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  “I only meant for you to go. You need to clear your head. You need to have some time alone in your favorite place in the world. Your mother never let y’all go back. You can go now . . .”

  “Not without you,” I repeated, and I knew I was pushing hard.

  “Let me think about it, Bonny.”

  “I can get it cleaned and ready. When your kids get out of school, you can meet me there.”

  “I love you, but I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “It was your idea,” I said. “And now it makes sense as if that’s what we were meant to do all along.”

  “For you, not for me.”

  “We promised each other—for all time.” I threw out my last desperate rope.

  “Oh, Bonny. I’ll think about it.”

  We hung up and I closed my eyes as the sun disappeared and ended the day I was exiled from my hospital and decided to return to Watersend.

  chapter 5

  BONNY MORELAND

  eighteen years old

  PROM 1983

  Imelted the eyeliner pencil to make it goopy and dark. My eye shadow was sparkly blue and my neon pink blush was definitely too much. Baby’s breath flowers were clipped into my French-braided hair. I wore a white eyelet dress and later that night I changed into a flowered sundress I’d made in sewing class. I was naïve, and my date, Eglan Davis, was both popular and arrogant—a terrible combination, which I was drawn to until I married the same. He was a prototype of my charming father, who ruled the world with the surety that only a privileged male, who has been granted an all-access pass to authority, could get away with.

  We stood outside the gymnasium, streamers bleeding in the rain, swamping on the pavement. Eglan puffed a cigarette and I waited, holding the umbrella over both of us so he could finish smoking before we left to meet a party on the Chattahoochee River, where all our friends were lighting a campfire and setting up for the real party. Then I saw a car just like Owen’s: an electric blue Camaro. But there were so many of them at that time and I didn’t want to get my hopes up—not at all. This was the stuff of my dreams—a fairy tale as romantic as a white horse and prince.

  All I knew about Owen at that time was that he’d quit college to work in ski resorts or wherever he could find a job out west. Of course it wasn’t Owen in the parking lot of my high school. First, he probably didn’t own that car anymore, and second, Colorado was too far away for him to make it there for my prom. But the thrill of the maybe was always by my side.

  I shivered and watched Eglan smoke the last of his cigarette and crush it under the shiny toe of his rented shoes, the ones that came half price with the tuxedo with the baby blue ruffles on the shirt. His tux was supposed to match my dress, but at the last minute I’d switched to an all-white dress, which “pissed” him off, thus the pouting since the pictures taken at my house with a group of friends that afternoon.

  Eglan grabbed me for a kiss, and I pulled away, which only made him draw me closer, his tongue shooting into my mouth like a lizard. “Stop,” I shouted and pushed at him. “Seriously, you taste disgusting—part ashtray, part whiskey. Not my favorite flavors.”

  “Why do you always have to be such a cold bitch?” he asked and pulled the umbrella away so I stood alone in the rain while he was covered. His lips curled in a nasty scowl. I didn’t want to be anywhere near this guy, and the night had just begun. There was only one way out of this—to get sick and go home—but in doing so I would miss the event of a lifetime: prom.

  The baby’s breath was sopping wet, drooping into my eyes. I yanked the flowers from my hair and threw them on the ground. “I don’t know, Eglan. Why do I have to be such a bitch? Probably because you are such a dick.”

  Owen’s voice sounded so close that I knew it had to be coming from my imagination. “Go ahead,” he said. “Call her a bitch one more time.”

  But it wasn’t my imagination. His voice came from his mouth, which was next to me along with his body and his clenched fists and his brown leather jacket splattered with rain.

  “Who the hell are you?” Eglan asked and dropped the umbrella, his fists raised and ready. The umbrella wobbled on the ground, a bowl of black nylon catching the rain in the opposite way it was designed for, swaying back and forth in the wind, skittering like an empty boat.

  “Stop,” I said and stepped between them. My back was to Eglan, and my face to Owen. “What are you doing here?”

