SHE RENTED A CONVERTIBLE, because if you were going to drive to the beach on a hot summer’s day, you might as well enjoy the ride. The insurance alone should have been enough to make a grown woman cry. Fortunately she’d never been much of a crier. Her business was going well. She was young, free and single. She intended to enjoy every minute of it. She was leaving her troubles—or should that be trouble in the singular?—behind in Manhattan.
Feeling pleased with herself, she took the Long Island Expressway out of the city and then hit Route 27. As usual it was clogged with traffic, cars idling bumper to bumper. She sat in it, inched forward, then stopped, inched forward again, working hard on her patience, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel as she stared moodily ahead of her. Too many people going nowhere. It was almost as bad as the traffic in Manhattan, except that she had more sense than to drive in Manhattan.
Calm, she thought. Breathe.
Harriet always told her she should try meditation or mindfulness, but Fliss didn’t know what to do with all the energy burning up inside her. She wasn’t a mellow person. She wasn’t calm either. Harriet practiced yoga and Pilates, but Fliss preferred kickboxing and karate. There was nothing quite so satisfying as landing a punch or smacking someone hard with a well-placed turning kick. Restful and calm she certainly wasn’t, but hey, she could pretend. With a touch of her finger, she changed the playlist, switching from pounding rock that had perfectly matched the pounding beat of New York City, to something more mellow and laid-back.
Instead of thinking about Seth, she tried to think about her plans for the business. Harriet was all for keeping it small. Fliss wanted expansion. She’d need to convince her sister it was the right thing to do, remembering that they each loved the business for different reasons. Harriet loved it because it allowed her to work with animals, which kept her well within her comfort zone. Fliss loved it because she fed on the adrenaline rush of building something and watching it grow. Each new client was another brick in the wall of financial security she was building around herself.
No one would ever be able to control her or dictate to her.
She earned her own money. She made the decisions about her life.
Useless? Worthless? Not so much.
She tried to focus on the business, tried to think about everything and anything but Seth. So why was it that trying to not think seemed to make her think of him more? Maybe it was because she was going back to the beach. Back to the place where she’d spent the happiest days of her childhood. The place where the land met the water.
Back to the place where they’d met.
At the mouth of the Peconic River, at the eastern end of Long Island, the land split into two forks at a place the Native Americans called Paumanok. Fliss took the south fork leading to the coveted side of the island. She waited until she hit an open stretch and then floored it. Too fast, but who cared? She finally had the road to herself, and after idling in traffic she wanted the speed.
As the road narrowed slightly, she slowed and made a right turn, inching through the tiny hamlets that led down to the water’s edge. This was where the elite chose to spend their summers. People who had made it, and people who wanted to pretend they’d made it by hiring out a beach house for a few weeks each summer.
She spotted a farm stand overflowing with produce and on impulse pulled over and grabbed her purse. She didn’t know what food her grandmother would have in the house. If she shopped now at least she wouldn’t starve, and even she couldn’t burn salad.
She was wearing cutoffs and a T-shirt, but after a couple of hours idling in the car under a baking-hot sun she couldn’t wait to strip them off and dive into the ocean. Naked? She grinned, remembering her promise to her twin. This visit she was going to try her hardest to keep all her clothes on. Which was going to be tough, because it was the type of heat that fried brains and sharpened tempers.
She pulled on a baseball cap and tugged the bill down. Not that she was likely to see anyone she knew, but she wasn’t in the mood for polite conversation. She waited, head dipped, foot tapping, while the family in front of her chose fruit for their lunch—make up your minds already—and then stepped forward to make her choice. There were plump juicy peaches, local strawberries, fresh-picked lettuces and a dome of shiny, jewel-like tomatoes. She bought a selection, then she took a photo and sent it to her sister.
Proof I’m not borrowing from people’s gardens.
