Three months later

Erik Rexford was drinking way too much.

His grades were shit.

He’d been benched from the Devils.

He’d been placed on both academic and social probation.

And the media was having a heyday.

There were rumors about why he’d changed from a golden-boy college athlete to a bad-boy, out-of-control drunk who’d been suspended for the rest of the hockey season after three fights on the ice.

Some attributed the change to his on-again, off-again relationship with Vanessa Osborn, who had been swept off her dainty feet by the British independent filmmaker Phillip Longfellow, known in peerage circles as the fifth Viscount Longfellow, during a summer sojourn in London while Erik remained at his family’s summer home in the Outer Banks.

Others wondered why Erik had kept such a low profile all summer. Instead of partying with his fraternity brothers in Durham or making the society pages at posh events in Raleigh, he’d been spied only once: with Vanessa, at a party at the Governor’s Mansion in July. Maybe he was depressed? Or on drugs?

There were others who waved his bad behavior aside as healthy college hormones, and still others who called him a spoiled brat who needed a firmer hand.

Only Erik, and his sister, Hillary, knew the true reason for the great change in his disposition:

Erik Rexford’s heart had been permanently and irrevocably broken.

Buzz. Buzz, buzz, buzz.

Buzz. Buzz, buzz, buzz.

“Fuckin’ shut up!” yelled Erik, throwing an extra pillow from his bed in the direction of his cell phone, which was probably still in the hip pocket of the jeans he’d worn last night.

Buzz. Buzz, buzz, buzz.

“Fuck!”

Squinting from the stream of bright light filtering through his bedroom window, he groaned as he flipped onto his back.

Buzz. Buzz, buzz, buzz.

Buzz. Buzz, buzz, buzz.

“Fuckin’ fuck, Hills!”

Scrambling out of bed naked, he grabbed his jeans off the floor and took out the offending phone. Hitting the Talk button, he pressed the phone to his ear.

“What?”

“Oh, there it is: the sweet voice of my darlin’ brother. Good mornin’ to you too.”

“It’s fuckin’ early,” he grated out, sitting on the edge of his bed.

“It’s noon.”

“So fuckin’ what.”

Hillary sighed, and he imagined her rubbing her forehead with consternation. “So it’s also Thanksgivin’ on Thursday. My classes end tomorrow. Are you goin’ out to Buxton, or what?”

Thanksgiving.

Fuck.

He hated the word. He didn’t want to hear it. He definitely didn’t want to celebrate it.

“No.”

“So you’re leavin’ me to the wolves.”

“Fancy’s furious at me. Daddy can’t look at me without explodin’. I’m sure they’d both prefer it if I wasn’t there.”

“I’m sure they’d both prefer it if you got your shit together.”

“Hills—”

“I know what happened,” she said in a rush, “and I know it hurt you. Bad. But you have to move on at some point. You can’t self-destruct!”

“Why not?” he asked softly, clenching his jaw and swallowing over the giant lump in his throat.

Laire had been so stony, so cold, that day in the hospital, he’d tried going back the following day, hoping she’d softened a little, but she’d told the nurses not to allow him to visit. They’d taken one look at his driver’s license and politely asked him to leave. With no other choice, he returned to school that following Thursday, but he called King Triton more times than he could count during the first two or three weeks back at Duke.

The first time she answered, his heart soared at the sound of her voice, and he begged her not to hang up. He could hear her breathing into the phone, ragged and shallow, as he told her he loved her. But no more than two or three seconds passed before he heard the click of the call disconnecting and the drone of the dial tone.

About a week later, she answered again, but this time she spoke first.

“Stop callin’ here.”

“Laire? Laire, darlin’, I need to talk to you. Please, just—”

“It’s over, Erik.”

“No. I can’t accept that.”

“You’re deluding yourself.”

“Tell me what I can do. Please. Please, Laire.”

“It’s over. You need to let me go.”

And the line went dead.

He couldn’t get his head around it. He didn’t understand. Yes, her father had had a heart attack, and he understood that she loved her father, and he even understood that the cold way she’d behaved in the hospital, while incredibly painful for him, made sense. Her sister was coming and going. Her father could wake up at any moment. He was still a secret. The timing was bad.