  My heart beat wildly against my chest; it was a wonder they couldn’t hear it.

  “It’s your prom. I didn’t want to miss it.” Owen grinned at me, and I couldn’t help but smile back.

  “Well, it might have been nice if you’d told me that. You can’t just show up like this whenever you want. I have a date, you see.”

  “Well, he’s quite the charmer.”

  Eglan stepped from behind me and swung his fist in a sudden and unannounced movement. Owen, although he stared at me, ducked and bobbed, coming to kiss me just as Eglan punched through air, lost his balance and landed on the umbrella. The flimsy spikes collapsed under his weight and a stream of curses exploded through the high school parking lot. Owen grabbed my hand and we ran through the puddles to his electric blue Camaro and I stopped pretending that I didn’t want him there or wasn’t waiting for him or didn’t need him.

  Through the five years since his mother had disappeared, we’d flirted and we’d kept in touch, but this was the night he came to me. “I’ve been waiting,” he said. “All these years I’ve been waiting until you graduated.” And he kissed me the same way I’d always dreamed about.

  And we didn’t stop kissing even as he drove to the motel an hour away in the North Georgia Mountains where he’d paid for a room. We didn’t stop kissing as he carried me into that room and laid me on the bed with the red-and-blue-checkered bedspread that smelled like pine. “I have loved you for so long, Bee. For so long. Since the day I found you on the dock staring at the sky and mumbling the names of the stars, and maybe even before then. Maybe I loved you the moment I arrived in Watersend and saw you standing in front of the river house in that silly sundress covered in daisies.”

  And I told him what I’d always kept hidden in the secret corners of my soul. “I’ve loved you since that afternoon when you climbed out of the back of that car all rumpled and bleary-eyed to stare at only me.”

  “You were meant to be mine,” he said as he covered me in kisses, as his lips found the parts of me that had expected him.

  “I waited for you,” I told him. “All this time, I waited for you.”

  That was the first night we made love, but it wasn’t the last. I loved him completely and unalterably, and for years afterward he consumed my thoughts and my bed. I was as desperate for him as I was for air or water. And he for me. There wasn’t anything we didn’t talk about, and even when he was away from me we spent those free hours on the phone. Letters on stationery and on legal-lined paper, on napkins and on any scraps of paper we could find flew between us. We quoted our favorite lines from books or poetry. We clipped and sent articles. We were consumed with each other to the exception of all others.

  Yet throughout college and my early twenties, this was a scene that repeated itself too many times to count: Owen would come to me when I needed him most, and then he’d leave for some adventure with promises to be back soon. He loved me; I never doubted it. When we were together, nothing else seemed to exist. We’d lose days, and sometimes weeks, until he left again.

  Lainey knew only that we saw each other every so often. I confessed to her my love for him, but never told her the extent of our affair. It had seemed so private, so simply ours, that to share it would diminish it.

  But what if I’d stopped him at the first leaving? Did the form of our love repeat itself because I was too weak to stand and say, “Stop”? Or did the pattern repeat because I wanted him so desperately that each time he c
ame to me, I convinced myself he would stay.

  When he’d leave, I would tell him it was over. It was over when I graduated from high school and left for Vanderbilt. It was over when I was a sophomore in college and he found me on a date at a fraternity party. It was over when he left for Colorado to train for wilderness rescues. It was over when I begged him to stop leaving and he said he couldn’t. It was over when I went to medical school. But it was never over. He always showed up when I was done crying. He always appeared when I’d convinced myself that I didn’t need him anymore. He ran and ran and returned and returned.

  Finally, at twenty-seven years old, I desperately needed to move on. My heart was bloodied and exhausted. I met the charming and quick-talking Lucas and found safe love. The laughter and the parties and the Charleston society life caught me in their sweet net. I believed I was free of Owen’s heartbreak, until the night before my wedding to Lucas, when Owen arrived and asked me to wait a bit longer. “Please be a little more patient.”

