He saw Olivia for the first time when she was meeting a stretcher-borne victim of the train wreck at the automatic doors to the ER. She was grabbing her long brown hair up into a sloppy, off-center ponytail, slipping a rubber band from her wrist to her hair to hold it in place. Then she and the paramedics whisked the elderly woman past Paul on their way to the trauma room, Olivia pressing a piece of bloody gauze to the wound in the woman’s side, talking calmly to her all the while. Dozens of doctors and nurses worked hard in that ER over the next few days, but Paul could not shift his focus from Olivia. He watched her tell families that their loved ones would either live or die. He watched her softly touch their arms, or hold them when they needed to be held. By the end of those few frightening days, her hair hung limply down her back and her bangs were swept by sweat and grime off her forehead. Her green scrubs were streaked with blood, and dark circles ringed the delicate alabaster skin around her eyes. He thought she was entirely beautiful.
He wished he’d been drawn to Olivia because he was finally ready for someone new, but he knew it was her utterly selfless compassion in the ER that had seduced him, because it reminded him of Annie. The comparison was ridiculous. Annie, with her disregard for time and her totally chaotic approach to life, would have created havoc in an emergency room. It was Olivia’s cool, clinical efficiency that made her so good. It took him a while to realize she was not at all like Annie, but by then he had genuinely fallen in love with her.
Some evenings he and Olivia would sit at this table and page through books she’d plucked from the shelves on her way through the store. She usually selected books on nature, or medicine. Early in their relationship, she went through a phase of reading every book she could find on sex. Having denied any sexual thoughts or feelings for much of her life, she was unstoppable once she’d been set free. Sex with Olivia had been like teaching a child a new game—at first she’d been uncertain of her ability, but once the rules were mastered, she wanted to play it continually. And she’d played it very well indeed.
During the last few years of their marriage, though, the books she’d bring to the table were filled with the sobering, sometimes hopeful, sometimes disheartening information on infertility.
Paul ate the last bite of his cheesecake, letting it melt in his mouth as he studied the gold band on his finger. He had put it on just that morning, and although he had not worn it in many months, it comforted him to see it on his hand. He and Olivia would not have drifted away from each other if they’d been able to have a family. He’d felt cheated when he learned she was incapable of conceiving. He struggled not to let his feelings show. It was not in any way her fault, and her own disappointment was keen. He was nearing the point of pulling himself together from that blow when she announced she had received the job offer in the Outer Banks.
He was incredulous. He knew Annie lived in the Outer Banks with her husband and two children, and he was filled with an odd mixture of excitement and terror. He tried to talk Olivia out of taking the offer, but she returned from her interview raving about the uniqueness of the area and the quiet challenge of the position being offered to her. It’s too isolated, he said. Too far from his family and their friends. He knew in retrospect his argument had been weakly offered, that in truth, he was electrified by the idea of being close to Annie. As his fantasies grew of what it would be like, how he might see her, might just bump into her at the grocery store or on the beach, he withdrew further and further from Olivia. When he spoke to her at all it was with a sharp edge to his voice. He was angry with her for putting him in this situation.
Once the move was complete, he managed to wait all of a week before looking up O’Neill in the phone book. She was listed both at her home address and at her studio. He waited another day before driving past the studio, and one more before going in.
She’d been alone, adjusting a photograph on the far wall, and the look on her face when she turned to see him could not have been more horror-filled if he had walked in sporting two heads.
“Don’t panic,” he said quickly, holding up a hand to ward off anything she might say. “I’m not here to cause you any trouble. I’m married too. Happily. My wife is a physician at the emergency room in Kill Devil Hills.” He rambled on about Olivia, partly to fill the silence, partly to convince her he had no intention of being a threat to her or her marriage.
She flattened herself against the wall of photographs as she listened to him, her arms folded protectively across her chest. Her hands hugged her elbows so tightly that he could see the whiteness of her knuckles from where he stood on the other side of the room.
She looked extraordinary. A little heavier than the last time he’d seen her. Not overweight, but she had a woman’s body now. Still the same hair, though not quite so wild, and the red was softened by those occasional strands of silver. Her skin was as dewy and fair as it had been when he first met her.
When he finally paused for breath, she spoke. “You’ll have to tell her you can’t stay here,” she said. “It won’t work, Paul. Please. It would be impossible for you to live here without us constantly bumping into each other.”
Her words only served to encourage his fantasy. Why would she care where he lived if she didn’t fear being tempted by him?
“I didn’t want to move here, believe me,” he said. “I tried to talk Olivia out of taking the job, but she was sold on it.”
“Does she know about me?”
He shook his head. “She doesn’t even know about the summer I lived here. I started to tell her about you once, long ago, but Olivia’s one of those people who wants to leave the past in the past.” Olivia’s own past had been so weighty, so painful, that it had absorbed nearly all their energy in the early days of their relationship. He’d had to undo all that had been done to her, and after that she wanted to put the past behind her. She knew only that he’d had a very serious relationship long before he met her. She wanted to know no more than that.
He walked to the back wall of the studio to study the breathtaking stained glass. “Your work is beautiful, Annie. You’ve come a long way.”
