Keeper of the Light

at them again. “You’re thirty-seven years old and the surgery only gave you a twenty percent chance of conceiving. Not very good odds.”

Olivia leaned closer to him to avoid being overheard. “I’m more convinced than you are that I could conceive. If I don’t, we could adopt. We’ve talked this out before. It’s nothing new.”

“Things have changed since the last time we talked about a family.”

The waitress delivered their entrees, and Olivia watched the muscles in the side of Paul’s jaw contract as he waited out the intrusion.

“You don’t understand,” he said, once the waitress had left. “I have to get out of here, Olivia, that’s all there is to it. Whether it’s with you or without you, I have to leave. I drove down here today feeling good and optimistic about us and looking forward to seeing you, but as soon as I crossed the bridge into Kitty Hawk, this black cloud dropped over my head. My mood got worse and worse as I drove down the island, and by the time I got to my house and out of the car…” He shook his head. “It’s like she’s still here, more powerful than she ever was when she was alive.”

Olivia felt her patience slipping. “What do you expect? Your house is full of reminders of her. Maybe if you got rid of…all the icons, all the tangible evidence that you ever knew her, you’d start to forget about her.”

He looked, briefly, angry, and she suddenly realized she could not just forgive him and go on. She was filled with her own anger.

“There’s nothing I want more than for us to get back together,” she said, “but I refuse to live in Annie’s shadow again.”

“Then we have to leave here.”

“I’m not going to leave a place I’ve come to love until I see real evidence that you’re over her. Throw out the stained glass. Break it into pieces.”

He started visibly.

“Oh, Paul.” She crumpled her napkin and set it next to her plate. “You’re not ready, are you?”

“Not to destroy the stained glass, no.” He looked exhausted, his eyes red and half-closed behind his glasses. She thought of Annie as a succubus, coming in the night to drain the life out of him. Perhaps Annie was more Paul’s nemesis than she was hers.

He drove her back to her car in the emergency room parking lot after dinner. She was glad he was not driving her home, where she would have felt the need to invite him in, where the night before she had worked on the crib until she was giddy. He walked her to her car, holding her hand. He kissed her lightly on the lips, and she turned abruptly to unlock the door of the Volvo. She would give him no chance to touch her, no chance to discover her secret.

She arrived home to find a message on her answering machine from Clark Chapman, the medical director of Emerson Memorial. She frowned as she listened to his deep, resonant voice.

“Please give me a call when you get in tonight,” he said. He left a number and told her he would be up until eleven. It was not quite ten now.

She dialed his number, curious.

“Dr. Simon!” He sounded delighted to hear from her, as if they were old friends. “How are you?”

She hesitated, wondering if perhaps she had met him somewhere and had forgotten. “I’m fine, thank you,” she said.

“You’re wondering why I’m calling, right?”

“Well, yes.”

“I’d rather have this conversation in person, of course, but I didn’t want to put it off that long. I’ve been following your story, Dr. Simon. It was more than idle curiosity on my part, of course, since your patient—Mrs. O’Neill—would have ended up in our trauma center had you opted to transport her.”

“Yes.”

“And you and I both know she would have come to us DOA.”

Gratitude and relief rushed through her, and her eyes threatened to fill. She cried too easily these days. “You and I seem to be the only people who are certain of that,” she said.

“I’ve spoken to some colleagues of mine at Washington General,” Clark Chapman continued. “People who can attest to your clinical skill and sound judgment. You made the far more difficult choice with Mrs. O’Neill, didn’t you? You demonstrated initiative and courage, at considerable personal risk.” There was a smile in his voice. “Are you wondering what I’m leading up to?”

“Yes.”

“I’m offering you a job. You’d be co-director of our trauma team. It’s a great group of people. They already think you’re a bit of a hero.”

It was perfect. One of those weird serendipitous occurrences that suddenly made everything fall into place. She and Paul could be together in a new location, without the rush of Washington, yet without reminders of Annie for either of them. Still, aside from feeling vindicated by Clark Chapman’s words, she felt no enthusiasm.

“I’m very flattered,” she said, “but I’m not sure I’m ready to leave the Outer Banks. I don’t want to simply run away from my problems here.” It was not exactly the truth, but Clark Chapman seemed to accept it.

“It’s an open invitation,” he said. “Come visit us.” He gave her his work number, and she jotted it down in her appointment book. “The position would be created for you,” he added. “It doesn’t exist right now, but we’ve got a few extra bucks for that department, so it’s yours whenever you say the word.”

She hung up the phone, feeling strangely flat. Wary. She couldn’t allow herself to hope, couldn’t give herself over to a new dream of the future when she didn’t yet trust her husband to be a committed, contented part of it.