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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I do now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why do you care so much?”

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

“No.”

“Don’t take any more, all right?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then we have to leave here.”

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

He started visibly.

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

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

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

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

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

She dialed his number, curious.

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

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

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

“Well, yes.”

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE


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

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

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

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

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

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

“And was it?”

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