  “Don’t come back,” I told him. “Let me get over you. Let me have a good life. My heart can’t take any more and I’ve found a safe place to land with a good man.” Which was exactly what I believed was true.

  Owen did as I pleaded—he physically stayed away, even when there were times I wished he didn’t. But he didn’t leave me alone. No, not that. There were phone calls, texts and e-mails with long letters. Over the next twenty-two years, we never stopped communicating for more than a month or two. We confided in each other and shared our lives with merely words. I didn’t see him; I didn’t touch him; but my heart never listened to the edict to stay away—it didn’t abstain from loving him at all.

  chapter 6

  PIPER BLANKENSHIP

  There I was, exiled to Nowhere, South Carolina, to spend the summer with my mom and her childhood best friend, Lainey, my godmother. Oh, yes, and as an added bonus I would babysit Lainey’s bratty kids. Well, okay, it might not have been fair to call them bratty. I hadn’t even met them. And “exile” might be too strong a word, but it was exactly how I felt.

  Mom had dropped me off the day before and then she’d gone home to finish packing. She’d be back the next day and Lainey would come with her kids the day after. Meanwhile, I needed to get the house perfectly ready: make the beds, wash the sheets in Mom’s Laundress #22 detergent and fill the refrigerator with groceries. I’m surprised she didn’t ask me to drop little chocolates on their pillows.

  It’d been only a couple weeks since Mom screwed up at work. It was like a bomb had been lit that day—she blew up everything in our lives. I think she left Dad, which I don’t blame her for, but it sucked because it only made him a bigger jerk than he was before. Then she began spending all her time going back and forth between Charleston and here to fix up her parents’ old house in this crap town. “I’m saving it to sell it,” she kept saying, as if she still had a job in the ER but the ER was for houses. Meanwhile, our real house, the one we lived in in Charleston, the one I grew up in, had just Dad and Gus, our sweet blond terrier, in it like a ghost house. Mom packed so much stuff it was like she never planned on going back.

  If asked, I could tell anyone why I’d been sent here to work for my mom and Lainey—failing my freshman year of college and a tiny little arrest (public intoxication, which shouldn’t even be a real thing) would do that. But it sounded worse than it really was. If it mattered, I could explain what happened. But it didn’t seem to matter and this was my punishment: Keep the house clean. Stock the refrigerator, make the beds, do the dishes and cook the meals. And let’s not forget—watch two little kids. But children were like aliens to me. I was Cinderella, but worse, because a prince did not exist. And there would be no ball at the end of this summer, only a “trial semester” at a junior college if I was lucky.

  Yes, it would be ideal if I was a better daughter, if I was still a virgin at nineteen, if I hadn’t “marred” my body with a little tattoo of my favorite flower, a sunflower, if I’d gone to class, if I didn’t drink too much. But ideal was never my thing. Even though I wished, at least once, for it to be my thing.

  Anyway, there I was and I had to admit to myself (definitely not to Mom if asked) that the house was super cute—white shingled with the brightest blue shutters and doors. Mom had painted our bedroom doors at home this very color. Now I understood why—some frosting-covered kid’s memory of the river house where she spent her childhood summers. I’d heard her and Grandma and Granddad (before they died) talk about it for years. Should we sell it? Keep renting it? Should we go back? But they never did anything with it. Until now.

  I’d nosed my way through the entire house already, kind of freaked out that Mom wanted to be here all summer while she waited to see if she could still be a “real” doctor. It was a creaky house, like its joints needed exercise. The floorboards seemed to be held together by sand. The doors didn’t close all the way, warped like they’d been underwater for years. There were four bedrooms spread out in the back of the house.

  Outside, behind the house, was the river—a tributary from the sea. It wasn’t the kind of water you swam in, or at least the kind of water I would swim in, what with so many crabs and shrimp and otters and fish and all manner of disgusting, squishy things that I did not want touching my skin. I was more of a beach girl, so thankfully that was exactly what was across the street—sand and ocean. It was a house between river and sea.