“I’ve changed, Paul,” she said. “I’m not the woman you used to know. Please don’t have any illusions that you and I can have a relationship again.”
“Just friendship.”
“No. It’s impossible.” She lowered her voice, and he knew someone else must be in the studio. “There was too much between us for us to simply be friends.”
He was close enough to her now to see fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. He wanted to see her laugh, to hear her ringing giggle bounce off the glass.
“I’m working for the Gazette,” he said, “and freelancing. I’d like to do an article on you for Seascape Magazine.”
“No.”
“I’ve already spoken to the editor about it. Please, Annie. It would help me get my name known here.”
He started as a door creaked open behind him, and he turned to see a large, ponytailed man walk into the room from what must have been a darkroom. Annie stepped toward him. “Tom,” she said. “This is Paul Macelli. He’s a journalist who wants to do a story on me in Seascape.”
“Hello,” Paul said as he shook Tom’s hand. He would play her game. He would act as though they were strangers to one another if that was what she wanted.
“Well, you couldn’t pick a better person to write about,” Tom said. “She’s a real Jill-of-all-trades. Anything going on in the community, she’s a part of it, and you can see for yourself what a talented artist she is.” He talked on, telling him little details about her work that Paul began jotting down in a notebook, while Annie lowered herself behind the work table, looking up at both of them, her eyes resigned and unsmiling.
The interviews began. He let her talk about her son and daughter, about Alec. Those meetings fed the roots of his obsession. He sent the Seascape photographer to her studio and demanded he take dozens of pictures, far more than Paul would ever need for the article, so th
at he could keep them for himself. He could pretend the smile she showed the camera was meant for him, because he was seeing so little of it in real life. She wanted him again; he was certain of it. There was no other reason why she should be afraid of his being nearby. She had to want him.
He had no friends. A growing number of acquaintances, but no one to confide in, and he was bursting to talk. And there was Olivia, ready to listen.
Olivia. How had she tolerated him all those weeks, those months, when he was wrapped up in Annie, when he spoke of nothing else?
It had been a terrible sickness in him. From this distance he could see it for what it was: a pathetic obsession that was costing him his sleep, his self-respect, his marriage. A few days earlier, Gabe had called him at the hotel to tell him about the Gazette article in which Jonathan Cramer accused Olivia of mishandling Annie’s case. He’d thought about it all night and he knew Cramer was wrong. He only had to think back to the wreck of the Eastern Spirit to know how wrong he was. He would trust Olivia with his own life, with the lives of anyone he loved. Annie had stood a better chance of survival under Olivia’s care than she would have with any other physician in the state. He could see that now, from this distance, as surely as he could feel Olivia’s presence in this bookstore. He had been satisfied during those years he and Olivia lived up here. With Olivia, he had finally been a man in control of himself and his demons, and he’d been grateful to her for freeing him from his obsession.
For her trouble he’d repaid her with pain, with coldness, with cruelty. Now she was handling harassment by the paper he worked for, as though he was still hurting her even when he was not physically there.
He looked at his watch. She would still be up by the time he got back to the hotel if he left right now. He paid the bill and hurried out into the hot night air.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The phone rang at ten-thirty-five. Olivia was lathering her hair in the shower, and she stepped out quickly, drawing a towel around her as she raced into the bedroom to answer it before the machine picked it up.
It was Paul’s voice, not Alec’s, that greeted her, and for a split second, she was disappointed.
“Are you back?” she asked.
“No. I’m in a hotel in D.C. I’ll get back tomorrow.” He sounded tired. A little tense.
“How are you?” she asked.
He was quiet for a moment. Then she heard a slight laugh, or maybe a cough. “Physically, I’m fine. Emotionally, I’m coming to grips with the fact that I’ve been out of my mind.”
The shampoo was beginning to drizzle down Olivia’s back. “What are you talking about?” She stretched the phone cord down the hall to the linen closet, where she pulled out a towel and draped it around her neck.
“I talked to Gabe at the Gazette and he told me about the flak on Annie’s case. I’m sorry, Olivia. I didn’t think the Gazette was capable of yellow journalism. Maybe if I’d been there I could have prevented it somehow.”
She walked back into the bedroom and sat down on the bed. “You thought I was to blame too,” she said.
“For Annie dying? No, Liv, I know you too well to have seriously thought that. I did wonder how you could have done it, though. How you could work on her when I’d been so obnoxious about the way I felt about her, but I know you did your best. I’m sorry I ever accused you of anything less.”
She cradled the receiver between her palms. “It means a lot to me to hear you say that.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I’ve been doing some thinking up here,” he said. “D.C.’s loaded with memories of you—of us together. I stopped in Donovan’s Books tonight.”
“Oh.” The sights and sounds and warm-coffee smell of Donovan’s filled her head.
“I wish we’d never left here. Things were good for us here.”
“But we agreed we didn’t want to raise a family there, whether we had our own children or adopted or…”
“I know, I know.” He paused. She heard him let out his breath. “Can I see you when I get back?”
“Of course.”
