When Laire didn’t show up to work on Friday night, Erik was disappointed to miss seeing her, especially after the mind-blowing night they’d spent together. But after reminding himself that they couldn’t easily get in touch with each other should she have to miss an evening of work, he decided not to indulge his worry and headed home early to spend some time with his mother, pack up for school, and get some sleep.

They certainly hadn’t gotten much last night, he thought, letting happy memories take over as he drove himself home.

After an hour-long nap, they had gotten up and showered together, touching each other, soaping and rinsing, their fingers sliding over each other’s bodies as they bathed and toweled off. Laire borrowed a shirt of his that just covered her, and Erik threw on some jeans before making a fire in his bedroom fireplace and lying down next to her. They talked and kissed, sharing plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas as a balm against their imminent separation.

When dawn lightened the skies, they stripped and climbed into his bed together, falling asleep for a few hours facing each other. Waking up with Laire in his arms was both miraculous and heartbreaking. Knowing that he would see her in November helped, but it seemed like an eternity. And yet, he wouldn’t trade a second of their sweet time together and promised her silently, in those sacred minutes of holding her quietly, that he would never love another as he loved her.

Still glowing, he picked up a bouquet of roses on the way to the restaurant on Saturday night, eager to see her. When she wasn’t at work again, he felt true misgivings and went to the kitchen to see Ms. Sebastian, politely asking her why Laire wasn’t working. With worried eyes, she told him that she hadn’t heard from Laire since she left early on Thursday.

That’s when Erik first felt icy panic seep into his blood.

What was going on? She’d left with plenty of time to get home, right? He doubted they’d been caught. Her father had said he wouldn’t be home until late afternoon, and she’d arrived home before noon, for sure. Unless she’d never arrived home?

His parents were back at the house entertaining friends, but he skipped polite greetings and beelined to his room, searching the Coast Guard website for any accidents in the Sound on Friday. When he didn’t see any, he called the local station to be sure, but they had no reports of a young woman in distress.

So where was she? Was she sick? Was she regretting their night together and avoiding him? Without speaking to her directly, he didn’t know.

He didn’t bother heading to the Pamlico House on Sunday morning to see if she’d turned up for the brunch shift. Instead, he called King Triton Seafood at precisely 10:01 and asked to speak with Laire.

“Who’s this?” asked a man’s voice.

“I, uh, I came in and bought some blue crab last week. I said I’d be back, um, for more today, but the girl there said to call before I came in again to be sure you had more in stock.” It was a lie, but he hoped it was a believable one.

“Huh. Well, Laire ain’t here today, but she knows better’n anyone that we always got blues.”

“Felt like she had a good eye for ’em,” said Erik, trying to disguise his voice to sound more local, more like Laire. “Will she be in later?”

“Negative,” said the man, his voice terse. “Her daddy had a heart attack.”

“Wait! What did you say?”

“Her daddy had a heart attack,” he enunciated, “so obviously she can’t be here while she’s sittin’ by his bedside. You want the blues, you’ll just have to let someone else help you. Okay, then?”

A heart attack. Fuck! That’s why she wasn’t coming to work. He knew how much she missed her mother—he could hardly imagine how much she was suffering if her father was in danger. His own heart twisted painfully, imagining her fear and sorrow.

“God, I’m . . .” Erik gulped, trying to hold back the emotion he felt and sound more conversational. “I’m sorry to hear that. Is he, uh, is he goin’ to be okay?”

“How the fu—I mean, I don’t know, sir. He’s not dead yet. You wanna send flowers? He’s up in Nags Head.”

Nags Head? Laire was in Nags Head?

“Sir, you want those blues set aside, or what?”

“No, I . . . Thank you. I . . . I have to go.”

He hung up the phone and stood up, pacing his room, trying to figure out what to do. Running a hand through his hair, he had a sudden idea and opened a Web browser on his phone.

Hospital. Outer Banks hospital. Nags Head.

He punched the address into his map app.

An hour.

It would take only an hour to be there by her side, offering whatever comfort she needed.

Racing down the stairs, he grabbed his keys from the basket in the vestibule and ran out the door to his car.

***

Laire woke up at the Hatteras Health Center on Friday night, her head aching something awful. When she opened her eyes, she whimpered from the pain and quickly closed them again.

“You knocked yourself out,” said Kyrstin’s voice, flat and low. “Needed eight stitches.”

Laire opened her eyes slower the second time, focusing on Kyrstin’s face. She sat between the two clinic beds on a mint-green stool, looking at Laire over her shoulder.

“Daddy?” Laire gasped, finding her throat dry and scratchy.

“Still out of it.”

“But . . .,” whispered Laire, “is he . . .?”

“Alive?” she asked. “Yeah. No thanks to you.”

Laire gasped from the sudden rush of relief, her eyes instantly burning from tears.

