On Mystic Lake

“Annie?”



“I’m pregnant,” she whispered, and at the words, she started to cry again. She wanted to be filled with joy over the news; she was three months pregnant. After endless years of taking her temperature, religiously charting her ovulation cycles, and standing on her head after sex, she had effortlessly conceived a child.



Blake’s child.



She’d never been so confused and shaken in her whole life, not even when Blake had asked for a divorce. At first when Dr. Burton had given her the results of the blood test, she’d assumed it was a mistake. When she realized it was no mistake, she’d had a moment of paralyzing, gut-wrenching fear. She wondered whose baby it was.



Then she remembered what Nick had told her. He’d had a vasectomy when Izzy was two. And then there’d been the pelvic exam, which showed that Annie was three months along.



It was definitely Blake’s child.



Hank touched her cheek, gently turned her to face him. “It’s a miracle,” he said, and she knew it was true. She felt it, the small seed of a baby growing inside her. She placed her hand on her stomach. It thrilled her and terrified her.



“It changes everything,” she said softly.



That’s what scared her most. She didn’t want to step back into the cold, sterile life she’d had in California. She wanted to stay here, in Mystic, to let the cool green darkness become her world. She wanted to keep on loving Nick. She wanted suddenly, ferociously to watch Izzy get braces and cut her hair and learn to dance. She wanted to open her own bookstore and live in her own house and be accountable to no one but herself.



But mostly, she wanted to be in love for the rest of her life, to wake up every morning with Nick beside her and go to sleep each night in his arms. But she couldn’t do that. There wasn’t a good enough perinatologist within a hundred miles of Mystic, and no hospital with a neonatal ICU. She’d called her obstetrician in Beverly Hills and been told to get home. Bed rest was the order of the day. Just like it had been with Adrian. Only this time Annie was almost forty years old; they weren’t going to take any chances. The doctor was expecting Annie in three days—and not one day more, she’d said sternly.



“Have you told Blake?”



This time, she wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. She stared at her dad, feeling already as if everything she wanted was moving away, receding just beyond her touch. “Oh, Dad, Blake will want—”



“What do you want?”



“Nick,” she whispered.



Hank gave her a sad smile. “So, you think you’re in love with him now. Annie, you’ve been with him for a few months. You’ve loved Blake since you were a teenager. Just a couple of months ago, you were so devastated by the breakup of your marriage that you couldn’t get out of bed. Now you’re willing to toss it out like yesterday’s garbage?”



She knew her father was right. What she had with Nick was special and magical, but it didn’t have the foundation that was her marriage. “Blake and I tried for so long to have more children. After Adrian, I was desperate to conceive again, but years went by and . . . nothing. When he finds out about the baby . . .”



“You’ll go back to him,” Hank said, and the quiet certainty in his voice tore her apart.



It was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, and Annie knew it. She couldn’t take Blake’s child from him and move up here on her own. A baby deserved its father.



There it was, the truth that stripped her soul and left her with nothing but a handful of broken dreams and soon-to-be-broken promises.



She was crying again; she couldn’t help herself. She kept picturing what was to come—the moment when she would tell Nick about the baby—and it hurt so badly she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t want to be strong, didn’t want to be honorable, didn’t want to do the right thing.



She thought about all their time together, all the moments he’d held her and touched her and kissed her lips with a gentleness she’d never imagined. She thought about Izzy, and how much she’d lost, and then she thought about going back to California, to Blake’s bed, to a place where the air was brown and the earth was dry. But most of all, she thought about how desperately lonely her world would be without Nick. . . .



Annie drove and drove, until she couldn’t drive anymore. Finally, she made her way back to Nick’s house. When she got there, he was in the garden with Izzy.



It would all go on without her, this place, this family. Izzy would grow up and learn to dance and go on her first date, but Annie wouldn’t be there to see it.



She looked at Nick and was horrified to realize that tears were blurring her vision.



“Annie?”



She took a deep, shaking breath. More than anything, she wanted to throw herself into his big, strong arms. She ached suddenly to say the precious words, I love you, but she didn’t dare. She knew that if Nick could, he’d promise that the sun would shine on them forever. But neither of them was so naive anymore; both had learned that everything could change in an instant, and that the heartfelt vows of people in love were fragile words that, once shattered, could cut so deeply you’d bleed forever.



He stood up, moved toward her. With one dirty finger, he touched her chin, so gently it was like the brush of a butterfly’s wing. “Honey, what is it?”



She forced a bright smile, too bright, she knew, but there was no help for that. “I got something in my eye. It’s nothing. Let me change my clothes, then I’ll come out and help you guys.”



Before he could answer—or ask another painful, loving question—she ran into the house.



