“I have a twenty-year-old son named Drew,” Michael said

“And according to his mother, he wants to meet me.”

A son. The words didn’t make any sense at first. We had a daughter, Emma. Where had a son come from?

And then I did the math, feebly, my mind tripping back over the years, and figured it out.

“Tess?” Michael said.

I took Michael’s hand, holding it hard even though I couldn’t face him. My gaze was drawn to the line of framed photographs on my dresser—Michael and me, Michael and Emma, Emma alone. Each picture offered its own truth, a testament to love and laughter and family. Even if there were dozens of moments that hadn’t been captured, it didn’t make those happy faces a lie.

“Tomorrow, okay?” I whispered. “We can talk tomorrow.”

Because no matter what had happened twenty years ago, history had taught me that there would always be a tomorrow for us.

Dear Reader,

The idea of love at first sight, especially young love at first sight, has always fascinated me. Who we are at eighteen is not necessarily who we will be at thirty or forty, and real love is a big commitment to make when you’re still discovering who you are. We all know childhood sweethearts who have found happy endings, but I can’t believe the road is always perfectly smooth.

Tess and Michael Butterfield are one of those couples. Not even eighteen when they meet, they fall hard and fast for each other. They’re now married with a teenage daughter, and their life together is exactly what they’ve always dreamed about…until an unexpected phone call changes everything.

Or does it? As Michael and Tess learn together, love isn’t simply a gift—it’s a choice, one that has to be made over and over to keep it strong.

I hope you enjoy this story as much as I did writing it. These are characters who first spoke to me long ago, and I’m thrilled at the chance to share them with you.

Best,

Amy Garvey

Pictures of Us
Amy Garvey

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Garvey has worked as a nanny, a video store clerk, a day camp counselor, a journalist, a Bloomingdale’s salesgirl and a romance editor, among other things, but her real love has always been writing. In her opinion, fictional people are usually more fun to spend time with than real people, even though she adores her husband and three kids. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, and when she’s not reading, she’s watching far too much TV, including Supernatural, her latest obsession, and reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Visit Amy’s Web site at www.amygarvey.com, or write to her at amy@amygarvey.com.

For April and Jess, whose story ended much too soon

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER ONE

MY WORLD CHANGED WITH ONE phone call on a Tuesday evening in May as my family and I were finishing a casual dinner of leftovers and bits and pieces from the fridge. My daughter, Emma, had dumped reheated sauce over a bowl of pasta, and my husband, Michael, had picked at the remains of a roast chicken, then washed it down with a beer. I was scraping the soggy end of a salad out of my bowl and into the garbage disposal when the phone rang and Emma bolted out of her chair to answer it. A fifteen-year-old girl’s response to a ringing telephone is alarming until you get used to it, and I remembered enough about being fifteen to smile at her crestfallen face when she handed the phone to her father. Her swing of dark blond hair fell across her cheek, and she looked bored.

“Dad, it’s for you.”

“Who is it?” Michael asked, squinting at the newspaper he’d spread on the table and frowning.

Emma rolled her eyes. If it wasn’t Jesse, the boy she was crushing on, she clearly didn’t care. “Some woman. She didn’t say.”

He glanced up then, wrinkling his brow, and took the phone into the living room. I heard his curious “Hello?” before he was out of earshot, and a minute later I heard the heavy thunk of something falling to the floor.

It wasn’t him, at least—I rushed in to find that he’d stumbled into the ottoman stationed in front of the huge old club chair that I intended to reupholster, knocking a stack of books onto the carpet. But his face was white, blank, his eyes as wide as I’d ever seen them, and as I watched, he sank onto the sofa wordlessly, the slim black portable phone still held to his ear.

To get the news out of him after he’d hung up took a little while. He insisted that Emma head upstairs to start her homework, a pronouncement that was met with a dramatic pout and more rolling of eyes. She usually studied at the dining-room table, with her books spread out and the wires of her brand-new iPod snaking out of her ears, while Michael and I puttered in the kitchen or sprawled in front of the TV. I never went down to the basement darkroom until after Emma was upstairs for the evening.

When she was in her room—the phone glued to her ear, I was sure, lamenting the unfair whims of parents to her friends—I replaced the phone in its base and motioned Michael out to the patio. He followed me through the French doors off the kitchen, and I winced as one of the doors screeched shut. The hinges needed oiling, one of dozens of small household repairs we’d both put off.

The sun had just set, a faint pink-gold smear on the horizon, and our generous yard was bathed in the dusky light of a suburban New Jersey spring evening. Emma’s outgrown swing set crouched at the far end, neglected. I settled in one of the Adirondack chairs facing the lawn, which Michael hadn’t cut lately, pulled my bare feet onto the seat and waited for Michael to settle in the other. Instead, he paced the length of the worn gray flagstones, hands jammed in his jeans pockets.

His silence was terrifying, and I couldn’t imagine what was wrong. His mother had called just that morning, and at sixty-seven she was sometimes more energetic than I was. Michael’s sister, Melissa, lived in California with her family, but we’d heard from them just a week ago, and if the news concerned my family, I assumed the person on the phone would have asked for me.

There was nothing to do but wait, though. When Michael’s upset, he turtles up instinctively, and trying to yank him out of the safety of that shell is impossible. With his shoulders hunched and his dark forehead creased in a frown, I recognized the look of my husband of eighteen years deep in contemplation. He could turn an idea over in his head for hours before sharing it. He’d kept me hanging about the living-room paint color for more than a week, and that had involved only a choice between two shades, Velvet Morning and November Skies.

This was more serious. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Michael’s face so unnaturally pale. I realized I was twisting my thick gold wedding band around my finger as I waited, one of my own nervous habits, and folded my hands in my lap with effort.

When he finally spoke, his voice faltered over the words, and he didn’t meet my gaze.

“That was Sophia Keating,” he said, and my stomach clenched. I didn’t know that name. That couldn’t be good.

I could hear the first of the crickets striking up out in the grass, and the faint thump of the bass from Emma’s stereo was just audible from her open window. The familiar sounds were something to focus on, because the rest of the world seemed to rush past in a dizzying blur when Michael continued, his face in profile against the last of the sun, a vague shadow.

“I…well, she’s the mother of my son,” he said, and drew in a lungful of evening air. His jaw was set in a hard line, as if he had to force the words out. “I…I have a twenty-year-old son named Drew, according to her. And he wants to meet me.”

Son. The word didn’t make any sense at first. We had a daughter, Emma. Where had a son come from? And who in sweet hell was Sophia Keating?

And then I did the math, feebly, my mind tripping back over the years, and figured it out.

“Oh.” It was hardly a reply. It was barely a word. But I couldn’t get anything else past my lips. Not with my heart clattering like a broken jackhammer in my chest.

“Tess?” Michael crouched beside me then, taking my hand. His dark eyes had gone even darker now, had always seen right through me. Michael knew me too well.

“I’m cold.” It was possibly the most inane thing I could have said. Plus it was still warm out. But Michael didn’t question me, and we went inside together. His hand in mine felt as it always had, warm and strong and slightly rough, the way men’s hands usually seemed to, and I was grateful to cling to it.

We carried a bottle of red wine and two glasses up to the bedroom, heedless of the workday to come. I needed something to smooth the raw edges of my nerves, and to soften the tension strung between us, taut enough to snap.

“Talk to me, Tess,” Michael said, setting down his empty wineglass and fixing me with a troubled, deep brown stare.

I wasn’t sure I could. Despite the wine, which had numbed my tongue and my emotions a little too well, I was still stunned. Our bedroom was familiar in the evening shadows, the bed the same cozy, rumpled nest we’d slept in for nearly twenty years, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my life, so long sturdily set on its foundation, had suddenly been shoved to the edge of a cliff. That, possibly, it had been built there all along, held up with masking tape and toothpicks and a few ancient rubber bands. I knew exactly when this child—young man, now—would have been conceived, and what was more, I understood my part in it. Neither fact made the news any easier to bear.

Once, Michael had said to five-year-old Emma, who was pawing through our wedding photos at the time, sprawled on the wide blue field of our bed, her hair still damp from her after-dinner bath, “I knew I was going to marry Mommy the day I met her.”

I hadn’t corrected him, since it was probably true, even though the roots of our relationship were much more tangled than that. Even at seventeen, Michael had been confident about what he wanted, and since then what he’d wanted most was me. It was romantic, certainly, and as comfortable—and comforting—as a favorite sweater, something I could wrap around myself, grateful for its warmth, its texture, its very familiarity.

But sometimes it was overwhelming. When Michael turned the high-powered beam of that love on me, its light, its heat, could be blinding. Then again, I’d certainly never doubted it.