Next to the farm stand was a food truck. They served macchiato, and Fliss sipped the coffee thinking that as far as exiles went, this wasn’t so bad. The availability of good coffee in this comparatively small spit of land was disproportionate to the number of inhabitants.
She’d forgotten how it felt to be standing with the sun heating your skin with the scent of the ocean clinging to the air. It took her back to her childhood, to those delicious first moments when they’d arrived at the beach with the long, lazy weeks of summer stretching ahead.
They’d loaded the car early in the morning so they could make the drive before the worst of the heat. She could still remember the painful tension of those early-morning departures. She could picture her father’s thunderous expression, and hear her mother soothing and placating. It was like spreading honey on burned toast. Didn’t matter how much you tried to sweeten it, the toast was still burned.
They’d learned to gauge his mood. When her brother arrived at the breakfast table and muttered “stormy today,” or “dark clouds and a little threatening,” they all knew he wasn’t talking about the weather.
On the day they left for the summer, they all hoped and prayed that the weather would be in their favor.
Harriet had slid into the back of the car and tried to make herself invisible, while Fliss had helped her brother load, pushing the bags in randomly in her haste to get away. Just do this. Let’s go.
Right up until the moment they drove away there was always the chance that they wouldn’t leave. That her father would find some way to stop them.
She remembered the catch of fear in her throat. If he refused to let them go, the summer would be ruined. And she remembered that delicious feeling of freedom when they pulled away and realized they’d done it. It was like bursting out from a dark, oppressive forest into a patch of bright sunlight. Freedom had stretched ahead like a wide-open road.
She’d watched, bathed in relief, as her mother’s death grip on the wheel lessened, the blood finally returning to her knuckles.
Her brother, claiming seniority and therefore the front seat, had covered their mother’s hand with his. “It’s all right, Mom.”
They all knew it wasn’t all right but were willing to believe it was, to pretend, and the more miles they put between themselves and the house, the more her mother changed.
They all did, Fliss included. She’d left her old life and her bad mood back in Manhattan, like a snake shedding its skin.
She glanced around, wondering how being here could still make her feel that way and wondering why it had taken a crisis in her life to bring her back here. Apart from brief visits to her grandmother, she hadn’t spent a significant block of time here since her teenage years.
Coffee finished, she continued on her way. This part of the island had some of the most coveted real estate in the whole of the Hamptons. She drove past curving driveways, high hedges and cedar-clad mansions topped with high gables and worn by the wind and the weather to shimmering silver gray. Some were inhabited year-round, some were rented by “summer people,” visitors who clogged the roads and the stores and drove the locals mad. Most belonged to the seriously rich.
Her grandmother’s house lacked the square footage and sophisticated security of some of its nearest neighbors, but what it lacked in grandeur, it made up for in charm. Unlike some of the newer mansions that surrounded them, Sea Breeze had been standing for decades. It had a pitched shingle roof and wide windows facing the ocean, but its real benefit was its proximity to the ocean. Developers hungry for any opportunity to exploit the most coveted piece of land in the area had offered her grandmother eye-watering sums of money to purchase the property, but her grandmother had steadfastly refused to sell.
The local community knew the story of how Fliss’s grandfather had bought the beach house for her grandmother on the day of their marriage. Her grandmother had once told her that selling it would have felt like giving away a wedding ring, or breaking a vow.
Marriage, she’d told Fliss, was forever.
Fliss felt pain in her hands and realized she was gripping the wheel so tightly she’d almost cut off the blood supply.
Her marriage hadn’t been forever.
She and Seth hadn’t even hit the three-month mark. And that was her fault, of course. She wore the guilt of that, and it made for uncomfortable clothing.
For a split second she lost concentration, and in that moment a dog shot into the road. He appeared without warning, a blur of golden brown.
Fliss slammed on the brakes, sending dust and her pulse rate flying.
