Lacey appeared in the doorway of the den. Olivia looked up from the tool case and was struck by how much older she looked than fourteen. “Hi, Lacey,” she said. “How are you?”

“Okay.” Lacey slipped into the den and pulled her father’s chair from his desk to the work table. She sat down, hugging her knees, her bare feet up on the chair. It was difficult to look at her hair and keep a straight face. “What are you working on?” she asked.

Olivia thought for a minute. She couldn’t tell her she was making a panel for a nursery—she could hardly let Lacey know she was pregnant when her own husband had no idea. “I’m making a panel for one of the bedrooms in my house,” she said.

“Do you have a design? Mom always worked with a design.”

“Yes.” Olivia lifted the graph paper from her lap to the table. The hot-air balloons probably looked simplistic to Lacey after the kinds of things her mother had done. But Lacey smiled.

“That’s nice,” she said, and she sounded sincere. She watched as Olivia pulled a roll of copper foil from the case. “You never told my father you saw me in the emergency room,” she said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because what happens in the ER is confidential.” She looked up at Lacey. “How’s your friend doing? The boy who used crack?”

Lacey wrinkled her nose. “He wasn’t my friend. He’s gone back to Richmond. He was an asshole, anyway.”

Olivia nodded. “He took a major risk with his life.”

“He didn’t care. Some people’s lives are so screwed up they don’t care.” Lacey picked up one of the spools of solder and began playing with it. Her fingernails were chewed short; a couple of her fingertips looked red and sore. There was a scared little girl behind that tough facade.

“Your father told me you have a collection of antique dolls,” Olivia said.

“Yeah.” Lacey didn’t look up from the solder. “My mother used to give them to me for my birthday.”

“Could I see them?”

Lacey shrugged and stood up, and Olivia followed her up the stairs. They passed what had to be the master bedroom, the bed a beautiful four poster covered by a quilt. Lacey opened her bedroom door and Olivia could not prevent a laugh. “Oh, Lacey, this is great,” she said. There was a shelf going three fourths of the way around the room on which delicate, ruffle-dressed dolls sat, wide-eyed and prim. Above and below the dolls were posters of rock groups—young men in leather pants and vests, bare-chested, long-haired, ear-ringed and insolent-looking.

Lacey smiled at her reaction.

“Is this room a good description of you?” Olivia asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean half angel, half devil.”

“Three quarters devil, I guess.”

Olivia saw the textbooks on her bed. “What are you studying?”

Lacey groaned. “Biology and Algebra.”

Olivia picked up the biology text and skimmed through the pages, remembering how enthralled she’d been by her own biology book in high school, how she had read the entire book by the end of the first week of school. “What are you up to?”

“Genetic stuff.” Lacey picked up a worksheet from her bed. “This is my homework. I hate this stuff. I’m supposed to make this pedigree study into some kind of chart or something. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Olivia looked at the sheet, then at Lacey. “Let me help you with it.”

The girl colored. “You don’t have to.”

“I’d like to.” She kicked off her shoes and sat down on Lacey’s unmade bed. “Come on,” she said, patting the space next to her.

Lacey joined her on the bed, and Olivia talked about Punnett squares and dominant and recessive genes until Lacey had a grasp of the concepts herself. They were comparing earlobes and trying to roll their tongues—which she could do, but Lacey could not—when they heard Tripod barking downstairs.

“Anybody home?” A female voice called out from the kitchen.

“It’s Nola,” Lacey said. She raised her voice. “We’re up here, Nola.”

They heard footsteps on the stairs and then an attractive blond woman dressed in a dark blue suit appeared at Lacey’s door, holding a pie in her hands. This was the woman who had “designs” on Alec, Olivia remembered.

“Oh, excuse me, Lacey,” Nola said. “I didn’t know you had company.”

Olivia leaned forward on the bed and lifted her hand to shake Nola’s. “I’m Olivia Simon,” she said.

“She’s a friend of Dad’s,” said Lacey.

“I’m just helping Lacey with her biology.” Olivia felt as though she owed Nola some sort of explanation. “Alec had an emergency at the animal hospital.”

“Oh.” Nola looked a little lost. She patted a strand of her pale hair back into place above her ear. “Well, I brought this pie over for him. You’ll let him know, Lacey?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll leave it on the kitchen counter. It’s his favorite, strawberry rhubarb.”

Nola left the room, and neither of them spoke again until they heard the back door open and close downstairs. “She’s my best friend’s mother,” Lacey said. “I think she wants to be my mother, too.”

“You mean…marry your father?”

“Exactly.”

“Would you like that?”

“Yeah, about as much as I’d like to die in a stampede of elephants.”

Olivia laughed.

Lacey drew little circles in one corner of her homework paper. “I don’t think my father will ever get married again.”

“No?”

Lacey shook her head. “He loved my mom too much.”

Olivia looked up at the row of dolls. They were a little spooky-looking, with their huge, watchful eyes. “It’s nice you have all these dolls to help you remember her,” she said. “Do you have a favorite?”

Lacey stood up and walked over to the other side of the room to take one of the dolls—a beautiful black-haired toddler—down from the shelf. She plopped back on the bed and set the doll in Olivia’s lap just as they heard a car pull into the driveway.

“Dad’s home,” Lacey said, but she didn’t move from Olivia’s side.

“Olivia?” Alec called from the den.

“We’re up here,” she and Lacey chorused, and Lacey giggled.

They heard him climb the stairs and then he appeared in the doorway, unable to mask his surprise at finding the two of them looking like lifelong buddies, Lacey clutching her biology book, Olivia with the raven-haired doll in her lap.