What he didn’t understand was why she hadn’t softened by now. Why did she insist that they were over? Why did she think that the love they’d shared was just a fantasy? Why was she closing him out of her life after they’d shared the most amazing summer together?

His mind had returned to that last night over and over again. Had it been a test? To see if he’d keep his word about having sex? And had he let her down—failed the test—by letting things go as far as they did? If that was true, he’d just as soon die that he’d killed their happiness by betraying her . . . except she’d stayed all night after that, waking up in his arms and telling him she loved him.

They’d had a plan in place to see each other over Thanksgiving. And perhaps what he hated the most about himself was that, while he knew, rationally, that she’d broken up with him at the hospital, part of his heart still desperately hoped she’d show.

But if she didn’t—if Thanksgiving Day came and went without her—they were really and truly over.

And if that was true, what was he supposed to do with the love he had for her? It was big and wide and real to him, this white-hot, beautiful love that saturated his heart and lived vibrantly in his memories of them. His stupid heart couldn’t let go of her. He thought about her, dreamed of her at night, looked at pictures of her on his phone. He drank too much at parties to numb the pain, couldn’t concentrate on his studies, and hit too hard against the boards in hockey because he was confused and angry. Angry? No. Furious. He was furious that she’d turned her back on the best thing he’d ever known.

He loved her.

Fuck, but he loved her more than his own miserable fucking life.

Self-destruction sounded perfect.

“Because I love you,” said Hillary gently. “Because I need you. And because if you don’t go for Thanksgivin’ and she shows up, you won’t forgive yourself if you’re not there.”

Fuck, but his sister knew him too well.

His heart clutched and he bent his head, his voice breaking when he asked, “But what if she doesn’t?”

Hillary sighed. “Then it’s time to pick up the pieces and finally move on.”

I can’t. I can’t move on without her. I’ll be stuck here in hell, loving her, forever. Tears pooled in his red, hungover eyes, slipping down his bristly cheeks.

“Fine,” he said, softly, hating himself for hoping. “I’ll be there.”

***

Laire wrote up the order she’d just taken over the phone, adjusting her perch on the stool at King Triton and stretching her neck back and forth. With the late-day sun shining through the windows and her uncle and father out making deliveries, the store was quiet, and her eyes grew heavy. She sighed, resting her elbows on the counter and her head on her elbows. This happened every afternoon lately: this drowsy, heavy feeling, like all she wanted to do was take a nap.

Fatigue. The very word scared her. She’d heard it enough times while her mother’s health was declining.

Something was wrong with her, and she’d been ignoring the symptoms for a few weeks, but today, since it was quiet, she needed to get on the internet and try to figure out what was going on. Her father had had an iron deficiency after his first heart attack—maybe that was it? She prayed there wasn’t something more serious wrong.

Opening her eyes and sitting up, she clicked on the mouse and waited for a search page to come up.

In addition to daily fatigue, the smell of certain kinds of fish, which had never bothered her before, now turned her stomach. Not to mention, she had this out-of-control appetite suddenly. As a result, she’d gotten a little liberal with the comfort food this fall, and her jeans bit into her abdomen uncomfortably. She was overweight and constantly tired and had occasional nausea.

She was also sad.

So fucking sad all the time.

A sad shell of her former self.

She was sad that she had caused her father’s heart attack and worked, every day, to win back his trust and love. But it was an uphill battle, and more and more, she suspected that something had changed—or been destroyed—between them. He could barely look her in the eyes. There was no teasing, no asking about her day. And when he did look at her, his shame was so apparent, so sharp and thick, it made her cringe with self-loathing. She didn’t know how, but she needed to redeem herself. She desperately needed to win back her father’s love.

