’s site and search for a property by owner name.”
“Excellent! Thanks so much.”
Within seconds, they disconnected.
Leah hunted the web until she found appraisal district sites for the counties nearest the house where Trina and Jonathan had lived at the time of her birth. Fulton County. Gwinnett. Forsyth. DeKalb. Cobb. And finally, Cherokee. Each time, she ran a property search by owner’s name.
Each time, she found no properties.
Chewing on her bottom lip, she peered through the windows at the comfortingly familiar curves and dips of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
On a fresh wave of inspiration, she swiveled back to the screen. She found an appraisal district database for her own county, Rabun, and input the name Sebastian Grant.
This time fortune smiled upon her.
He owned property at 1248 Black Cherry Lane.
What an excellent house number. 1, 2, 4, 8. Each subsequent number doubled the one that came before. Very promising.
Tomorrow was Saturday, and he often spent his weekends in Misty River. She’d already been planning to go walking tomorrow for exercise. So instead of a hiking trail, why not amend her plans?
She’d walk past his house instead.
The next day she parked a mile away from Sebastian’s address and set out on the three-mile loop she’d charted. Striding at her fastest clip, she started in a neighborhood of half-acre lots. Gradually, the lots grew bigger. Then bigger, until nature surrounded her on both sides. The road plateaued before climbing steeply.
Whenever she had her backpack with her, she kept her phone inside. For quicker, less remote walks like this one, she carried her phone and car key in a band strapped to her upper arm. After a time, her phone’s male Irish voice spoke from that arm band, notifying her that 1248 was coming up on the right.
Male Irish voice was rarely wrong. Which was one of the things she valued about him. She reached over and turned off the GPS.
At first, Sebastian’s house played hide-and-seek between the trees. Leah continued forward until a luxurious modern-day cabin slid into view. Dark wood siding. Stone chimneys. A short central hallway connected the two main wings, the narrow front sides of which faced forward. The wings were of equal width and both had identical obtuse rooflines. However, the one on the left was one story. The one on the right, two stories. Porches spread forward from the bases of the wings, and a balcony jutted from the second-story sliding glass doors.
Manicured grass and planting beds curved between stands of pines. No driveway to be seen, so that must wrap around from a different point to the rear of the building.
It was a fantastic house.
Unfortunately, though, for her purposes, it sat dark and empty.
However, when she walked by his house again, one week later . . .
He was home.