Nick and Annie lay in bed, barely touching, the sheets thrown back from their naked legs. A big old oak fan turned lazily overhead, swooshing through the air, stirring it with a quiet thwop-thwop-thwop.



After Izzy had been put to bed, they’d circled each other, he and Annie, saying none of the things that seemed to be collecting in the air between them. Now, he held her tightly, stroking the soft, damp flesh of her breast. She’d been quiet all evening, and every so often he’d looked at her and seen a faraway sadness in her eyes. It scared him, her sudden and unexpected quiet. He kept starting to ask her what was wrong, but every time the words floated up to his tongue, he bit them back. He was afraid of whatever it was that lay curled in all that silence.



“We need to talk,” she said softly, rolling toward him.



“God, if those aren’t the worst four words a woman can say.” He waited for her to laugh with him.



“It’s serious.”



He sighed. “I know it is.”



She angled her body until she was almost lying on top of him. Her eyes looked huge in the pale oval of her face, huge and filled with sadness. “I went to see a doctor today.”



His heart stopped. “Are you okay?”



The smile she gave him was worn and ragged at the edges. “I’m healthy.”



His breath expelled in a rush. “Thank God.”



“I’m also three months pregnant.”



“Oh, Christ . . .” He couldn’t seem to breathe right.



“We tried for years and years to get pregnant.”



Blake’s baby. Her husband’s baby, the man who’d said he’d made a terrible mistake and wanted her back. Nick felt as if he were melting into the hot, rumpled sheets that smelled of her perfume and their spent passion.



I always wanted more children. Those had been her exact words, and in them, he’d heard the residue of a lifetime’s pain. He’d known then it was the one thing he couldn’t give her. Now it didn’t matter.



He knew Annie too well; she was a loving, honorable person, and a ferocious mother. It was one of the things he loved about her, her unwavering sense of honor. She would know that Blake deserved a chance to know his child.



There would be no future for them now, no years that slid one into the next as they sat on those big rockers on the porch.



He wanted to say something that would magically transform this moment into something it wasn’t, to forge a memory that wouldn’t hurt for the rest of his life. But he couldn’t.



Before their love song had really begun, it was coming to an end.



Chapter 23



Nick knew that Annie was making her arrangements to return home, but she was careful around him. She hung up the phone when he came into the room.



He tried to erect a shield between them, something that would soften his fall when she left, but it was impossible. Yesterday, he and Annie had driven to Seattle to see a specialist in high-risk pregnancies. He couldn’t stay detached. He was there for her every minute, encouraging her to keep drinking water when she thought she couldn’t take another sip, holding her hand during the ultrasound. When he saw the baby—that tiny, squiggly gray line in a sea of fuzzy black, he’d had to turn quickly away and mumble something about having to go to the bathroom.



Each day, he tried not to think about what was to come, but he felt the silent, insistent march of every hour, ticking away what he wanted most in his life.



Sometimes, in the middle of the day, when a strand of sunlight slid through an open window and highlighted Annie’s cropped hair, he was stunned by her beauty; and then she’d smile at him, that soft, sad, knowing smile, and it would all come crashing back. He’d hear that ticking in his head again.



She had changed him so much, his Annie. She’d given him a family and made him believe that love was a heavy winter coat that kept you warm all year. She’d shown him that he could pull himself out of the destructive patterns of his life; he could quit drinking and take care of his daughter. She’d given him everything he’d dreamed of.



Except a future.



When they were together, they didn’t talk about the baby or the future.



Now she was standing in the living room, staring at the pictures on the fireplace mantel. Absently, she stroked her still-flat abdomen.



As he walked down the stairs, he wondered what she was thinking. The steps creaked beneath his weight, and at the sound, she looked up, giving him a tired smile. “Hey ya, Nicky,” she said.



He went to her, slipped his arms around her, and pulled her against him. She leaned her head back against his shoulder. Tentatively, he reached a hand out, let it settle on her stomach. For a single heartbeat, he allowed himself to dream that the child was his, that she was his, and this moment was the beginning instead of the end.



“What are you thinking?” he asked quietly, hating the fear that came with the simple question of lovers everywhere.



“I was thinking about your job.” She twisted in his arms and looked up at him. “I . . . want to know that you’ll be going back to it.”



It hurt, that quiet statement of caring. He knew what she needed from him right now, a smile, a joke, a gesture that reassured her that he would be all right without her. But he didn’t have that kind of strength; he wished he did. “I don’t know, Annie . . .”



“I know you were a good cop, Nick. I’ve never known anyone with such a capacity for caring.”



“It almost broke me . . . the caring.” The words held two meanings, and he knew that she understood.