Page 91 of Dream Lake

“You’re lying,” she choked, but her sobs quieted.

Yes, he was lying. The idea of marriage, a baby, made him die inside. Marriage would be a prison. But he loved Emma too much to hurt her with the truth. And he’d known the risks of having an affair with her. A nice girl, from a fine family, facing ruin because she loved him. If it killed him, he wouldn’t let her down. “I want to,” he repeated.

“I—I’ll talk to my parents.”

“No, I’ll talk to them. I’ll take care of everything. You just calm down. It’s not good for you to get upset.”

But Emma was shaking with relief, holding him tightly, struggling to get even closer. “Tom. I love you. I’ll be a good wife. You won’t be sorry, I swear it.”

The memory faded, and the ghost was left with feelings of shame and dread. For God’s sake, what had been wrong with him? Why had he been so afraid of the thing he had wanted most? He’d been an idiot. If only he’d had it to do over again, everything would be different. What had happened to the baby? And why had Emma lied when she’d told Alex that she and Tom had never talked about getting married? Why hadn’t the wedding ceremony taken place?

He looked at Emma’s still face. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I never meant to hurt you. You’re all I ever wanted. All I ever loved. Help me find a way back to you.”

Twenty-one

Since a relationship with a Nolan had a limited shelf life, Alex was not surprised when Sam and Lucy broke up in mid-August. He was sympathetic, however. For the past couple of months, Sam had been happier than Alex had ever seen him. Clearly Lucy had meant a lot to him. But Lucy had been offered some kind of art grant that would require her to move to New York for a year. She was going to take it. And Sam, being Sam, wasn’t about to interfere with that or ask her to stay for the sake of a relationship that was headed nowhere.

Since Alex had been doing some work on an upstairs staircase at Rainshadow Road, he happened to be there on the day that Lucy came to break up with Sam. While Alex pounded shims into the treads and risers of the stairs, the ghost went to check out what was happening.

“Lucy just broke up with Sam,” the ghost reported about ten minutes later.

Alex paused in his hammering. “Just now?”

“Yeah. Clean and simple. She told him she had to move to New York, and he didn’t try and stop her. I think it’s hit him hard. Why don’t you go downstairs and talk to him?”

Alex gave a snort. “About what?”

“Ask him if he’s okay. Tell him there are other fish in the sea.”

“He doesn’t need me to tell him that.”

“He’s your brother. Show a little concern, why don’t you? And while you’re at it, you might want to mention that you have to move in with him.”

Alex scowled. Darcy had recently e-mailed him that she was filing for a temporary order from family court to kick him out of their house. Her house.

Moving in with Sam would be cheaper than renting an apartment, and in lieu of paying rent, Alex could continue the restoration work at Rainshadow Road. God knew why Alex felt so compelled to work on the place. It wasn’t even his. But he couldn’t deny his attachment to it.

It had been three weeks since he had started having sex with Zoë—the best three weeks of his life, and also the worst. He rationed out his time with her, when he wanted to see her every minute of the day. He invented excuses to call her, just to listen to her talk about a new recipe or explain the differences between Tahitian, Mexican, or Madagascar vanilla. He found himself smiling at odd times during the day, thinking of something she had said or done, and that was so unlike him that he knew he was in serious trouble.

He wished he could blame Zoë for being demanding, but she knew when to push and when to back off. She managed Alex more adeptly than anyone else ever had, and even though he knew he was being managed, he couldn’t bring himself to object. Like the night he’d told her he couldn’t stay, she’d made a pot roast that had filled the entire cottage with a dark succulent fragrance, and so of course he had relented long enough to have dinner, and after that he’d found himself in bed with her. Because pot roast, as she must have known, was an aphrodisiac to any man from the Pacific Northwest.

He tried to limit the number of nights he spent with her, but it wasn’t easy. He wanted her all the time, in every way. The sex was amazing, but even more astonishing was how much he wanted Zoë for other reasons. The things that had once annoyed him—the perkiness, the stubborn optimism—had somehow become his favorite things about her. She constantly sent out cheerful thoughts like party balloons that he couldn’t bring himself to pop.

The one thing Zoë couldn’t delude herself about was Emma’s condition, which was going downhill. Recently the home-care nurse, Jeannie, had given her some cognitive tests: word repetition, and drawing clock faces on pieces of paper, and simple coin-counting games. Emma scored significantly lower on the same tests she had taken a month earlier. More distressing was that Emma had lost the awareness of hunger, as well as what constituted a balanced meal. Had Jeannie and Zoë not been there to remind her, she might have gone days without eating, or gotten herself something like corn chips and yellow mustard for breakfast.

It worried Zoë to realize that her grandmother, always so impeccably groomed, no longer seemed to notice or care if her hair had been brushed or her nails had been filed. Justine came at least twice a week to take Emma to the salon or to the movie theater. Alex sometimes kept Emma occupied after dinner while Zoë cleaned the kitchen or took a bath. He played cards with Emma, grinning at her flagrant cheating, and he had even put on music and danced with her while she criticized his foxtrot technique.

“Your foot-turn is too late,” Emma complained. “You’re going to trip me. Where did you learn to dance?”

“I took lessons at a place in Seattle,” Alex said as they crossed the room to the melody of “As Time Goes By.”

“You should get your money back.”

“They worked miracles,” he told her. “Before the lessons, the way I danced looked like a pantomime of washing my car.”

“How long did you go?” Emma asked dubiously.

“It was an emergency weekend crash course. My fiancée wanted me to be able to dance at our wedding.”

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