And I didn’t really doubt it now. At least, I didn’t want to. I took Michael’s hand, holding it hard even though I couldn’t face him. My gaze was drawn to the line of framed photographs on my dresser, Michael and me, Michael and Emma, Emma alone. Moments in time, most of them caught with my own camera, and in all of them we were smiling. I recalled the story behind each picture, too—the piece of birthday cake Michael and Emma had shared before I snapped them sitting at the kitchen table, their lips still sticky with frosting; the bright fall day Michael and I had signed the papers to close on this house, both of us terrified and elated and exhausted all at once.

Each picture offered its own truth, a testament to love and laughter and family. Even if there were dozens of other moments that hadn’t been captured, it didn’t make those happy faces a lie. I pulled Michael’s arm around me as I settled back into the pillows, grateful for the dim light, and for the free pass I believed twenty-five years of loving Michael bought me.

“Tomorrow, okay?” I whispered, turning my head just far enough to speak over my shoulder. “We can talk tomorrow.”

Because no matter what had happened twenty years ago, I needed to believe that there would be always be a tomorrow for us.

AS I LAY IN BED THAT NIGHT, drifting uneasily toward sleep, I let my memory lead me back in time, to twenty-five years earlier, when Michael had appeared in my life out of nowhere and changed it forever.

I might have created him, given the right tools. His resemblance to the man I’d dreamed of, danced with, spoken to in the fantasies that occupied me while I did my barre work or ran in the mornings before school was so unnerving that, from the beginning, I found myself obsessed with touching him. A dream made flesh, or so it seemed, I wanted the reassuring proof of bone beneath skin, the rhythmic pulse of a heart that beat.

I don’t have any photos of the day we met, of course. We were just seventeen when we did. The school year had ended the day before, and Lucy, Cath and I had piled into Lucy’s ancient Beetle to drive to the Jersey shore. Sandy Hook was only forty-five minutes away, and the weather was perfect for it—hot and clear, with a wispy breeze. Not that bad weather would have kept us at home; the senior class had graduated the previous night, and most of them would be at the beach today, nursing hangovers and kicking off their last summer of freedom before college with sunburns, volleyball and an endless rehash of grad-night parties.

Lucy was fiddling with the radio, which was notoriously temperamental, and Cath was still half-asleep behind an enormous pair of sunglasses, her long dark hair riffling out the open window. I was curled in the backseat, my bare feet propped on the stack of beach towels, and was watching out the rear window as the crowded lanes of the parkway unwound behind us.

The summer stretched ahead, and I wasn’t sure I could face it yet. Cath would spend the weeks sleeping until she couldn’t take the heat in her attic bedroom any more, and then haunt the library and the record store downtown most afternoons. Lucy’s job at the day camp would begin next week, and she had already informed us that she intended to paint her bedroom, too. Both Cath and I knew that she would also plow through every book on the senior reading list, and probably volunteer at the children’s hospital in Mountainside, as well. Lucy, a one-girl compendium of achievements, had anticipated college applications for two years now.

And for the first time since I was twelve, I not only needed to find something to fill the months before school started again, I also had to consider applying to college. To study what, I had no idea. Nothing appealed to me. College didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to spend the summer in bed, with the blinds drawn against the sun and the fan spinning in lazy circles above my head. Secretly, spending the rest of my life just that way didn’t sound awful.

I looked down at my knee as Lucy pulled in to the crowded parking lot at the beach, and examined the scar that cut through it. It was still angry, a jagged pink arrow pointing to the fact that my life had changed irrevocably in one afternoon. My parents liked to remind me that I was lucky to be able to walk, but I didn’t care much about that. If I was going to be curled up in bed for weeks at a time, hypnotized by daytime TV and drinking diet soda by the gallon, two functional legs probably wouldn’t be necessary.

“We’re here,” Lucy said, jerking on the emergency brake as the car shuddered to a halt. “Cath, wake up.”

“I’m up,” Cath mumbled, shoving her sunglasses on top of her head and squinting out at the sparkling water. “God, it’s bright.”

I climbed out of the back when Cath got out, stretching her arms over her head before lighting a Marlboro, and threw the others their towels. I was hauling my backpack over my shoulder when Lucy nudged me.

“Look at that,” she whispered, cocking her head toward Billy Caruso’s Jeep, parked just five spots away. “Who is he?”

“He” was beautiful, tall, with dark, slightly unruly hair and large dark brown eyes, his lean body delicately corded with muscle. I swallowed and felt the blood rushing to my face when he glanced up and saw me looking at him.

Westfield wasn’t a small town, but there was only one high school. By the time you arrived there, you either knew everyone, or someone you knew had gone to grammar school or one of the two junior highs with the people you didn’t. For Billy, a freshly graduated and enormously popular senior, to show up at the beach today accompanied by a strange boy who looked the way this one did was a social error of fantastic proportions. He was fresh meat, a new face, a walking possibility.

Lucy wasn’t waiting, either. She and Billy had been on the newspaper together, and his social credentials didn’t faze her even slightly. Tucking her gingery hair behind her ear and pushing her glasses up on her nose, she hefted her beach bag and marched toward him. I followed, nabbing Cath by the hem of her black T-shirt as I did.

“Congratulations on graduating, Billy,” Lucy said, raising up on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek, her lips landing on the hard line of his jaw, instead. “The paper won’t be the same without you.”

“I’m sure you’ll marshal the troops, Luce.” His voice was light as he inclined his head at me and Cath. He was every inch the suave upperclassman, his baggy plaid shorts riding low on his hips, his Ray-Bans perched on top of his cropped blond hair. “Tess. Cath.”

“Who’s your friend?” Lucy asked, sticking her hand out to the stranger, who was watching the interchange with amusement.

“This is Michael Butterfield,” Billy said, busy scanning the people down on the sand. “Just moved in next door to me.”

“Hi.” Michael shook Lucy’s hand as he nodded all around. “Caruso said the beach was the place to be today.”

“You from the city?” Cath said, eyeing Michael’s H.S. 475 T-shirt.

“Yeah.” He shrugged when the short answer was met with three pairs of curious eyes, his hands jammed in the pockets of a pair of faded cutoff jeans. “My dad died, and my mom wanted to join a practice out here. School ended last week.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. The words sounded inconsequential in my ears, useless and small, but Michael smiled at me. A real smile, his eyes going warm and even darker. I felt my cheeks heating up again and tried not to bite my bottom lip.

“Well, I guess we’ll head down,” Lucy said abruptly, turning and marching for the worn wooden steps that loped over the dunes. “You guys coming?”

She’d done her duty and satisfied her curiosity at the same time, and if I suspected that she wished Michael had given her the smile he’d given me, she would never say so. Cath was, as usual, oblivious to anything that wasn’t shouted, and she dawdled as we trudged across the hot sand, struggling to light another cigarette in the breeze.

But she noticed when Michael spread his towel out next to mine, and arched a plucked eyebrow in reaction. The safety pin in her left ear gleamed in the sun, and she left on her shirt and the black leather collar around her neck when she lay back on her towel. She was going to have one strange tan, not that she would care.

Michael seemed fascinated by a game of Frisbee farther down the beach, and for a minute I wondered if he’d realized where he’d chosen to sit. I pulled off my plain white T-shirt and pretended I didn’t know he was there, as I smoothed oil on my legs and stomach.

It wasn’t until a half hour later, when I rolled onto my stomach to change the station on the radio, that he even moved.

“Do you want some on your back?” he asked, picking up the greasy bottle of Hawaiian Tropic. He held up his other hand to shade his eyes, and I avoided his squint before I blushed again. It was so hot by then that I was probably bright red already, and I had to resist the impulse to dab sweat off my forehead and chest with the corner of my towel.

“Sure.” I gave him a noncommittal shrug, and hoped I wasn’t trembling as his hands worked the oil into my back in long, firm strokes. His fingers were strong, but equally gentle, and everywhere he touched felt strangely alive, vibrating with a teasing echo of his hands. I was suddenly painfully unsure what my plain bikini bottom covered and what it didn’t, what the curve of my spine looked like and if my shoulder blades were anything more than bony wings.

When he finished, I propped myself on my elbows to rummage in my bag for a piece of gum. My mouth had gone dry, and I was just unwrapping a piece of Juicy Fruit when he leaned closer still. My heart was already beating hard as he waited for me to return his gaze. And when I did, he licked a drop of sweat from my upper lip without any warning.

“Hot,” he said.

