Her mouth went dry, and she jerked back as if scalded, then returned to her studio.
After dark that night, Leigh returned from her long journey to bring him his medicine.Thank God, Jonah thought, when he heard her enter Remy’s small house. She’d arrived with the good stuff.
Leigh came and went without visiting the bedroom, so it was Remy who handed him the pills. He downed them while his host looked on like an annoyed schoolteacher.
Sometime later, Remy came in to turn off the bedside lamp. By then, the pain had drained from his body. Sweet relief. He was floating. For the first time since he’d been pulled from the sea, he didn’t care about anything. For the first time, she wasn’t frustrating him.
He heard himself ask, “Will you sleep here again tonight?”
“I will.”
She would be nearby.
It eased his mind even more to know . . . she would be nearby.
ChapterFour
Many miles to the west, Fiona was feeling smug.
Smug because she’d been born in Maine. Smug because she had the good sense to live here still, in Maine’s prettiest and most charming town, no less. Whenever anyone tried to say Groomsport wasn’t best, she leapt in to argue. Because, obviously, it was.
The weather. That was the thing making her especially secure in her choices on this autumn morning. Fog hovered over the ground, magical, but low enough that she could glance to the side down alleyways and streets to catch glimpses of the harbor.
Fiona made her way down Main Street like a toned and curvy eighteen-wheeler, dressed in chic business clothes, high heels clicking smartly on the sidewalk, hair salon-fresh.
On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, she arrived to work early, parked her car in the lot there, then walked to her favorite coffee shop for breakfast. Had she walked to the coffee shop every weekday morning, it might have begun to seem like a compulsion. But walking on Tuesdays and Thursdays without fail? Not at all.
Settlers had first come to Groomsport in 1770. Because many were Irish, they’d named the town after a seaside village in the old country. Initially, their economy had depended on shipbuilding and fishing. But by the late 1800s, wealthy Americans had discovered Groomsport's beauty and begun flocking here and building summer homes purely for pleasure. Almost all the historic buildings, mansions, and cottages had survived—giving the blocks and blocks of the downtown area a time capsule feel.
The surrounding hills formed a V—with the harbor at the V’s base. Thus Main Street started high on one end near the library. It dipped down from there past numerous restaurants and boutiques before rising again up the opposite hill toward the opera house.
Fiona’s town had everything a coastal Maine town should have. A dock made of wood. A lobster shack. A fleet of windjammers. Taste and class. A lighthouse minutes away. And plenty of tourists to properly admire it all.
She breezed through the front doors of Java Junkie. Minutes later, she was carrying a saucer and cup of skinny cappuccino in one hand and a gluten-free, sugar-free nut bar (better than the green smoothie she consumed most mornings of the week) in the other. Her only sorrow? That she was forced to sit at her least favorite table because all her favorite ones were taken. Why would anyone build a table so tall that your feet didn’t touch the ground and you were obliged to perch them on a little metal protrusion?
Sipping her coffee, she slid her iPad from her Hermes bag and skimmed through the day’s news stories. Weather drama, political drama, international drama, celebrity drama. Usual, usual, usual—until she suddenly came upon a scientific article about the total solar eclipse scheduled to occur in Maine one year from now.
Memory collided into her and she set her coffee cup down with aclink.
Her father had once dreamed of becoming an astronomer and was fond of saying he would’ve gotten a degree in that field had he possessed either the brains or the means to attend college. Absent those things, he’d contented himself working as an electrician and indulging his love of astronomy by traveling whenever possible to the sites of solar eclipses. Because the family’s budget was tight, he typically drove alone to eclipses in the continental United States. But there had been one time, back when Fiona had been eight years old, when the whole family had journeyed to Suriname in South America to view a total eclipse and to vacation.
Everything about the experience—visiting a foreign country, holding a paper apparatus to her eye, watching the moon move across the sun until the daylight faded to darkness—had been memorable. As was the promise she’d made to her sister, Isobel, that day.
Isobel was the second-oldest child and first girl in their family. Fiona had followed fifteen months later. They’d shared a room. They’d played and fought in equal measure—driving their parents crazy and exhausting their siblings.
Fiona was big enough to admit that she’d been the instigator of most of the problems. She'd been too intelligent and crafty for her own good, born with a deep sense that she wasn’t being treated fairly even when she was being treated fairly by all. Isobel was good-hearted, but also staunch. Had Isobel been a doormat, the two of them would’ve gotten along famously. As it was, Isobel stood up for herself, which led to frequent confrontations between the principled older sister and the fiery younger sister.
Immediately following that South American eclipse, when the sunlight had returned, bathing them like a fairy spell, their love for each other had reigned above their competitiveness. They’d looked at each other with awe, then chattered, talking over each other in their excitement, about the miracle they’d just experienced. The moon had come in front of the sun! And it had been scary, how everything had gone dim and still. And they—the O’Sullivan sisters from Maine who never got to go anywhere or do anything—had seen it.
Isobel asked their father when a total eclipse would come to their part of Maine. He named a date so far in the future that it made Fiona's mind spin. She’d be an adult then. Seeing that eclipse in Maine felt unreachable—as real as pulling Excalibur from a stone.
Isobel turned to her. “Let’s make a promise,” she said gravely.
“About what?”
“Let’s promise each other that we’ll watch that total eclipse in Maine together. Just like we did this one.”
Fiona immediately felt the genius of the idea. “Yes.” She was honored to be asked. Flattered. Eagerly, she extended her pinky finger. “Pinky promise.”
