vacationing with her family. Apparently, there’d been some controversy over the way the police had dealt with her disappearance, and that’s where Anna came in. I found her in the very last sentence.
This couldn’t be our Anna, but I checked Google for her name, anyway. The name Anna Knightly was more common that I could have guessed. Anna Knightlys were breeding dogs, blogging about counted cross-stitch and teaching school. I added the word
I sat back in my chair, an icy sweat breaking out all over my body. I didn’t really believe Noelle’s half-written letter until that moment. I couldn’t picture her stealing a pack of gum, much less an infant. I couldn’t imagine her living a life of lies. Yet here it was. Here was the proof.
Now, what was I supposed to do with it?
23
Noelle
“Hey, Galloway Girls,” Sam said from the back door of the little oceanfront cottage, “here’s my contribution to dinner tonight.”
Flanked by Emerson and Tara, Noelle walked across the musty-smelling living room and peered into the bucket Sam was holding. Four sad-looking, silver-scaled fish lay one on top of the other in the bottom of the bucket.
“Wow, excellent!” Tara said.
“What are they?” Emerson asked.
“Fish.” Sam grinned proudly.
Emerson swatted his arm. “I meant what kind.”
“Who cares.” He laughed. The four of them had been at the beach for two days and his skin was already a rich caramel, his eyes the color of the sky behind his head.
Noelle could see that at least one of the fish was still alive and laboring to breathe. She shuddered and raised her eyes from the bucket to Sam’s face.
“You’re a brute, Sam,” she said.
Sam looked in the bucket himself. “I don’t think they suffered too much,” he said, but now he actually looked a little worried and that touched her. Sam was a softie.
He leaned over to peck Tara on the cheek. “I’ll clean them out here,” he said. “I just wanted to show them off first.”
The oceanfront house on Wrightsville Beach was small and funky and perfect. Tara and Sam had the largest bedroom, while Emerson had the nicest of the smaller ones. She’d suggested that she and Noelle draw straws for it, but Noelle told her to take it. She would do anything for Emerson. She said it didn’t matter which room she had and that was the truth. She was happy just to be at the beach with friends she’d come to love over the past ten months. She would never have the tight, freshman roommate bond that existed between Tara and Emerson, since she was three years older and had spent the year as their RA, but both of the younger women had become the closest friends she’d ever had. Early on, she’d worried that they’d think she was insinuating herself into their lives, but she gradually felt their genuine affection for her. They accepted her, quirks and all, the way few people had.
In some ways, though, she was even closer to Sam.
It turned out he’d been a teaching assistant in her Medicine and the Law course early in the semester and she discovered he was far more than just a pretty face. While her professor focused on how medical personnel could protect themselves from lawsuits, Sam seemed more concerned about the patients and Noelle loved that about him. He became a part of her world both in the classroom and out. They’d fallen into a pattern of meeting at the restaurant in the student union during their break after class, and she’d tell him about patients she was working with in her clinicals and he was always fascinated. Always concerned. She’d thought of lawyers as calculating hustlers who twisted the truth to suit their clients’ needs, but Sam would never be that sort of lawyer. She hoped law school wouldn’t jade him. He’d be going in the fall and she warned him at least once a week to hang on to his values the way she’d hung on to hers during nursing school.
Their conversations in the student union would occasionally stray from the professional to the personal, and she’d share with him things she usually kept to herself. Her father’s desertion. Her mother’s midwifery. She’d point out the handful of men she’d slept with, as well as the men who wanted her whom she’d turned away, disinterested.
“You like the kooks,” he said to her.
“What do you mean?”
“The guys you’ve slept with.” He nodded toward one of them who was sitting at a nearby table, hunched over a book, his waist-long braid over his shoulder. “They’re outside the norm.”
They were. So was Sam, in his own way, and if he had not already been taken she would have hoped for something more with him. She knew he was attracted to her, yet his commitment to Tara was as strong as if they’d been promised to each other at birth.
Things would be so different in the fall, and that’s what made this summer and her time with her friends so precious. In the fall, Sam would be in law school at Wake Forest and she’d be heading to midwifery school in Greenville. While she was excited about getting closer to her goal, she felt a profound sadness at the thought of being apart from Emerson, Tara and Sam.
Especially, of course, Emerson.
Although her mother knew she’d befriended Emerson, she thought Noelle had made a sort of peace with the whole situation and could leave it alone. She would leave it alone, yes. She had no desire to hurt anyone. But