I blinked, and I think I nodded, riding out the potent combination of shock and arousal and curiosity. Michael Butterfield wasn’t like the few boys I’d gone out with so far, kids I’d known for years, as familiar and unsurprising as my own face. From them I could imagine a cheap grope, an attempt to untie my bikini top, a casual slap on the ass. This was different.

Michael turned over and lay on his stomach, resting his head on his crossed arms so he could look at me. I knew even then that my life was going to change again, even if I couldn’t predict exactly how. One thing was sure, though. The summer I’d been dreading for weeks wasn’t going to be aimless or empty if Michael Butterfield had anything to do with it.

CHAPTER TWO

THE MORNING AFTER SOPHIA KEATING’S surprise phone call there was little time for Michael and me to talk. He was late for his train into the city, where he was the executive editor for a small but prestigious publisher, and Emma was eyeing the two of us over her bowl of Frosted Flakes. We were rarely all together on weekday mornings.

“Must be nice to get to sleep late whenever you want,” she complained, then set her bowl in the sink and zippered her backpack. She’d twisted her hair up behind her head with a black butterfly clip, and she looked at least two years older, which was unsettling, especially on this particular morning.

“I still have to bring a note from home, though,” Michael teased her. His tone was light, but the restless night had left a deep gray smudge beneath each eye. He was puttering, too, pouring a second cup of coffee, returning upstairs for a different tie, idling over the morning paper.

I refilled my mug of tea from the old china pot on the counter and said, “You’re going to miss the 7:50 if you don’t hurry.”

“He’s not going.” Emma slung her backpack over one shoulder with a wry smile. “You two are going to play hooky, aren’t you?”

Michael glanced at me, but I looked away, watching an enormous bumblebee hovering in the thick blue fists of wisteria outside the kitchen window. We’d taken plenty of days off while Emma was at school, spending the morning tangled in bed and later indulging in lunch out somewhere or window-shopping downtown. It was one of our rituals, a stolen day of reconnection we tried to make time for every six months or so, and we were due.

But not today. Definitely not today.

“You’re going to be late, too, miss,” I told Emma, shooing her out the front door with a kiss. “See you this afternoon.”

Her hand lifted in a wave as she set out down the walk, and I paused at the screen door, as she ambled along the sidewalk, adjusting the volume of her iPod, her head swinging in time to the beat.

Our gorgeous girl had a brother. Biologically, at least. What else he might be to her was still up in the air, but Emma would be fascinated by the news initially and then the questions would come, rapid-fire and endless. She knew full well what year we’d been married, and she’d always been too perceptive for her own good. After all, she’d picked up on the weird vibe between Michael and me this morning, even if she hadn’t interpreted its cause correctly.

Michael touched my arm, and I turned to face him. Part of me wanted the comfort of burying my head in his shoulder, but another part of me longed to crawl into bed alone for a few days and hide.

“We’ll talk to her tonight,” he said. His dark hair was sticking up in spikes over his forehead, and in my mind’s eye I could see him standing in the kitchen, running a hand through his hair restlessly, wondering if he should join me. I knew him inside and out. That hadn’t changed, either—so it was even more surprising that he didn’t understand how imperative it was that we talk first.

“I’m not sure what there is to tell her yet,” I argued, slipping away from him and returning to the kitchen. The pale wood floor was warm; early sunlight had flooded the window over the sink.

“I’m going to talk to him today.” Michael caught my wrist before I could pick up my mug. “I arranged to call him at lunchtime. There are things I want to hear from him, too.”

I let him pull me against his chest, and I breathed in the clean scent of his shirt, and the spicier smell of his skin beneath it. With his arms around me, and his heartbeat the steady, comforting rhythm of a clock beneath my cheek, the rest of the world receded for a minute, as it always had.

“I’ll call you after I speak to him,” he murmured into my hair, and I nodded. “And then we can decide what to tell Emma, and everyone else.”

When he’d gone, gunning the old Volvo out of the driveway to make his train into Manhattan, I carried my tea onto the front porch, letting the screen door slam behind me once Walter, our aging beagle, had settled into a square of sunlight with a grunt. I had dozens of things to do, but my mind refused to focus on anything other than the fact of Drew Keating’s existence.

My fingers itched to dial Lucy’s number at her office, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was nearly impossible to get her on the phone lately, and we resorted to brief, flying e-mails more often than not, but that wasn’t the reason for my hesitation. Since junior high, Lucy had been my willing ear, my shoulder to cry on, but spilling this particular story seemed like a betrayal when even Emma didn’t yet know about her half brother.

As much as I would have welcomed Lucy’s voice on the other end of the line, what I really wanted was reassurance. Someone to reassure me that I had nothing to worry about, that I hadn’t taken Michael’s love for granted, that nothing about our life together was going to change. The problem was, there was every chance that Lucy would disagree.

DANCING BALLET PROFESSIONALLY requires an incredible amount of dedication, concentration and talent. I had all three, according to my teachers, but after ten years of training, and four summers spent at the New York City Ballet’s prestigious School of American Ballet, what I didn’t have was luck. I’d fallen during a rehearsal, thanks to an ill-timed jump into Jared Farmer’s arms, and smashed my right knee into pieces, quite literally, as I landed on the floor.

Everything I’d dreamed of, everything I’d worked for, was over in that moment, and I realized it even as I lay sprawled on the gritty studio floor. The pain was a blinding starburst, hot and relentless, like nothing I’d ever felt. My knee wouldn’t move—what had once been solid seemed to be a handful of dust now, and my lower leg a useless length of bone, my foot dangling from it like an afterthought in its scuffed pointe shoe.

Now, I barely remember the round of doctors’ appointments and consultations, the surgery and the recuperation. What I remember is the awful feeling of loss, and of being lost. I had nothing to focus on for the first time. For years, every free moment of my life had been occupied with dance. Studying my idols, training, practicing, living, eating and breathing ballet. It wasn’t a distant spot on the horizon; it was the here and now, packing lamb’s wool into my pointe shoes, washing my leotards, stretching my rebellious muscles every morning, absorbing Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and Stravinsky until I could hear the violins humming and swelling in my sleep.

Meeting Michael was what saved me. From what, I’m not sure—depression doesn’t sound melodramatic even if self-destruction does. But as intently as I turned my eyes and my heart to him, I found that I was the focus of someone else’s fascination, and it felt good.

By the end of that day at the beach, Michael had asked about everything from my family and friends to what I dreamed about at night. He wanted to know if I’d ever cut my hair, which fell halfway down my back, and if I liked white peaches. He was fascinated by my knowledge of classical music—at least, the ballet-appropriate pieces—and he’d made me list everywhere my family had ever been on vacation. He wanted to know what my room looked like, if I slept on my stomach or my back and what I ate first thing in the morning.

As odd as it may seem, we didn’t have anything to do but talk that day and walk up and down the shoreline, our feet splashing in the salty tide. And it was incredibly freeing. In those hours, I didn’t have to think about the gaping hole in my life. Michael was filling it in with his interest in me.

It didn’t escape Lucy’s notice, either. “You’re in love with being loved,” she said two weeks later, when I’d disentangled myself from Michael long enough to join her in Cath’s pool. She was hanging on to the side, kicking her feet out behind her in lazy swipes, and her wet hair was slicked back from her face.

I swam away from her, stung. Michael was flipping through a magazine on a lounge chair just a dozen feet away, his eyes shaded behind a pair of dark sunglasses and his chest pink with sun.

“That’s…well, mean. And not true,” I said, paddling over to the concrete lip and tossing back my own soaked hair.

“Really?” She shook her head, shrugging. She was squinting in the fierce afternoon sun, her nose wrinkled in disapproval, each freckle standing out like a polka dot. “What is it you like about him other than how he’s completely obsessed with you?”

“You’re out of line, Lucy.” I managed to keep my voice steady as I said it, but my heart had squeezed into a tight fist. I didn’t want to fight, but I wasn’t going to listen to her accuse me of something she understood nothing about.

I was flattered by Michael’s interest, and I knew it even then, but I was also pleased by it because I’d fallen so hard for him. There were plenty of things I liked about him, not that I was about to spout off a list for Lucy’s benefit. He was smarter than any boy I’d ever dated, for one thing, and he was gentle and funny and kind, but there were a million little quirks that wouldn’t have mattered to anyone who wasn’t in love with him. The way his fingers were shaped. The way his left eyebrow was slightly crooked. The way he ate Oreos, around and around the edges until he swallowed the middle in one gulp. The fact that he was an awful swimmer but could run for miles without losing his breath. The short stories he’d written and collected in a plain spiral-bound notebook. The way he always carried a book with him wherever he went.

That he liked me was only one reason among the dozens I mused over as I lay in bed at night, and the idea that he’d given me something to do other than brood all summer didn’t occur to me at all until Lucy mentioned it.