“Well… Hello.” He smiled.

“How’s the dog?” Olivia stood up. “She’ll survive.”

“Olivia helped me with my homework.”

“And Nola stopped by with a pie for you,” Olivia said. She had a pleasant sense of belonging in this house, standing there in bare feet, a welcome guest in the bedroom of Alec’s daughter. “It’s your favorite,” she said. “Strawberry rhubarb.”

“She worked her fingers down to bloody stumps hulling those strawberries just for you, Dad.”

“Don’t be catty, Lacey,” Alec said, but there was laughter behind his smile. He looked at Olivia. “Want some pie?”

“Yes.” Lacey jumped up from her bed. “I’ll go cut it.”

Alec looked after Lacey as she raced out of the room and down the stairs. He turned to Olivia. “She’s acting like a human being,” he said. He ran his fingers down her arm and squeezed her hand before letting go. “What did you do?”

Olivia’s mood was light on the way home. She was humming when she pulled into her driveway, smiling as she walked up the front steps. But she nearly stumbled over an enormous floral arrangement sitting on the deck. The fragrance of the flowers filled her head as she knelt down to read the card propped up against the vase.Wish you were here so I could give these to you in person. I love you, Liv,Paul



CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE


The committee meeting was again at Alec’s. Paul would have preferred to meet almost anywhere else, but he supposed this was some sort of test to see if he could be in Annie’s home without succumbing to his memories again. He had given away two more of the panels that morning, leaving him with just the large one in his bedroom and a few smaller panels scattered throughout his house. This was probably the most difficult thing he would ever have to do in his life, but it was absolutely necessary. He couldn’t go on the way he’d been.

He’d watched Olivia on the news the night before. A reporter was interviewing her in front of the emergency room, discussing the shift in public opinion since Jonathan Cramer’s resignation and the publication of Alec’s letter in the Gazette.

“What we should learn from Ms. O’Neill’s case is how critical the need is for better emergency services in the Outer Banks,” Olivia said. “Whoever becomes director of the Kill Devil Hills Emergency Room should work toward that end.”

She looked very pretty, very sexy in her scrubs, and she sounded bright and in perfect command of the interview. Seeing her in that forum inspired him to write a poem about her—how long since he’d done that?—which he left in an envelope in her mailbox on his way to the meeting.

Now in Alec’s kitchen, he had a sense of déjà vu. Alec was filling baskets with pretzels and popcorn, while Paul poured wine into glasses on a tray. Only this time, he intentionally avoided looking at the blue cloisonné horse on the shelf in front of him.

He glanced over at Alec. “Olivia mentioned that you and she had speaking engagements in Norfolk a few weeks ago.”

“Yes,” Alec said. He was taking napkins out of the cupboard above the sink. “She did a great job.”

“Thanks for writing that letter to the Gazette,” Paul said. “It’s really made a difference for her.”

“It was the least I could do.”

Paul tipped the bottle over another glass. “I know these last few months have been hell for Olivia,” he said. “I haven’t been much help to her. I have a lot of making up to do.”

Alec had started toward the living room with the baskets and napkins, but now he stopped and looked at Paul, a smile coming slowly to his lips. “Take good care of her, okay?” Then he looked past Paul’s head, and Paul turned to see a girl in the doorway between the kitchen and den. “This is my daughter, Lacey,” Alec said. “Lacey, this is Paul Macelli. Dr. Simon’s husband.”

Alec left the kitchen then, and Paul smiled at the girl. She was tall and fair-skinned, with Annie’s blue eyes, but her hair was half black and half red. She eyed him as she took a handful of pretzels from the bag on the counter.

“You’re the one who got my age wrong.” She leaned back against the cabinets.

“What do you mean?” he asked, setting the bottle down. Her hair was absolutely ridiculous.

“In that article about my mother in Seascape. You said I was twelve, but I was actually thirteen. I’m fourteen now.”

Paul frowned. “I could swear your mother said you were twelve.”

She popped a few pretzel sticks in her mouth. “Everybody got on my case about it,” she said, chewing. “I mean, twelve, God.” She gave him a narrow-eyed look of disapproval as she swept past him. “I’m going out, Dad,” she called into the living room, and then she disappeared through the back door.

Paul stared after her. He would swear on a stack of Annie’s stained glass panels that she’d said her daughter was twelve.

He was anxious during the meeting. Alec talked about the progress being made on moving the lighthouse. The track was already under construction, he said, and the site was swarming with engineers and surveyors.

Paul barely listened. Mothers didn’t get confused about the ages of their children. His mother could rattle off all six of their ages at any point in time. There was only one reason he could think of for Annie to have lied about Lacey’s age.

The moment the meeting was adjourned, he thanked Alec and nearly ran out to his car. He drove home in a trance, and once inside his little cottage, began digging through the box of tapes he kept in the spare room. He found the three tapes he’d made of his interviews with Annie and carried them, along with his tape recorder, into his bedroom. He sat down on the bed and skimmed through the tapes with the fast forward button until he found the one he was after. Drawing in a long breath, he leaned back against the wall and pushed the play button.

He could hear the clinking of silverware from another table in the Sea Tern. Then his question. “Tell me about your kids.”

“Well…” Annie’s voice cut through him. It had been so long since he’d heard it. A little husky, and here, a little halting. He thought now that he understood the reason for the slow, careful manner of her speech. “What would you like to know about them?”

“Everything,” he said. “I assumed you didn’t name them Rosa and Guido.”

Paul winced now as he heard himself ask that question, as he remembered the angry look she’d shot him.