And it wasn’t just her father either. She was sad that Kyrstin and Issy looked at her differently now: not like their beloved little sister, but someone tarnished, someone a little dirty, someone who didn’t follow the rules and had gotten herself in trouble. They didn’t know where she’d been that night, but they studied her with shrewd eyes, trying to figure out if she was still pure. She wasn’t, of course. She was spoiled now. And though it had felt worth it in the heat of the moment to open her legs for Erik Rexford, she didn’t know if it was worth it now that she was paying the price for her lust and hedonism.

She was sad that the rest of Corey Island had found out about her night away, when her father had searched frantically for her that evening. And now they speculated in whispers that cut off abruptly, about where she’d been, and with whom. She had been the highlight of the Corey gossip mill for months now, the subject of low-toned rumors and haughty, knowing looks. It would be a long time before the islanders forgot about her missing night. In fact, it was an episode that would follow her around for the rest of her life, changing the way people saw her and interacted with her. She was a little less worthy now. A little too worldly.

She was so sad, she hadn’t designed a blouse or a dress in months, not that anyone had asked. But her fingers weren’t interested in creating something beautiful. Not for herself or someone else. It was like all her creative energy had been siphoned away when she watched Erik walk out of her father’s hospital room with a broken heart. It was like she had killed the best part of herself when she ripped out his heart and stomped on it.

She was so sad that she forbade herself to think about Erik because she worried for her sanity if she did. When she dreamed of him, she woke up crying uncontrollably and had even woken up her father once or twice.

The love she bore for him was ceaseless and throbbing, an open wound on her heart that made her feel like she was dying inside. Unlike his life, which had certainly sped up with his move back to college, hers had slowed down. Unable to use her father’s boat, she was trapped on Corey, working every day at King Triton, where her father and uncle were constantly in and out and could keep an eye on her. Since barely anyone spoke to her anymore, she was left for quiet hours alone with her thoughts, and she tortured herself, second-guessing her decision to force Erik from her life. But what had been her alternative? Her decision to be with Erik had almost killed her father. No matter how much she loved Erik, she loved her father more, didn’t she? Yes, of course she did. She should, right? A good daughter would choose her father’s health over the love of her life, wouldn’t she?

And yet her love for Erik hadn’t died, as she’d hoped. It lived, strong and aching, within her, hoping for a day when it might be allowed to thrive again.

She sighed, feeling mentally exhausted as she looked back down at the computer.

The cursor was blinking.

She typed “weight gain, fatigue, nausea” and pressed Enter. WebMD came up with a list of possible health concerns:

Depression. Well, yes. That made sense. But her symptoms were physical, not just mental. She felt it in her gut—something more significant was going on.

Type 2 diabetes. Hmm. She bit her bottom lip, trying to remember if there was diabetes on either side of her family, but she came up dry. Still, she ripped a piece of paper from a notepad under the counter and wrote down the disease.

Congestive heart failure. Her breath hitched. Certainly heart problems ran in her family, considering her father’s two heart attacks. She wrote down the three words carefully, frowning at them.

Hypothyroidism. She read the word slowly aloud, “Hypo-thyroid-ism,” and her fingers grew instantly cold, withdrawing from the mouse in horror as she stared at the second syllable.

Thyroid.

Her breathing hitched as she whispered it again, “Thyroid.”

Laire’s mother had died of medullary thyroid cancer, a cancer that might have been treatable had it been discovered before stage 4.

Without waiting another moment, she picked up the phone and dialed the Hatteras Health Center, making an appointment to see the nurse practitioner tomorrow and have some blood tests run on her thyroid.

Because she hadn’t been allowed to use her father’s boat since the day she’d returned from staying overnight with Erik, she asked Kyrstin if she’d drive her over to Hatteras for her appointment, and after sharing her fears, Kyrstin agreed.

The next afternoon, Laire sat uneasily on the paper-covered examination table while one nurse prepared three plastic vials for a blood draw and another nurse analyzed Laire’s urine in a small room beside the bathroom.

A knock at the exam room door made Laire look up.

The nurse doing the urine analysis peeked into the room. “Can I, uh, speak to you for a second?” she asked her colleague. “I’m not sure you need to, um, to do the draw.”

“Will you excuse us?”