“Awake?”

“In a . . . a coma,” Kyrstin whispered, her voice breaking. Then she turned back around to face their father, lying in the opposite bed.

Laire winced in pain, whimpering softly again before closing her heavy eyes and falling back to sleep.

When they moved her father up to Nags Head the next morning, Issy tried to stop Laire from going with him, claiming that seeing her when he woke up would just upset him all over again. But Kyrstin had been a surprising ally, telling Issy that Laire had as much right to go up to Nags Head as they did. She wasn’t exactly warm and affectionate, but she stood up to Issy until Issy backed down in a huff.

Laire and Kyrstin called a taxi service from Hatteras and paid a hefty fee to be driven up the coast. It only occurred to Laire as they pulled away from the health center that she could have called Erik and asked him to drive them. But, for the first time since meeting him, the thought of Erik didn’t fill her with warmth or excitement or happy tingles. She felt desperately sad and confused as she stared out the taxi window thinking about him, some significant part of her blaming him for what had happened to her father. If she and Erik had been more responsible, if they’d been able to stay away from each other, if he hadn’t pursued her so damned doggedly in the beginning, this never would have happened.

So quickly, the magical, secret world she and Erik had built all summer had been toppled—tarnished beyond recognition when her father fell to the ground, clutching at his chest. Laire inhabited a grotesque new world now, in which her beloved father was glad her mother was dead—a world in which he had almost been killed by her irresponsibility. 

It made her feelings toward Erik much more complicated than they’d been on Thursday, much less black-and-white. What if loving Erik ended up killing her father? How could that love be right? It couldn’t be. Which meant that loving Erik was just a fantasy. A self-serving, self-indulgent, childish fantasy that, left to their wild, unhampered, unchecked desires, had raged out of control, hurting someone she dearly loved. And more than a fantasy, it was wrong. And the worst of it was, on some level or another, she’d known it was wrong all along.

On the interminable ride from Hatteras to Nags Head, with these terrible thoughts swirling, Laire’s conscience tidily relegated her worth to the darkest, lowest level of shame, propelling her into a state of guilt—of such profound, profane, breath-catching, terrifying guilt—that her love for Erik felt almost unbearable.

Her father lay prone in a hospital bed, his prognosis still uncertain.

She had no right to happiness or love.

Not now and maybe not ever.

That was her new reality.

Their father was settled into a room in the cardiac unit, and in a strange twist of events, Issy, who prided herself on being the most caring and responsible daughter of the three, wasn’t able to sit by their father’s bedside. She wasn’t permitted to bring baby Kyle into the adult wards, due to a breakout of pneumonia. With Paul at the height of his sea-fishing season and her in-laws unable to watch the baby for more than a day, this meant that Issy had had no choice but to return to Corey with her son, leaving her younger sisters with their father.

Kyrstin and Laire, who checked into a motel in Nags Head, took turns sitting beside their father’s bedside, hoping against hope that he’d wake up soon.

On Sunday afternoon, with Kyrstin at the motel taking a nap, it was Laire’s turn, and she held her father’s weathered hand in hers, reading to him from the Bible and praying that she’d have more time with him.

“Laire.” She opened her eyes and looked up to see Nurse Patty, assigned to her father’s care, peeking into the room. “There’s someone here to see you. He’s at the nurses’ station.”

“My cousin? Harlan Cornish?”

“Didn’t catch his name. A man, though, with a big bouquet of flowers.”

Uncle Fox had called earlier to say that Harlan might be coming up to visit, and she almost cried with relief at the thought of seeing him.

She nodded eagerly. “Sure. Send him in.”

“I’ll do that.” Patty flicked a glance to her patient. “His color’s good.”

“When do you think he’ll come to?”

“Hard to tell,” she said. “His body created the coma to protect itself. But his vitals are better and better. Stay hopeful.”

Laire’s eyes filled with more useless, painful tears, and she nodded, turning back to her father. When she heard the sound of a man’s heavy footsteps, she didn’t look over her shoulder.

“Hey, Harlan. You can put the flowers anywhere.”

“Laire.”

The voice wasn’t Harlan’s, but it was just as familiar—soft and worried, deep and beautiful. It was the voice of her dreams, of her torment, and every space in between. Laire’s breath caught with a sudden burst of love she didn’t want to feel, but she was in control of herself enough not to turn and face him.

“Laire? How you doing, darlin’?”

“Erik,” she murmured. “What are you doing here?”

His hand landed on her shoulder. “I was worried when you didn’t show up to work. I called King Triton.”

She whipped her head to face him. “You did what?”

“I pretended I was a café owner,” he said, his eyes registering instant concern as they carefully swept her face. “What . . .” He cringed, reaching up to gently touch the bandage covering her stitches. “What happened to your head?”