“I mean, a date? We’ll go out someplace, get to know each other again.”
“I’d like that.” She matched the tenderness in his voice with her own.
“I should be there around five.”
“I work until seven.” She cringed, waiting for him to chastise her for allowing her work to interfere with her marriage again.
“Seven is fine,” he said, then he hesitated for a moment. “Liv? Why aren’t you fighting this thing with Cramer? It’s so unlike you to just sit back and take it.”
She ran her hand over her bedspread. He was right. She usually took her adversaries head-on, battling them just as she had battled every other obstacle in her life.
“My only recourse would be to ask for a medical review panel,” she said, “but I’m not sure I have the strength right now to go through that process.”
“Do it, Liv. I’ll be behind you all the way. I promise.”
She thanked him, surprised and somewhat guarded, unable to completely trust his words, his warmth. Yet by the time she’d hung up the phone, she’d made a decision, and despite the hour, she called Mike Shelley.
Mike listened quietly as she told him her plan. She could guess what he was thinking. A review panel would not only put her on the line, but the emergency room itself.
“Please hold off a day or two on taking any action, Olivia,” Mike said finally. “Let me think about it a bit.”
She got off the phone, feeling better, feeling less helpless than she had a half hour earlier. She stood in front of the full-length mirror on her closet door. Her hair was white with lather. She let the towel drop to the carpet and turned to look at her profile. There was no denying the slight protrusion of her belly. If Paul touched her, he would know. It had been enough to make Alec pull away from her.
Instead of putting on her nightgown, she dressed in a T-shirt and the only pair of jeans she could still zip closed. Then she walked outside to the storage closet and took a couple of screwdrivers and a wrench from the small hardware kit Paul had left her when he moved out. She carried them into the nursery, along with the radio and a glass of ginger ale, and settled in for a long and satisfying night of crib construction.
At the change of shift the following evening, Mike called Olivia and Jonathan into his office. Jonathan sat near the window, wearing the sour smirk that was a permanent part of his demeanor these days, while Olivia took the chair closest to the door.
Mike leaned forward, his forearms on his desk. “Jonathan,” he began, “I want you to retract your ‘cover-up’ statement to the press.”
“I’m not going to retract something I think is the truth.”
Mike shook his head. “Olivia is planning to request a medical review panel, and if that occurs, I will be telling that panel the truth as I see it, which is that both of you were right in the O’Neill case.” Mike spoke slowly, as if he expected Jonathan would have difficulty following him. “Olivia was right to take the action she did because she has the skill and the experience to perform that type of surgery. A case could be made for malpractice if she had not attempted to save Ms. O’Neill’s life in that way. But you, Jonathan, were also right. Do you know why?” He didn’t wait for Jonathan to respond. “You were right because you do not have the skill or experience to perform that procedure. It would have been malpractice if you had attempted it. So.” Mike sat back again, his eyes on Jonathan. “Is that what you’d like this community to hear?”
Jonathan’s eyes had narrowed. There was a thin bead of sweat above his upper lip. “You’re twisting the…”
“I’m twisting nothing,” Mike growled, leaning forward again, and Olivia was as surprised as Jonathan by the force of his reaction. “You make that retraction or Olivia is calling for a review panel to clear her name. And clear it she will, which isn’t going to make you look too good, is it?”
She felt Jonathan’s eyes on her, felt his burning, p
enetrating glare. “Don’t bother,” he said to her, standing up. “I’m resigning, effective immediately. Then you can tap abdomens till your heart’s content, for all I care.” He took off his stethoscope, and in a exaggerated gesture, slapped it down on the desk before storming out of the office.
Mike looked at the stethoscope, and Olivia thought he was trying not to smile. He raised his eyes to hers. “I apologize for not doing that sooner, Olivia. Please wait on the review panel until we see what the outcome of this is.” He nodded toward his phone. “Shall I call the Gazette and tell them the news?”
She changed her clothes in the lounge for her date with Paul, ignoring the rumors that were already crackling through the ER about what had taken place in Mike’s office. She dressed in a blue skirt that masked her expanding middle, and a white, short-sleeved sweater. When she stepped out of the lounge, she spotted Paul in the waiting room and felt a nearly forgotten flutter of longing for him.
He’d brought her a delicate blue tea rose in a silver bud vase, and she recognized it as the rare variety she had grown in the yard of their old house in Kensington. Her throat ached to see it, the remnant of a happier time.
“I cut it this morning,” he said as they walked out to his car. “Snuck into the yard before the sun was up.”
His out-of-character wickedness made her smile.
He started the car and pulled out of the parking lot, glancing over at her once they were on the road. “You look good,” he said.
“Thanks.” She noticed he was wearing his wedding ring again. He was serious about this, about missing her, about getting back together. She studied his profile. He had a lovely chin with the suggestion of a cleft, and a fine, straight nose, but he really did not look well. He had lost a good deal of weight these last few months. His skin was sallow, his cheeks drawn, and she felt a little sorry for him.
She told him about her meeting with Jonathan and Mike, thanking him for his encouragement. “I’d gotten sort of paralyzed, I guess,” she said.