It was rude and blunt of her to say it, but there are moments now when I wonder if she was wrong.

That summer was gorgeous from the beginning, just hot enough, lush and sweet scented. The old trees that lined the streets were thick with leaves, gardens had bloomed early, and every few blocks you could smell the chemical tang of chlorine from a backyard pool. Michael had been anticipating boredom his first summer away from Manhattan, where a kid with two doctors for parents could do pretty much whatever he liked, but we kept busy in the way only teenagers seem to do, wandering the streets hand in hand, drifting lazily in friends’ pools, talking for hours on my front porch, counting fireflies at dusk and listening for the tinny jingle of the ice-cream truck.

And kissing, of course. There was a lot of kissing.

I’d kissed boys before, if not extensively. I was usually too wrapped up improving my port de bras or learning a new variation for performance, and most of the boys in my ballet classes weren’t particularly interested in girls. But I had made out with Tommy Giuditta during the second installment of Friday the 13th, and I’d fooled around with Brendan Hastings at Billy Caruso’s party over Christmas break.

Michael tasted different, felt different from other boys. I couldn’t get enough of touching him. The wiry hair on his chest was fascinating. The smooth, firm muscles in his upper arms responded beneath my fingers. And his mouth was hot and faintly sweet, like nothing I’d ever tasted.

When he touched me…well, that was different, too. I was so familiar with my own body, the strength of my legs, the jutting definition of my ribs and hipbones, the painful bunions and scabbed blisters on my feet, that I was convinced it couldn’t hold any surprises. But when Michael and I were kissing, tangled together in his bed or on the sofa in my deserted living room long after everyone had gone to sleep, I never failed to be awed. My body understood a whole host of things I didn’t, apparently, and Michael had been the one to introduce me to them. There was heat, a slow softening that blurred every edge when Michael touched me, but there was also an electric buzz, a new, urgent energy. Need, I know now.

I was consumed with it those first weeks we were together, restless and irritable when he wasn’t within arm’s reach. To satisfy my parents—who had explained that although not dancing certainly wasn’t my choice, I would have to spend at least some of my vacation productively—I’d found a part-time job at the cinema downtown. Michael wasn’t working, since his mother felt that the loss of his father, moving out of his first and only home and preparing to leave for college were quite enough for him to deal with.

I’d been heartbroken to learn that he had graduated already—he was only a few months older than I was, but he’d started kindergarten early or something like that. I was too shattered to listen to the explanation, and anyway, I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was come September, he’d be leaving for Boston and Harvard.

One afternoon when I didn’t have to work and Michael’s mother had taken his sister, Jane, into the city for the day to visit friends, we were sprawled upstairs on his bed, drinking iced tea and feeding each other potato chips. We’d been talking about Michael’s favorite bookstore in Greenwich Village and had drifted into a strange conversation about reading The Scarlet Letter for school, and then about what classes Michael would take at Harvard, where he was going to major in literature.

I could feel him pulling back, the muscles in his shoulders stiff and his eyebrows drawn together over those huge, dark eyes. He would make noises about putting off school for a year, finding a job in town and waiting for me to graduate. He’d done it before, and although I’d stopped him each time, I was learning that he had a stubborn streak as wide as the sky.

I didn’t want him to go, but I didn’t want him to stay, either—not with me as the cause. What if he stayed and hated me for it? What if he stayed and realized he didn’t really love me, even though he’d said it a million times already, like a prayer between kisses, whispered in my ear at the movies, written on scraps of paper he left in my shorts pockets or my bag. It was then that I’d realized that being the object of love gave you power. And I was desperate not to use it the wrong way.

I pushed up on my elbows without warning, nudging the nearly empty chip bag to the floor. Michael looked up; he’d been lying beside me on the bed, his dark brown hair gleaming amber in the sun and one cheek flushed with heat.

I sat up completely and peeled off my T-shirt and bra, then swung my legs over the side of the bed to shimmy out of my shorts and panties. Michael sat up, too, eyes wide, his mouth opening as if he was about to speak.

I held out my hand as I lay back on the pillows, and he straddled me, his jeans rough against my naked thighs, his T-shirt warm and soft against my breasts. “Tess?” he said.

I didn’t answer, but he let me tug off his shirt, and groaned as I ran my hands over his chest.

“This was more romantic in my head,” he said as I fumbled with his zipper. “There were going to be, like, candles and stuff.”

I smiled as he shrugged off his jeans. My blood was racing, but it felt good. We’d been giving ourselves to each other for weeks, fitting the smaller pieces into the bigger ones, revealing colors and shadings, creating a puzzle that was very definitely an “us” instead of the separate entities “me” and “him.” I wanted to finish this now, I wanted all of it, and I didn’t want to wait. “Doesn’t matter,” I told him, taking his face between my hands, studying the shadow his eyelashes made on his cheeks before he kissed me.

And then we didn’t say anything else for a long time. But I don’t know even now if I was trying to give him something to hold on to when he left, or shamelessly, wordlessly, trying to convince him to stay after all.

IN THE END, INSTEAD OF CALLING Lucy, I went inside and made another piece of toast. After slathering it with butter and grape jelly, I leaned against the counter to eat it, and marshaled myself to attend to the day’s tasks. I had the Blair wedding proofs to sort and number, my own photos to develop, nearly a dozen phone calls to return either to clients or friends and a mound of laundry roughly the size of a small car.

I’d always loved working at home. Michael and I had painted, and refinished floors, and spent countless hours at flea markets and antique fairs, hunting down treasures for the dining and living rooms. It was more than our house; it was a true nest, the one place I felt completely comfortable. My house was one of my favorite places to be. But until today I’d never noticed one of the disadvantages of working there—far too much time alone with my thoughts, the usual peaceful quiet tightened into a disconcerting silence.

I made a halfhearted loop through the rooms downstairs to get myself started, picking up stray books and a sweatshirt of Emma’s, tidying the stack of magazines on the coffee table, which always seemed to expand on its own, thumbing through the junk mail piled on the sideboard in the dining room and throwing all of it away. But the house was too silent, too still—even Walter was lethargic, dozing on the kitchen floor rather than barking at passersby through the screen door.

Before long, I was inventing errands to run, considering what I might need from the grocery store or the pharmacy, and I went upstairs to shower, as if I could scrub away my uneasiness. By nine, I was in the bedroom, damp hair twisted into its usual loose knot on the back of my head, rooting through a pile of clothes on the soft green chair in the corner, looking for a pair of halfway-clean jeans.

When the phone rang, I jumped at least a foot. It couldn’t be Michael—he wouldn’t even be in his office yet. The later morning trains were notoriously prone to delays. One hand pressed to my heart, ashamed of my foolish nerves, I picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Tess Butterfield?”

I said that it was, staring at my reflection in the mirror above the bureau, watching as my eyes widened when the husky voice on the other end continued.

“This is Sophia Keating.”

CHAPTER THREE

YEARS AGO, WHEN I’D FIRST BEGUN taking pictures, I’d begun a project that I fully expected would never end. I’d started collecting old photos of my family, which I’d haphazardly stored in half-finished scrapbooks and albums or stuffed into shoe boxes up in the attic. I’d wanted a record of everyone, individually and together, and I’d pestered my grandmothers for snapshots of my mom and dad as kids, as teenagers, grinning in front of the Christmas tree, pedaling their tricycles, holding up a science trophy.

There were wedding pictures, of course, and all the photos of them with us kids over the years, but very few of them together. I changed that, much to their dismay, actually. After a while, my mother called me a paparazzo when I showed up for dinner with my camera in hand.

It was something like the growth chart so many parents etch into a doorway with pencil, mine included: Tess at two, Will at eight, Nell at thirteen. I even began to take the same pictures every year, on Thanksgiving and at the Memorial Day barbecue my parents always gave, a kind of living record, year by year, of a couple.

It wasn’t just them, though. I’d done the same thing with my sister and brothers, and used the self-timer to photograph all of us together. The photos changed as we married, had children, the definition of our family expanding, fluid.

Of course, even before Michael and I were married, I’d started what I only ever called my “Pictures of Us” file. Michael, me, Michael and me together, Emma, Emma and me—you get the idea. Emma’s birth had been an emergency caesarean, and although she had been born healthy and whole, I had ended up bleeding uncontrollably, so badly that the surgeon had decided on a partial hysterectomy to save my life. “Partial” meant removing my uterus, which also meant that Michael and I would never have more children, at least not naturally.

