“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“Not now. Don’t ruin now.”
I feel a ripple of frustration in him, but he accepts. Because he understands, as I knew he would. So, I hold reality off a little while longer. But reality is like the gun thrown into the ocean. Just because it disappears from sight doesn’t mean it’s gone. It is there, under however many fathoms, like the princess and the pea, which I used to read to Joy just as my mother read it to me.
“Three hours,” I murmur as sleep hovers. “Set your phone.”
He snorts. “I’m not setting any phone.”
“I’m serious, Jack. I can’t sleep here the whole night.”
“Why not?” In the next breath, he answers. “Huh. Joy. But Margo is with her.”
“I can’t, not the whole night.” I could talk of the responsibility Anne claims I lack, but I don’t want to go there. I could say that I have never spent a night away from Joy since she was born, but I don’t want to think of why I am now and where it goes from here.
I don’t look up. My decision is final.
“Five hours,” he bargains.
“Three.”
“Four.”
“Three point five.”
“Done,” he says and, wrenching away, is thundering down the stairs and back up with his phone, dropping it on the nightstand, turning off the light, and sliding his long, naked body against mine.
I fall asleep breathing him in. And for those few minutes—few hours—I feel whole.
After releasing Guy from the master bedroom, Jack walks me home. Hauling me up against him on the back steps, he gives me a lastthorough kiss. It’s his mark, bestowed with what used to be smugness but is only worry now. I’ve told him about the gun, the argument, our mothers, but I didn’t allow for discussion. So, his worry could be from one of those things. Or from us. But I refuse to let him ask how I can really return to New York after what we just did. When he starts, I cover his mouth with my hand and shake my head in warning. Now, he simply, devastatingly, places a sweet kiss on my forehead and lets me go.
There is no sound when I creep in through the beach door. I already know that Anne’s car hasn’t returned, but the fact that night lights are the only ones lit says that Margo has been down to check.
Anne is with Bill. She has to be. The hope that the Billy Houseman we knew as kids should turn out to be our savior is bizarre. But it’s the best we have.
Chapter 21
Joy is sitting on the bed when I wake up, and the fight with Anne, the gun, my time with Jack all return. Needing a bridge into mother mode, I focus on the ocean sounds through a show of sleepiness, peering at her first through one eye, then both, before stretching.
“Are you okay?” she asks softly.
I nod.
“Jack helped?”
“Good to talk with,” I say.
She grunts. “Mom.” She knows exactly how I spent the night.
“Good to talk with,” I repeat, because I’m not getting into that. What Jack and I did was pure escapism—friends with benefits—the ultimate for-old-times’-sake. I don’t want to explain that to Joy any more than I want to dwell on it myself.
But my worry is needless. She is more concerned about her aunt.
“Anne never came back. Margo says she spent the night at Bill’s, but do we know for sure? What if she had a car crash, like the onethat killed Gram or the one we saw driving here Friday?” she asks with a frightened grimace. “But she has to be at the shop by now. Wouldn’t she be there? I mean the baker gets there at four in the morning to make muffins, but Anneisthe shop? She opens at six thirty. Shehasto be there.”
“She will be.”
