She raised her head, but lowered it to his shoulder again, moaning, and he hugged her tighter. He was cold and wet and running the risk of Lacey getting sick down the front of his jacket, yet he had not felt this completely content in a very long time.
Lacey staggered to the car when they reached the inlet, while he carried the cooler of fish. He set it in the back of the Bronco and climbed into the driver’s seat. He looked over at his daughter. “Still a little green around the gills,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Mmm.” She leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes.
She was quiet during the drive home. She did not even bother with the headset, and the radio rested silently in her lap.
Once in the house, Alec set the cooler on the kitchen table and took a good look at his daughter as she pulled off her soppy windbreaker. Her face was white, the skin around her eyes puffy. “I guess fishing wasn’t the best idea,” he said.
She set her crumpled jacket on one of the chairs and opened the top of the cooler. “Well,” she said, lifting out the smallest bluefish, “Noler will be happy.”
He smiled. “I’ll take care of the fish, Annie. You go on up to…”
Lacey spun around to face him. “I am
“I’m sorry, Lace,” he said.
“You make me sick!” She turned on her heel and stalked out of the room, her red hair flashing in the kitchen light.
She was already gone by the time he got up in the morning, and the house felt empty. He carried the fish over to Nola’s. She was out, but the house was unlocked and he put the fish in her refrigerator and left a note on the kitchen table.
He was putting together some information on the lighthouse for Olivia when Lacey came home that afternoon. He heard the back door slam shut and the thumping of her footsteps on the stairs as she ran up to her room. He’d been rehearsing what he would say to her all afternoon, what Olivia had coached him to say during their phone call the night before: He’d enjoyed her company last night, he would tell her. Please don’t let his one mistake ruin it.
The door to Lacey’s room was open, and at first he thought there was a stranger in the room—a young girl with jet black hair, sorting through the top drawer of Lacey’s dresser.
“Lacey?”
She turned around to face him and he gasped. She had dyed her hair and cut it short, nearly to her scalp. In some places it looked practically shaved, the whiteness of her scalp clearly visible against the stark blackness of her hair.
“What did you to do yourself?” he asked.
She put her hands on her hips and narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t look a thing like her now, do I?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“She cut off her hair and dyed it black,” Alec said.
Olivia rolled onto her side, moving Sylvie out of her way. She knew when the phone rang at ten-thirty each night who it was, and she was sure to be in bed by then. He was the one who said it first—that he liked talking to her from his bed, that his bed was the loneliest place in his house since Annie died. Yes, she agreed, she knew exactly what he meant. She felt close to him, talking to him in the darkness. His lights were off as well; she had asked him that the first night. She’d stopped short of asking him what he slept in, not certain she wanted to know.
“She’s tired of existing in Annie’s shadow,” Olivia said. She understood all too well how Lacey felt.
“It makes her look cheap,” Alec said. “I keep thinking of those men on the boat. She was enjoying their attention a little too much. She told me her best friend is having sex. Maybe she’s not as naive as I’d like to think. Annie was only fifteen her first time.”
Olivia frowned. “Fifteen?”
“Yes, but there were extenuating circumstances.”
“Like what?”
Alec sighed. “Well, she was raised with a lot of money but not much love,” he said. “I guess she tried to find it the only way she knew how. She was pretty promiscuous as a teenager—she loathed that word, but I don’t know what else you’d call it.”
Olivia said nothing. She wondered if Annie had still been looking for love the night she slept with Paul.
“So how old were you?” Alec asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
He laughed. “I guess that was pretty blunt. You sounded so appalled when I said Annie was fifteen, it made me wonder about you. You don’t have to answer.”
Olivia wrapped the telephone cord around her fingers. “I was fourteen the first time,” she said, “and twenty- seven the second.”
It was a few seconds before Alec spoke again. “I’ve opened a can of worms.”
“Well, I don’t talk about this much.”
“And you don’t have to now if you don’t want to.”
She rolled onto her back again and closed her eyes. “I was raped when I was fourteen by an older boy in my neighborhood.”