That blow had taken less time to recover from than I’d believed, and much of it was due to Emma. We were in love with our miraculous baby girl, and by the time she was three we were completely satisfied with our little family. So I had never expected that my definition of my new immediate family would need some revision.

And now Sophia Keating, the author of that revision—well, part of it, at least—was on the phone. Waiting for some response from me.

I wasn’t prepared for a conversation with Sophia. Not now, half-dressed and still damp, and maybe not ever. I was teetering between gratitude and vicious jealousy—I could thank her for raising her son alone all these years, leaving Michael out of it, but I was also tempted to scream, Why? Why did he sleep with you?

The first sentiment, of course, was petty and unfeeling. The second was about as mature as my fifteen-year-old daughter on a bad day.

So instead I said simply, “Hello.”

Her voice was low, a bit husky, and there was no way to guess if it was her usual timbre, or if she was as nervous as I was. “I know this is unexpected,” she said, and I dropped onto the bed behind me, nodding wordlessly. “All of it, including this…conversation.”

It wasn’t a conversation yet. I prayed the discussion would at least be a short one. My heart was banging clumsily as I said, “Unexpected is a good word for it.”

“I know.” She cleared her throat, and somewhere on the other end of the line I heard a siren wailing, distant and fleeting. “I just wanted to tell you that I don’t want anything from Michael. What I mean to say is, Drew would like his help, but it’s nothing financial, nothing…well, it’s for him to explain, really. Drew, I mean.”

I couldn’t help it—pity for her had already twisted into a painful knot in my throat. She was so completely ill at ease, so apologetic. Whatever had driven Drew to contact Michael was obviously not his mother’s idea.

“And you need to know that I didn’t tell Michael when I got pregnant because…well, when we broke off it was pretty clear he was going to make things work with you. And I cared about him—it wasn’t just some fling, you know? But I didn’t think…Well, I didn’t want to get in the way. And I don’t mean to sound like a martyr…” She trailed off, and I heard the brief note of panic in her tone. She was saying too much, getting in too deep.

Revealing things I was quite sure she hadn’t intended for me to know.

“Sophia…” I paused once her name was out. What was there to say? Thank you for raising my husband’s kid all by yourself? I couldn’t imagine what being a single parent would have meant, and when I thought about Emma’s babyhood, her full-speed-ahead toddler years, the idea of handling a child alone was enough to make my stomach lurch in despair even now.

I couldn’t very well blame Sophia for sleeping with Michael, much as I wanted to. That was my fault as much as his, and not hers at all, really. Michael had been free to see other people then. And so he had.

Twenty years, a marriage, a child and a mortgage later, the idea of him in another woman’s bed still made me ill. My man, I was tempted to screech. Mine.

The trouble was, all those years ago I had told “my man” I needed space. Now I couldn’t envision anything more absurd. Space for what? Where was this infamous space that everyone wanted? It loomed like a gaping black hole, ready to swallow me up, regrets and all.

“It’s okay,” I finally said, remembering the woman on the other end of the line, who was waiting for some response from me. What a pathetic word to offer, but it was all I had at the moment. “Drew has every right to speak to Michael, and Michael is…looking forward to meeting him.”

That was true, I realized. Michael was confused and upset, but there was no mistaking the flicker of curiosity in his eyes this morning, the way his gaze seemed focused somewhere distant. North, in fact, toward Boston.

“I just felt I needed to tell you that,” Sophia said. “I can’t really imagine what this is like for you. Not that a phone call from me necessarily makes it any easier.”

Her soft, husky laugh punctuated her words, and I found myself smiling. No matter what I would have liked to believe about Sophia Keating, she was turning out to be remarkably hard to dislike.

“It does help,” I offered, staring out the window, trying to picture her face, the room she was sitting in as she talked to me.

But when I hung up, I couldn’t avoid the knowledge that I’d lied. Talking to Sophia hadn’t helped at all. Liking her was going to make everything that much harder.

“IT’S BEAUTIFUL, isn’t it?”

Struggling to keep my coffee from spilling as my sister, Nell, jerked her well-worn little Civic to a stop an hour later, I glanced across a sprawling, shaggy yard at an enormous farmhouse. Its white paint was peeling, and one of the pale blue shutters on the second floor was askew, but the porch was trimmed in gingerbread, and two brave potted ferns flanked the front door. Beautiful was stretching it, but the place did have an air of old-world, dilapidated elegance. A shingle swinging in the breeze above the picket fence read Willowdale Farm.

“It’s…lovely,” I said cautiously, climbing out of the car after her. It certainly didn’t seem like the kind of place that catered weddings. Behind the house, a faded red barn leaned to one side beneath a pair of willow trees. Even on a bright spring morning, the farm seemed a bit sad, ashamed of its disuse and disrepair.

Nell had called before I’d left the house. Not that I’d had any idea where I was going aside from away—from the phone, from the bed Michael and I had shared for so long, from the unfinished work piled on my desk, which I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on. Taking a drive out Route 78 to see the place Nell swore was right for her wedding reception was the perfect distraction.

After one brief, failed engagement and countless boyfriends, Nell was getting married. She claimed that anyone under fifty was still eligible for a traditional white gown, and she had picked one out two months ago with my mother and me in tow. She wanted the whole deal—fancy reception, bridesmaids, throwing the bouquet, everything. Of course, I would be doing double duty as maid—I refused to call myself “matron”—of honor and photographer. The wedding album would be my gift to Nell and Jack, her fiancé.

“I know it’s not much now,” she was saying, sweeping one arm toward the grounds, her dark blond hair swinging. She’d inherited my mother’s thick sleek hair, while I’d gotten my father’s unruly curls. “But they’re turning it into a restaurant and catering facility, and they’re only asking peanuts for anything scheduled before the first of the year.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, struggling to visualize the grounds cleaned up and a fresh coat of paint on the aging shingles. “But will it be done by September?”

“Partly.” She was hedging, walking away to inspect the few lonely tulips blooming near the fence. A nurse for almost twenty years now, she was wearing a denim jacket over light blue scrubs, which meant she had a shift at the hospital later. She looked much younger than her forty-seven years.

Actually, it wasn’t the wedding that meant so much to her. It was Jack. The prospect of sharing the rest of her life with him, after waiting for so long to find someone—that was the important thing.

“He’s the one, Tess,” she’d told me nine months ago over beer at the Trolley one Friday night. Even in the dim light of the bar, cigarette smoke choking the air, her eyes shone. Big and blue, they’d always been a mirror of Nell’s feelings—she couldn’t lie to save her life. And for too many years they’d reflected nothing but disappointment that was rapidly sharpening into bitterness.

“He’s gentle and funny and kind and…” She bit her bottom lip to stifle a grin. “He’s so good in bed. I can’t even tell you.”

“Please don’t.” But I laughed when I said it. My sister was happier than I’d ever seen her, and I could only hope that Jack was the paragon she made him out to be.

The thing was, he’d been close by all along. A high-school art teacher in Springfield, he adored his students and gave private drawing lessons out of the Craftsman cottage he’d restored over the past ten years. He paid his taxes, he volunteered at the juvenile center in Rahway twice a month and he liked cats and dogs.

“Clearly, he’s perfect,” my mother had teased at Thanksgiving, when Nell had chosen to introduce him to the family en masse.

“I like to think so,” Jack said, not missing a beat, and everyone had laughed, including Emma, whom I thought had developed a bit of a crush on him. What was more, he obviously adored Nell.

If he wasn’t arguing about a wedding reception at Willowdale Farm, why should I?

“It’ll be great,” I said, reaching out as she walked past me and grabbing her hand. She looked at me, eyes hopeful and even brighter than usual in the warm sunlight. “I can imagine some gorgeous pictures on that porch and under the willows.”

“I know!” She was beaming again, and she leaned in to give me an impulsive hug. She smelled like citrus and laundry soap, and her lips were cool on my cheek. “It’s going to be beautiful. Shabby-chic maybe, but chic nonetheless.”

I laughed and looped my arm through hers as she led me inside, eager to introduce me to the female half of the couple who’d bought the place and show me the dining room.

“Kara and Peter remind me of you and Michael,” Nell confided as we waited in the drafty front hall. I was admiring the wainscoting and the vintage sconces. “They met when they were in high school, too, and they knew it was love even then. Just like you two.”

There was a wistful note in her voice that I thought was more habit than anything else. As much as Nell loved Michael, part of her had been envious of us for years, of the time we’d already had together, of what she called the “lightning bolt” method of falling in love. How often had she told me, teary and heartsick after yet another breakup, that I should be grateful I’d found my life’s mate before I’d even had to go looking?

“He found you,” she’d said, although this was frequently uttered after a beer or two. “Love found you. How lucky is that?”