  Since the house rested on the banks of the tidal river, the view was beautiful. A dock stretched across the water like it was waking, its wooden sun-warmed arms spread apart in a stretch. A boat, only big enough to fit two or three people, bobbed on the water like a little kid wanting attention. One minute I glanced outside and there was nothing but a blue-gray basin parallel with the earth, a flat landscape separated only by the colors of earth and then water. And the next minute the dock’s plankway dropped ten feet, baring the crushed oyster shells, discarded like sea trash, on the banks of the marsh.

  But there wasn’t much enjoying any of it until I finished the to-do list from hell. So I walked along the sidewalks of Watersend on my way to the market. The air felt like it was being pumped through a furnace. Not that I didn’t know what hot felt like—Charleston could be a bonfire—but I’d been north at college in Vermont. Now the humidity felt like a thick sweater, as if I’d never felt it before.

  I kept thinking I was lost, because in Watersend the curvy roads changed names without warning as if a drunkard had planned the place. I checked the little hand-drawn map and saw I was exactly where I was supposed to be—one more left and then downtown. Along the way, there were cedar shake houses with wide porches and front lawns with wildflower gardens and iron gates hinting at hidden secrets. It made me think of The Secret Garden, but then again, Ryan (my ex) made fun of me because he said everything made me think of a book. I was a weirdo. Which he once thought was cute, but not so much anymore.

  The river scooped around the town like a hug (I couldn’t believe I thought something so sentimental and sappy). And everything—the town, the houses, the streets and stores—sat in the curved arch of the bay. If the river overflowed, or decided to swallow the town, it would all be gone in an instant, absorbed into the green and gray and oyster-dimpled basin.

  These were the things I thought about as I strolled into town because I was doing my very best not to think about Ryan. And how much I loved him. And how he’d chosen Hannah over me even though I’d offered him everything and how he was backpacking through Europe with her this very second and how he posted things on Instagram like “View from here” and I could tell it was from the bed where he lay with her. He was my “first,” and although I’m not a big enough idiot to believe that the first is the last, I loved him so much that I couldn’t stop believing it. It was horrible knowing something wasn’t true but believing it anyway.

  My chest felt bruised even though he’d never hit me. And to add insult to embarrassment, ther
e I was dragging one of those ridiculous wagons with the big beach tires because “everything is walking distance.”

  My cell phone dinged. I glanced to see who had texted or e-mailed or Instagrammed or Facebook messaged or Snapchatted or . . . anything at all. But it was just Mom asking how it was going.

  It’s going, I texted back. On the way to market. I rounded the corner to downtown and it was charming for sure. My grandma, she would have said, Golly! And sometimes I say it just to say it, which I did right then.

  Downtown had the only straight street so far: the town planner had finally sobered up. The shops were decked with brightly colored awnings—yellow, blue, pale pink and garish orange. The rows of attached shops were separated only by paint color and awning designs. Benches, black iron with curved backs, lined the street and I spotted a retro movie theater, its marquee bright red. Gas lanterns burned, trying to outdo the sunlight, which today was impossible. Faded white lines marked the parking spaces and most people obviously ignored them, parking any which way they chose.

  I glanced at the grocery list, which was on a pad of paper with a ridiculous dolphin on the upper left-hand corner and the name of the house typed below: Sea La Vie. Dumb name. Even though I failed French (eight a.m., were they serious?), I knew that La Vie meant “Life.”

  The Summer Sisters’ shopping list was like a Rorschach test of food.

  Mom, the OCD ER doctor: Chicken cutlets. Asparagus. Eggs and cheese. Like she printed her list from the Cookbook for the Boring.

  Lainey, the artist: Chardonnay came first. That told me mostly all I needed to know. Then health food after that. Which was frankly quite the contradiction, but who was I to judge? “Vegetarian,” it said at the top of the e-mail. Guess Lainey was oh so California now. Her kids couldn’t have anything processed, packaged or pumped with hormones.