She recoiled from his touch, quickly reaching up for his hand and leaving it to hang in the air between them. “Don’t touch.”

He searched her eyes. “Okay. But what happ—”

“Doesn’t matter. You can’t be here.”

“I was worried.”

“You. Can. Not. Be. Here,” she repeated in a grave, urgent whisper, flicking worried eyes to her father, who slept peacefully, before looking back up at Erik. “Go.”

“Laire,” he said, his eyebrows knitting together in confusion. “I just . . .”

“You have to go,” she insisted, turning back to her father. “Now.”

“I’ll wait for you—”

“No.”

“—in the cafeteria,” he said, his voice serious and losing patience. “I’m not leavin’ till you come talk to me.”

“Don’t you understand?” she bit out in a furious rush, her eyes flashing, regret and anger rushing to the fore of her confused emotions. “My father almost died! Might still die! I can’t talk to you. Go home, Erik. Go back to Raleigh. Go back to Duke. Leave me alone!”

Her words knocked him off-balance. She saw it. She felt it. And it hurt like a sharp knife to a soft place.

“Leave you . . .?”

“Alone. I mean it,” she said, keeping her face stony even as goddamn tears trailed down her cheeks, betraying her. “Please leave.”

“Darlin’, I don’t have to go until Thursday. I can be here with you every—”

“No, you can’t! You’re not listening to me!” she cried. “I’m not your darlin’. I’m not your anything. We were just a . . . a fling. A fantasy. I’m an islander; you’re a dingbatter. It’s over.”

He flinched, his face twisting as her words sank in.

Laire looked away, concealing a whimper and ignoring the cracking and breaking of her heart. It had already been torn in half between her father and her lover. Now those halves were splintering into tiny pieces, painful shards, in this hospital room where her father lay unconscious and her lover begged for something she couldn’t give him: more time. They’d run out of time in spectacular fashion, and everything that had existed between them didn’t feel real—felt like a fantasy, like a sweet dream that had ended in a gruesome nightmare.

“Please go,” she begged him.

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s nothing to understand. The summer’s over. We’re over.”

He’d been leaning down toward her, but he straightened up, still looking down at her, his eyes fraught and confused as they searched hers. His voice low, but fierce, his face as shattered as her heart, he asked, “Why . . . why’re you doin’ this? I’m sorry about your father . . . but we love each other.”

She sucked in a painful breath, the truth of his words biting at her. He did love her, and she did love him, but Laire Maiden Cornish had gotten a bleak and sudden dose of reality when her father went into cardiac arrest because of her recklessness. She and Erik were an impossibility in the real world. There was no use pretending any differently.

“No,” she said, hating herself, hating him, hating her father, lying so still and silent between them, hating her sisters and the Pamlico House and the whole fucking world. “It wasn’t real, Erik. It wasn’t real.”

He gasped, blinking at her in disbelief as his face blanched to white. White. Like white-hot pain. She could see it. She could feel it, and it burned her inside like nothing she’d ever felt before.

“You can’t mean that, dar—”

“Laire? Everythin’ okay?” Over Erik’s shoulder, Kyrstin came into view, standing with her hands on her hips just behind Erik. “I’m back. I woke up early.”

“Kyrs,” she murmured, clenching her jaw to try to stanch her tears.

“I’m Kyrstin,” she said to Erik. “You are . . .?”

“No one!” said Laire, springing up from the chair beside her father. She shifted her eyes from Kyrstin to Erik. “He’s no one. He’s just in the wrong room. You were leaving, weren’t you?”

Erik’s eyes shuddered as if he’d been sucker punched, and when they opened, they were glistening and heavy. He turned to Kyrstin. “Yeah. I’m . . . I’m leavin’.”

Kyrstin raised her eyebrows, taking a good look at him before shifting her stare to Laire, who stood with her fists clenched by her side. After a moment, she slid her gaze back to Erik. “Nurses’ station can help you find whoever you’re lookin’ for.”

Erik clenched his jaw, then swallowed, nodding at Kyrstin before looking at Laire.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and if those shards had any chance of repair, now they were blown to dusty smithereens with the deep sorrow, deep regret, she heard in his voice. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

He leaned forward to place the flowers on the table at the foot of her father’s bed, met her eyes one last time, then turned and left the room.

She watched him go, felt the burn in her lungs and in her eyes and everywhere he’d so lovingly touched. She’d never known pain like this. Not when her mother died. Not ever. And yet she blinked until her tears retreated. Then she lifted her chin and her gaze to her sister.

Laire and Kyrstin stood in silence, facing each other, neither of them saying anything.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Kyrstin pulled a chair to the opposite side of their father’s bed and sat down, taking their father’s right hand, and Laire, who’d made her choice, for better or worse, sat down across from her sister, and took his left.