Very lucky, and I knew it. I knew it now, at least. Back then, I wasn’t always so sure. I was still in high school, a vague lifetime ahead of me, and there were moments I felt I’d simply traded one comforting certainty for another. Ballet had been my future for as long as I could remember, part vocation, part passion, part habit. After the surgery, even after I met Michael, I would sneak up to my room before bed or on a Sunday afternoon, warming up quickly before donning pointe shoes and testing pliés and relevées. Each time, my knee had shrieked its disapproval, and my body had stalled, unaccustomed to the physical demands after months away from the barre.

Michael had offered another kind of certainty. If ballet had been my first love, Michael was my second—he wasn’t so much the one as another one, although I’d never said that to him, and it wasn’t the case now, or even after a few months together. But even if he wasn’t exactly eloquent about it—and he wasn’t, back then—he’d never been afraid to tell me that I was the one for him, the one and the only.

September 18, 1983

Tess,

I can’t believe how much I miss you already. Feels like months have gone by since I saw you, instead of just a week and a half. I’ve been busy, too, getting adjusted to life here in Straus. It’s a good dorm—Harvard Square is just outside—and I have a single room, which suits me. It’s not huge, but then, I don’t have to share it.

At the same time, since classes haven’t really started in earnest yet, I don’t have a lot to do but read and think about you. So I’ve been thinking about you a lot—what you’re doing, what school is like your senior year, if your new job is all right, everything. I’m pretty happy to be here (I mean, it’s Harvard. Who wouldn’t be?) but in those empty moments that I’m waiting around, wishing for something to do, I’d really rather be there, with you.

I began writing a short story about this, but I’m not going to share it yet. If ever. It’s still pretty rough, and in some places it keeps turning into a Penthouse letter. Not that I ever read them, you know. Really. Okay, forget I said that. Really, I’m reading poetry. All the time.

When I’m not thinking about you, that is. Have I said how much I miss you? I think I have, but it bears repeating. It’s so infuriating that we met only to be forced apart three months later. I guess it could have been worse (not meeting at all), but when you find something so awesome, you want to keep it next to you. You want to be able to touch it and look at it. Now I’m making you sound like an object, which is not the point at all. (Maybe I’m not cut out to be a writer. Crap.) It’s just, I love you, Tess. You’re the biggest part of my life, even way up here in Cambridge.

Write soon. I love you. And also? I love you.

Michael

CHAPTER FOUR

LATER THE SAME DAY NELL AND I toured Willowdale Farm, I was trimming fresh green beans in the kitchen when Michael came home. He pushed open the screen door and leaned down to pet Walter, who greeted him with his usual drool-and-pant doggy grin.

“How’s my girl?” he said, setting his briefcase down and tossing his jacket on the back of a chair.

I could sense him hovering behind me. He usually kissed the back of my neck when he found me this way, whispering kisses that made me smile and wriggle away before the meat burned or the vegetables dissolved into mush.

But we hadn’t talked all day. He’d left two messages, and I’d called back at his office, only to be told he was in an art meeting. The impromptu errand with Nell had helped distract me this morning, but I’d returned to a silent house and work that refused to take my mind off the issue of Drew Keating. By three, I’d given up and settled on the sofa with a bag of chips, flipping the channels through bad made-for-TV movies and home-design shows until I was drowsy and more than a little numb.

“Just waiting to hear about your conversation with Drew.” I didn’t turn around, and instead thwacked the ends off a dozen more green beans a bit more violently than necessary.

Michael lifted the lid of the saucepan on the stovetop, where chicken breasts were simmering in wine and garlic. The kitchen smelled delicious. I was paying for the junk food, and probably my attitude, with a decent meal.

“We talked,” he said finally, and I heard the scrape of chair legs against the floor as he sat down. “Can I talk to you now? Face-to-face?”

I set down the knife and took a deep breath before turning, and what I saw in his eyes evaporated the bitterness and resentment I’d been working into a team all afternoon. He was exhausted, and worried, and at the moment I was pretty sure he was more worried about me than about his brand-new son.

“I’m sorry.” I dropped to my knees in front of him, taking his hands in mine. “I’m being awful. Tell me what happened.”

He pulled me onto his lap, his thighs lean and bony beneath my legs, and I laid my head on his shoulder, breathing in his scent and his warmth as he talked. Eyes closed, Michael’s arms around me, I let the comfort of his closeness soothe the rough edges of my mood. Walter joined us, pressing his firm little body against my leg and nosing Michael’s hand for petting.

“He sounds like a good kid. Kid. I guess he’s more than a kid now, but it’s hard to get my head around it. And he was nervous, too, which was even weirder, because he…Well, he sounds a little like me when I’m rambling.”

I swallowed hard, holding Michael tighter, not daring to look into his eyes.

“And he wants to meet me. Well, us. All of us.” It was Michael’s turn to swallow, choking back sudden emotion. “He was kind of emphatic about that part, and he kept apologizing for whatever waves this was causing.”

“But did he say why?” I asked, finally getting up to walk back to the stove. The lid on the chicken pan was rattling, and I needed to turn down the heat. “I mean, why he’s getting in touch now?”

“He said there was a reason.” Michael loosened his tie and then slid it free of his collar. “He’d rather tell me—us—in person, though.”

I was moving the chicken breasts around in the pan to keep them from sticking, but my mind had already jumped ahead to the moment I would look this young man in the eye. The idea was overwhelming, and a host of other thoughts accompanied it. What if Sophia joined him? How was Emma going to react? How could we be sure that Drew was in fact Michael’s son?

“Tess?”

I must have frozen—I looked down to find the wooden spoon motionless and the pan lid in my other hand, suspended over the counter, dripping condensation.

“I’m sorry.” I finished with the chicken and wiped my hands on a kitchen towel. “It just struck me that…well, how do we know Drew is your son, biologically?”

Michael’s frown deepened, a worried slash above eyes gone still. “We don’t, not officially. But I don’t doubt it, Tess. And I can’t ask him to prove it, at least not until I’ve met him.”

Outside, a squirrel bounded through the yard, and Walter, parked at the screen door, barked his disapproval. I hushed him and turned back to the green beans, still piled on the cutting board.

“You’re right. It’s just that it’s so unbelievable,” I said, running water in another pot. “But too believable at the same time. Do you know what I mean?”

He was silent for a moment too long, and when he spoke, his voice was tight. “You mean it’s too easy to believe that I slept with Sophia?”

I actually whirled around, for possibly the first time in my life, and water splashed over the rim of the pot, splattering my shirt. “No! No, that’s not what I meant at all. It’s just that this kind of thing does happen. You see it on TV and in the movies and on the news, but when it happens to you…I think you’d be the first to admit it’s a little surreal.”

He nodded, and then he was up and out of his chair, dabbing at my shirt with a tea towel, taking the pot from my hand and turning off the tap. His arms were encircling me, hard, his face in my hair, before I could say a word about Sophia’s call to me that morning.

Then Walter woofed at someone in greeting, and the screen door opened as Emma swung through it. Her backpack hit the table with a thud. “God, get a room, huh?”

She was leaning into the fridge a moment later, grabbing a can of diet soda before slouching against the counter. Michael and I separated with a sigh, and as Emma popped open the can, he kissed her forehead. She grunted “Daddy” in a tone of outraged humiliation, but he just shook his head and laughed.

“How was school?” I asked absently, adjusting the heat beneath the beans. I glanced at the clock on the microwave. “Did you have yearbook after?”

“Nope,” she said, hoisting herself up onto the counter, her sneakered feet swinging. “That’s tomorrow. I was doing costumes for the play.” She had inherited my mother’s love of fashion, and her facility with a sewing machine.

“What are they mangling this year?” Michael stepped back as Emma aimed a light kick at him.

“They’re doing Bye Bye Birdie, and they’re not mangling it at all,” she protested. “Or not much, anyway.”

The hair clip she’d been wearing this morning was gone, and the thick blond mass of her hair rested on her shoulders as she leaned forward. Her cheeks were flushed, and the tentative coat of mascara she’d been applying most mornings was long gone. She looked like my little girl again, and very much like Nell, I realized.

Would Drew look like Michael?

“What’s for dinner?” Emma said suddenly, interrupting my thoughts. “You two are probably hungry if you hung around here macking on each other all day.”

Michael snorted, but I hid my reaction by checking on the couscous steaming in another pot.

Once upon a time, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Didn’t all relationships begin that way, curiosity and infatuation making desire more potent, more immediate? After the first time that summer, we’d made love everywhere and anywhere we could, as often as we could, tangled together on the smelly old mattress up in my attic when everyone was asleep, reveling in the afternoon sun that streamed across Michael’s bed when his mother and sister were out. Everything was still new, still a discovery, every sigh or twitch of surprise a victory and a treasure.