“Dammit.” She sat there, fighting the shock, her heart almost bursting out of her chest. Her hands shook as she groped for the door and opened it. Had she hit it? No. She hadn’t felt a bump or heard anything, but the dog lay in the road, eyes closed. She must have hit it.
“Oh God, no–” She dashed to its side and dropped to her knees. Along with her other crimes she was now a destroyer of innocent creatures. “I’m sorry! I didn’t see you. Please be okay, please be okay,” she was muttering under her breath when she heard a voice behind her.
“She’s fine. It’s a trick of hers.”
The voice punched the air from her lungs. She wanted it to be a mistake, but the recognition was visceral, and she wondered dimly how it was that a voice could be so individual, like a fingerprint. It could have belonged to only one person. She’d known that voice measured, teasing, commanding, amused. She’d known it hard with anger and soft with love. She’d been hearing that voice in her dreams for the past ten years, and she knew there was no mistake even though it made no sense.
Seth was in Manhattan. He was the reason she was here. If it hadn’t been for Seth, she wouldn’t even have been on this road at this time, and if she hadn’t been thinking about him she would have been concentrating and maybe spotted the dog before it appeared without warning from behind the sand dunes.
“Are you all right?” Now the voice was deep and calm, as if he was used to soothing the ragged edges of a person’s anxiety. “You seem pretty shaken up. I promise you the dog really is fine. She used to work in the movies and they trained her to play dead.”
Fliss closed her eyes and wondered if she should do the same thing.
She could lie down in the road, hold her breath and hope he stepped over her and moved on.
She was relieved about the dog, of course, but she wasn’t ready to talk to Seth. Not yet. And not like this. How could this have happened? After all her careful planning, how had she found herself in this situation?
There was no justice. Or maybe this was justice. Maybe this was her punishment. Being made to suffer now for all the sins of her past.
The dog opened its eyes and sprang to its feet, tail wagging. Fliss had no choice but to stand up, too. She did so slowly, reluctantly, brushing the dust from her knees, postponing the moment when she was going to come face-to-face with him.
“Maybe you should sit down.”
Maybe I should make a run for it.
She forced herself to turn.
Her gaze locked with his, and instantly she was sucked back in time. She was eighteen years old, lying on the sand naked, lazily warm and content, her limbs entwined with his, their faces so close they were almost touching. She’d always liked being physically close, as if proximity lessened the chance that she would ever lose him. Touch me, Seth, hold me.
He’d touched her, held her, and she’d lost him anyway.
And clearly he was surprised to have found her again.
Shock flickered across his face, followed by confusion. He reached out and pushed her hat back, taking a closer look at her face. “Fliss?”
She was confused, too. She’d assumed time would have diluted the effect he had on her. Neutralized her feelings. Instead it seemed as if it had concentrated everything. She hadn’t seen his face for almost ten years, and yet everything about it was painfully familiar. The crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the few wayward strands of hair that insisted on flopping over his forehead, those thick lashes that framed eyes as dark as a pirate’s heart. Sexual awareness punched through her with shocking force. The magnetic pull was so powerful the force of it almost jerked her forward. If she’d been in the car, the air bag would have deployed.
She was baking hot and sweaty, which made her all the more resentful that he managed to look so cool. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and khakis. He’d always been strikingly handsome, and the extra years had stripped away the last of the boy and shaped the man. He had the same athletic physique, but his shoulders were wider, his body stronger and more powerful.
Once, she’d believed that maybe happy endings really weren’t just for books and movies. Her feelings for him had filled her until there was no room for anything else, until she hadn’t known how to contain them. Fortunately all those years with her father had provided advanced training in how to hide them, which was just as well because Seth looked insanely good and she looked—
She didn’t want to think how she looked.
It was definitely karma. Punishment for her past sins, which were too many to count.
She was trapped by that gaze, and her brain and her tongue knotted at the same time. So she did what she always did when she found herself in a tight corner. She acted on impulse.
“I’m not Fliss,” she said. “I’m Harriet.”