Laire had spent a few minutes online yesterday, reading through the symptoms for hypothyroidism, and with every additional page of information, she was more and more certain that she was suffering from a precursor to the disease that had killed her mother.

In a strange way, she felt at peace with this realization. If she was sick, it would supersede her transgressions. She would have to undergo surgery in Carteret, like her mother, and maybe even chemotherapy on a weekly basis. Her father and sisters would have to drive her over to the mainland, fuss over her, and worry for her safety and care. And maybe it sounded crazy, but if cancer was what it would take to draw them all back together, Laire was ready to face it. No. More than that. She was ready to embrace it.

The nurse reentered the room, taking a deep breath and cocking her head to the side as she stared at Laire.

“Laire, on your admittance form you said you weren’t sexually active.”

She stared at the nurse, who held a piece of paper in her hand. “I’m not.”

The nurse took another deep breath, her brow knitting as she looked down at the paper. When she looked back up at Laire, her expression was severe. “Not at all?”

Laire’s mind skated back to her night with Erik, but he’d barely been inside her for more than a few seconds, and he’d climaxed on her stomach. That didn’t count, did it?

“Really, I—”

“Laire, honey,” said the nurse, taking a step forward and placing a calming hand on her arm, “are you sure you haven’t been with anyone? Sexually? Maybe . . . it wasn’t your choice? Did someone . . . force you or—”

“No!” she said, shaking her head as she jerked her arm back. “Nothing like that! I swear.”

“Then . . .”

She glanced at the printout in the nurse’s hand, her stomach clenching with worry. “What does it say on that paper?”

“Well, it seems that your urine test revealed the presence of . . .” She paused, searching Laire’s face. “. . . the pregnancy hormone hCG. In fact, we found 288,000 mIU/ml in your urine. That level is commensurate with a woman who is ten to twelve weeks pregnant.”

Laire. Stopped. Breathing.

She stared up at the nurse blankly, in stark horror, trying desperately to get her head around what the nurse was saying.

The nurse smiled gently. “It would also explain your fatigue, increased appetite, and weight gain, especially around the abdomen.”

“No.”

“Yes, I think—”

“Pregnant? You’re saying I’m pregnant?” she cried.

“It looks that way. Yes.”

As the nurse reached for her arm again, Laire shook her head, murmuring, “No. No, no, no, no, no. You’re wrong. You’re . . . wrong.”

“I don’t think we are.”

“You are!” she screamed.

“Calm down, Laire,” said the nurse, squeezing her arm gently. “You need to calm down.”

“No! This can’t be happening! I thought cancer. It’s cancer, like my mama!”

“We can still do blood tests if you want, but you have no real symptoms of hypothyroidism that can’t be explained by pregnancy. This diagnosis makes more sense, and the urinalysis—”

“I don’t care about that! It’s wrong!”

“It isn’t wrong.” The nurse looked down at the sheet in her hand again. “It’s correct, Laire. You’re about three months along.”

“Oh, my God, no! This can’t be happening!” she shrieked, leaping off the table and backing away from the nurse.

“Dear,” said the nurse, standing back and holding up her palms. “It’s okay. You need to calm down, or you’ll hurt the—”

“Shut up!” she screamed. “It’s not okay! It’s not! It’s not true!”

Tears were streaming down her face as the nurse opened the door, called to the other nurse, spoke to her briefly, then turned back to Laire.

“Laire, there are options.”

Options? On Corey Island? With her father? With her sisters? No. There were no options. There was nothing but rejection and shame and humiliation. Options?!

She shrieked with a high-pitched laugh that sounded as crazy as she felt.

“Please sit back down, Laire. I just asked the nurse to get your sister.”

“What?” gasped Laire, her eyes widening almost impossibly. “No! Noooo! Don’t tell  her! Don’t—”

She lurched forward, pushed the nurse away, and ran from the exam room, trying to reach Kyrstin before she heard the shameful truth, but as she arrived in the waiting room, one look on Kyrstin’s face told her she was too late.

“Laire,” said Kyrstin, looking over the nurse’s shoulder, her voice a whisper, her face white. “What have you done?”