Of course, twenty years down the road, we felt that particular urgency less often, and sex was sometimes more comfort and communication than passion. But it was still one of the threads that held us together—I’d treated that bond too lightly all those years ago. And the incredible news of a child of Michael’s wasn’t the only thing rattling me. It was wondering if Michael had believed then, or believed now, that I didn’t love him as completely as I knew I did.

AS I FINISHED MAKING DINNER, I thought back to those years so long ago when Michael and I were moving beyond the exhilarating newness of our relationship and into something solid, even with several states between us.

Surprising everyone, myself included, I’d applied to New York University during my senior year and been accepted. As a student whose grades had always been an afterthought compared with my form in pirouette, I’d managed to raise all my marks during the first half of my senior year—mostly because I had little to do but study, write letters to Michael and lie on my bed, moping and missing him. I’d given up the movie-theater job because the assistant manager was creepier than I could handle, especially when it was just the two of us behind the greasy concession counter on slow weeknights, and had taken a job at a bookstore downtown, instead. The owner was a wry, gentle man in his midfifties, and I was given just enough shifts to keep me busy a few afternoons a week and make some spending money.

Until Michael came home for the summer, nothing truly distracted me from the misery of being without him. When I moved into my Tenth Street dorm at NYU that September, though, it took a mere few minutes before I realized that this year distraction wasn’t going to be a problem.

The dorm was a converted hotel, and the rooms on my floor were former suites, with two generous bedrooms, a bath and several enormous closets. As dorm rooms went, it wasn’t the standard concrete-tiled cell I’d imagined, but I had four roommates. Living with four other girls was a shock of tempers, shower schedules, borrowed clothes and spontaneous bitch sessions about everything from boys to classes to the comparative number of calories in Famous Ray’s pizza versus Sbarro’s.

After a weeklong bout of what had to be estrogen shock, I loved it.

And I loved my classes, too, or at least most of them. The Psych 101 lecture at 8:00 a.m. wasn’t my favorite thing, but my other classes were just challenging enough to keep me interested, and life in the Village was exhilarating. Everywhere I went there were cafés, bars, vintage shops, newsstands, record stores and people. After years of trudging only into Penn Station and then uptown to Lincoln Center for ballet lessons, I found the Village young, alive and more like a small town than I could have imagined. I hadn’t stopped missing Michael, who was back at Harvard for his sophomore year, but the constant sharp pain I’d felt the year before had dulled to a low-level twinge. We wrote letters once or twice a week, although he was more consistent about getting to the mailbox than I was, and we managed to sneak in phone calls once in a while, too.

The sense of freedom was so delicious it seemed I could actually taste it with every breath of crisp autumn air. My sophomore roommates, Sydney and Marissa, were more than happy to show me around the neighborhood with fellow freshman Jane, from Connecticut, and Carter, a Southerner who constantly needed reminding to close her mouth and stop staring when we were out in the city between classes and on weekends. Manhattan wasn’t unfamiliar to me, but I’d never before had the chance to make my own mark on it, staking out my favorite coffee shop, the secondhand store that sold the best faded jeans, a diner that served breakfast twenty-four hours a day and made killer scrambled eggs for just a dollar fifty.

Sharing my experiences with Michael wasn’t easy, at least not in letters. He was the writer, not me, and his lazy, detailed descriptions of his Cambridge neighborhood were like something out of a travel guide. So the notion of him visiting didn’t take long to be born—unlike last year, when my parents had looked at me with a combination of horror and amusement at the suggestion I take the train up to stay with Michael one fall weekend, this year we were both free to come and go as we pleased.

“Y’all do know Thanksgiving is just around the corner, right?” Carter had drawled when I broached the subject of Michael’s impending visit.

“So they can’t wait,” Jane argued, folding laundry she’d brought up from the dorm’s basement. “It’s romantic. Which is more than I can say for me at the moment.” She’d had a fling with a junior philosophy student she’d met in the dining hall, which had ended in tears and avowals that Kant had ruined her attempt at a sex life.

In the end, Jane and Carter were both a bit awed that I had a sex life, and Marissa and Sydney agreed to let them bunk in their room when Michael arrived. The countdown began at that moment, after an excited and expensive call to Cambridge, and I spent the next week alternately pacing the confines of my room, daydreaming about what we would do while he was in the city, and feverishly trying to get ahead on my class readings so I could enjoy the weekend without guilt.

I met him at Penn Station on a Friday afternoon, hovering at the Amtrak arrival gate, dressed in my favorite jeans and a new sweater, a scarf looped around my neck that I knotted and unknotted with nervous fingers. When his face appeared on the escalator ascending from the track, blurry with sleep but searching me out with those dark, wide eyes, I nearly yelped with excitement.

The good thing is, when you don’t care who happens to watch you kissing your boyfriend in greeting, you can’t be embarrassed about it. I certainly wasn’t. If anything, it was a little thrilling to give all those gray-suited commuters an eyeful.

That evening is still a blur. There were the introductions to my roommates, a brief walking tour of Washington Square, which was windy and crisp in the fading light and studded with gold light from the main campus buildings bordering the park, and then a noisy, crowded dinner at a local hamburger place.

I was a bit giddy—I can see that now. The excitement and anticipation on top of a grateful rush of love for my roommates, who were being incredibly generous, was heady stuff. I wanted Michael to be part of everything in my life at NYU, and even then I knew that I didn’t sound quite like myself. I was babbling, laughing too loud, my cheeks hot and my pulse racing. But part of that was due to a mounting sense of panic.

Michael was friendly with the girls, and he was as affable as ever about the evening’s plans, but something was wrong. Aside from those initial kisses, some connection between us had shorted out—for the first time ever, being with him felt awkward. The physical space between us seemed bigger, colder, devoid of our usual silent language of expressions and glances.

He was quieter than usual, withdrawn in a way only I would notice, despite his nodded replies to my friends. That dark head was set low, hunched into his shoulders, and his eyes were somehow too bright—they looked nearly as panicked as I felt, I realized as I stared at him across the table while we divvied up the bill for dinner and Marissa and Jane figured the tip.

The others were heading to see An Officer and a Gentleman over on Sixth Avenue, so Michael and I waved them off at the corner of West Fourth and turned toward the dorm. He took my hand as we walked, and I held on, grateful for its warmth in the chilly night air. Upstairs, my room was quiet and dark, the only sound a gentle shush from the filter of Jane’s small fish tank, the only light its fluid blue glow.

I reached for my desk lamp, but Michael stopped me. “Don’t,” he said, reaching for my hand and spinning me so he could shrug off my coat. His worn denim jacket dropped to the floor next, and then we were on my bed, a fumbling, tentative meeting of mouths and hands.

But minutes later, skin to skin, hearts beating in time, everything shifted. Our bodies remembered each other without hesitation, and in those hours that seemed to stretch out endlessly till morning, we were able to find our way back to each other, somehow communicating everything we hadn’t yet been able to say. Sometime long after midnight, we found the words, too: I wanted him to like my new life; he was ashamed to admit that he was slightly jealous of it; we still missed each other; college would be difficult when it meant spending so long apart.

There was more, silly things that no one but us would understand—I called him Hemingway sometimes, and he liked to hum “Tiny Dancer” in my ear to make me giggle—and then the conversation melted into kisses again. With Michael around me and above me and inside me, everything melted away—school, my friends, the world, all gone, subsumed by a rush of sensation and emotion. Michael snored as I lay there afterward, blasted, wrung dry, yet grateful that I could spend the night with him in arm’s reach. It was foolish, and it certainly proved how young I was, but in those moments before I drifted off to sleep, I believed that nothing would ever truly be wrong between us that couldn’t be solved by a night in bed.

WE DIDN’T SHARE THE NEWS about Drew at dinner, by tacit agreement. Emma was in one of those rare effusive moods that seemed to come too seldom in fifteen-year-old girls, chattering about the play and her friend Simon’s run-in with their French teacher, and neither Michael nor I had the heart to shatter the atmosphere. She set herself up in the dining room later, books spread across the table and iPod humming in her ears, while Michael and I settled in front of the TV.

There was nothing in particular to watch, but neither of us minded. I flipped channels aimlessly, landing here or there for a few minutes, but what we were both enjoying was our physical proximity. We were curled into one end of the sofa, his arm around me, my head nestled into his shoulder, our hipbones knocking together when either of us shifted. The window over the sofa was open, and the soft night air carried the fragrance of fresh-cut grass and wisteria. For the first time that day, I was content, or nearly so.

We cleaned up the kitchen when Emma took herself off to bed, blowing kisses over the banister and reminding me she needed lunch money for tomorrow. When the dishwasher rumbled to life and Michael had shut off the lights, we went upstairs together, but we didn’t go right to sleep. I slipped into bed after cracking the window to let the breeze wash through the room, and when Michael joined me, I reached for him. I was naked under the sheet, and he fit himself against me, his hard, lean length so familiar, so beloved. I let my body speak to him again that night, and he answered me, every touch tender, reassuring and full of love. It’s all right, his body said. I love you. I won’t hurt you. We’re together here, and forever. What I couldn’t hear was how he felt about having a son. The boy we’d never had. Someone he could talk baseball and beer with, another male in the small circle of our family, where Emma and I had him outnumbered. What I wouldn’t know, unless I asked him, was if he was actually happy about this news.

I fell asleep holding his hand, staring at the pale, fat moon through the maple outside the window, hoping that he had heard I love you and We’re together when I touched him, too.

CHAPTER FIVE

I PICKED EMMA UP AFTER SCHOOL on Friday, another watercolor of a day, soft and bright, made for picture postcards. Jesse Perry had asked her to the prom, much to Emma’s relief, after weeks of phone calls and a few after-school “dates” downtown at Starbucks. He was a junior, with the hugest brown eyes I’d ever seen, the one time I’d met him, picking up bagels downtown with Emma, and he had a distinct bad-boy air despite his honor-roll status. I wasn’t happy that an older boy liked my daughter, but I didn’t have any real reason to deny her the thrill of her first big dance, either. We were dress-shopping today, and I was looking forward to it.

I’d finally shared Sophia’s phone call with Michael, but we still hadn’t told Emma about Drew. Between the prom and the play and the approaching end of the school year, she’d been incredibly easygoing, and neither one of us could bear to share the news with her. Not yet, anyway.

“She might not be as flipped out as you think,” Michael had argued over steaming mugs of tea at the kitchen table the night before. “We weren’t married then. Kids are a lot more sophisticated these days, for better or worse.”

“Kids are a lot more sophisticated about cell phones and fashion and movie sex,” I said wearily. “Real-life stuff is a little different. There’s a lot of child left in her, Michael. She still won’t let me give away her Barbies.”

She had to know, of course. And we were going to tell her, this weekend probably, when we were all at home together, with time to talk. Michael had spoken to Drew again yesterday, and we’d agreed that we would drive up to Cambridge over the Memorial Day weekend to meet him. I hadn’t really faced the fact that the trip was only two weeks away—denial was so easy to slip into, a comfortable old coat I donned every day now. If I pretended that we had all the time in the world to tell Emma, I could almost make myself believe it.

I’d pulled the Jeep up to the curb in front of the school, under an ancient elm that dappled the hood with shadows in the afternoon sunlight. I had the radio on louder than usual, a Springsteen song from my own high-school years, and I felt pretty good—I’d forced myself through yoga that morning, which I’d let slip all week, and I’d finished sorting photos for another chapter in my book. The laundry had piled up again, but I had decided not to care about that. Dirty clothes were the least of my problems this week, and the afternoon was too lovely to spoil with regret—of any kind.

Emma banged through the front doors of the school with a gang of other girls, a rainbow of pastel shirts and short skirts, faded denim and backpacks adorned with key chains and cell phones. I didn’t wave—I knew better. But she smiled when she climbed into the car beside me and slammed the door shut. “Let’s shop,” she said.

I shifted the Jeep into gear. “That’s the plan.”

We decided to start at Lord & Taylor, which would have the widest selection, if not the best prices. Guilt lay at the bottom of that decision, and I wasn’t going to try to deny it. Finding out that she had a half brother, that her dad had actually slept with someone other than her mom once upon a time, when she’d long believed in the fairy-tale, childhood-sweethearts version of our life together, was going to be horror enough that it was comforting to pretend I could buy her understanding with an expensive dress.

We clashed from the start, which shocked me. Emma had her moods, like any red-blooded American fifteen-year-old, but we got along ninety percent of the time. She still liked good-night kisses and the occasional lazy Saturday-morning cuddle, for God’s sake, so I didn’t expect a battle over something that was meant to be a pleasure. While I was fingering lovely, sleek little dresses that she proclaimed “boring” and “way momlike,” everything she chose was either too short or was so obnoxiously glittery most Atlantic City showgirls would have protested.

“It’s a prom, not a cabaret act,” I snapped, hanging up the latest offending dress as the first sharp fingers of a headache gripped the back of my skull.

“God, Mom.” Emma rolled her eyes and walked toward another rack, declaring over her shoulder, “It’s, like, the twenty-first century, you know?”

“I know full well what century it is,” I hissed, hating the sound of my voice. Where had it come from? My mother had never raised her voice, never lost her cool—she had an amazing ability to disengage whenever any of us were acting up. She’d simply pull back, eye us coolly and wait until we realized that she wasn’t going to put up with whatever it was we had done or said.

I took a deep breath and sank into one of the chairs set against a mirrored column. I could be calm. I would be calm. I had to be, about the dress and everything else. We weren’t going to get through the next couple of weeks otherwise.

“Maybe Nana could make me something,” Emma said suddenly, chewing her bottom lip. Her backpack was slung carelessly over one shoulder and her arms were folded across her chest. It sounded like a truce, even if it looked like defiance. My mother wouldn’t make her anything too daring, but Emma would convince her grandmother to design something with a hint of sex to it, even if it was subtle.

“Nana’s pretty busy right now, Em,” I said carefully. “You could ask her this weekend, but I can’t guarantee she’ll be able to make you a dress before the dance.”

“I bet she’ll do it.”

“Well, we’ll find out, I guess.” I stood up and started for the door, Emma following beside me without a word. I didn’t understand her abrupt about-face—at least, not until we got into the car and I was steering out of the parking lot.

“Jesse invited me to a party,” Emma said, fiddling with a tube of lip gloss she’d scrounged out of her bag.

“After the prom, you mean?” I needed to make a left onto North Avenue, which was nearly impossible at that time of day.

“No, Memorial Day.”

Damn it. Those same fingers pinched into my skull. The battle hadn’t been won; the venue had simply changed.

“Emma, I don’t know…”

“It’s at his parents’ house,” she said quickly. She’d rolled down her window, and a rush of air blew her hair back as I saw my opportunity and pulled onto the road.

“I haven’t met his parents, Emma, and I don’t think—”

She cut me off. “They’re really nice, Mom. And Grace is going, too. Her mom said yes.”

There it was, the resentful emphasis on the word her. Other parents understood, that tone said. Other parents were cool.

Of course, other parents were probably not driving two hundred miles that weekend to meet a newly discovered illegitimate son.

“Well, Grace can tell you all about it,” I said in the most even tone I could manage. “But that weekend is a problem.”

“I knew you’d say no. I knew it! I didn’t even have to tell you the party’s at their shore house. I told Grace I wouldn’t get that far.” Arms folded across her chest again, she was seething, her jaw tight with fury and her eyes brimming with tears.

I couldn’t even pretend sympathy at the moment. “At their shore house? The party is at their shore house, and you thought you had a chance to go?”

The tears spilled, bright wet tracks down her cheeks. “Grace is going!”

“Well, I’d love to know if Grace’s mother was told exactly where this party is.” I turned off North onto Dudley with a jerk of the steering wheel.

Silence.

I kept my mouth shut, too. It was the smart move at the moment, with my headache ramping up again, more vicious than before, and my heart still hammering in outrage. A party at the beach, fifty or more miles away, with a boy I’d barely met? She was dreaming. Even if Jesse’s parents were there, which was iffy, it didn’t mean the kids would be supervised down at the beach. And God knows I had a good idea what teenagers could get up to when they were determined.

She was too young still, a child beneath the tentative makeup and the clothes and the newly adopted attitude. She had no idea about boys, older boys, and certainly not about sex…She didn’t, did she? Oh God—my headache, and everything else, was going from bad to worse.

“Why exactly is Memorial Day a problem?” Emma said, startling me out of my thoughts.

I swung the Jeep onto Clark, my teeth clenched. What was I supposed to tell her?

“Mom?” Resentful, demanding.

“We’ll discuss it when your father comes home,” I said, turning down our street and into the driveway.

She huffed “Whatever” and slammed out of the car, leaving me leaning against the steering wheel, my heart still hammering, the afternoon sun hot on the knuckles that gripped the wheel. Through the screen door she’d left open, I heard a door bang shut, then Walter’s confused whine.

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