In a Perfect World

cowboy hat on the desk. The bed was unmade, and the sheets had pirates on them—skulls and crossbones and tall-masted ships. There was a photo of Sam himself on the nightstand. From Halloween? His curly strawberry- blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a patch over one eye.

Camilla’s room was spotless. Just a row of slim hardcover books on a white shelf. A round green rug on the floor. The clover-covered bedspread was pulled up carefully over the pillows. A dustless desk with a stapler, a laptop, a small bowl of thumbtacks, and a few pencils lined up.

Sara’s room, on the other hand, was the typical adolescent disaster. Clothes tumbled out of the closet and onto the floor. There was a half-full bottle of Diet Coke open on the nightstand. Books and notebooks were scattered across the desk. On the wall was an enormous poster of a wild-haired man with a naked torso, holding the neck of an electric guitar with one hand, the other pointed at the camera, middle finger raised. The bedspread was black, as were the silk sheets rumpled on the mattress, which had been pulled off the bed frame and onto the floor.

Jiselle stepped out of the room and back into the hallway quickly, but she wasn’t alarmed. Although she herself had kept a tidy teenage room under her mother’s vigilant administration, she remembered how teenage girls could be. She remembered Ellen’s room. The piles of dirty laundry. The books and magazines scattered across the floor. Having to wade though the debris to get to the bed, where you had to push away more debris to sit down.

She wandered to the kitchen then, where a bowl of red apples sat on the butcher-block countertop. She took one and smelled it before biting into it. Orchards and sunlight in that mouthful of apple. It was crisp. Tart and sweet at the same time. She stood and ate it down to the core in Mark’s kitchen, her bare feet on the ceramic tile, before finding the garbage pail under the sink and dropping it in.

Then she made her way to the living room, where she went first to the bookshelf, studied the titles on the spines lined up neatly:

Aviation Through the Ages. Light Aircraft Navigation Essentials. Memoirs of an African Big- Game Hunter. The Art of Chess. The Sibley Guide to South American Birds. Woodcraft.

They were books that spoke of masculine hobbies—large, heavy books with glossy dust jackets, smelling of their own clean pages—and Jiselle thought with some shame of her own shelves, overstuffed with paperbacks. The broken spines and the pages folded over to mark a place to which she’d never returned. The library books were mixed in with the books she owned, so that she was always searching, and her books were always overdue.

She would, she vowed, clear the shelves when she got back, dispose of those books, return the library books, donate all the others to someone, something (a homeless shelter? an orphanage?) before she moved into this perfect house with Mark. She would let someone less fortunate have them. She would clean up her act, as her mother used to tell her to do.

She was thinking about that—about her fortune, and her worthless books, and her mother—when she turned and saw it hanging above the fireplace:

A framed photograph.

A full-length portrait.

A wedding portrait.

More than anything in that first moment of recognition, Jiselle was startled that it hadn’t been the first thing she’d seen when she walked in the door.

It took up half of an entire wall.

Framed in filigreed silver, it was perfectly centered over the mantel.

In it, Mark looked so much younger that she might not have even recognized him if it hadn’t been for his eyes, deep set and dark, and the playful lift of the eyebrows, an expression she recognized—one he’d make boarding a plane, saying, “Howdy, folks,” to the flight crew before the passengers boarded and one of the flight attendants, always a woman, came up behind him to help him slide out of his coat. His eyebrows would rise in that casual, inverted V, and he’d say, sighing theatrically, “Ah. A good day to die.”

But in this portrait he was only a prop. He was an afterthought. Jiselle stepped closer to look more carefully, although her heart was already beating hard. The center of this large photograph was the bride, of course, wearing a wedding gown, holding a blindingly white piece of cake up to the photographer. She was offering that piece of cake to the future, it seemed, on a wide silver knife. Her strawberry-blond hair cascaded over her shoulders in ringlets. She did not wear a veil but, instead, a ribbon of ivory velvet in her hair, wound through a strand or two, tied in a loose knot. Jiselle put her hand to her mouth.

“Oh, dear,” Mark said, coming up behind her.

He’d startled her, but she didn’t turn around. She couldn’t, transfixed as she was by that first bride’s gaze.

“Oh, Jiselle,” Mark said. “I just keep that up so the children will feel, you know, as if their mother’s here. Of course, now I’ll take it down.”

He took Jiselle’s shoulders in his hands and turned her around to look at him.

He pulled her to him and kissed her then with so much gentle longing that her knees would have buckled beneath her if he hadn’t been holding her so steadily in his arms.

CHAPTER SIX

The spring passed in a blur of anticipation. When Jiselle wasn’t flying, she was busy with preparations—the catering, the flowers, the invitations.

She still hadn’t met the children, but she’d sent the girls opal necklaces to wear with their bridesmaid dresses, and Sam (not for the wedding) a pirate’s three-cornered hat with a red feather. Mark would be bringing her to the house for a week prior to their marriage, and he said, “You can see for yourself then that they’re great kids, and they’ll adore you. But you’ll still have time to back out!”

Until after their honeymoon in Puerto Rico, he would continue to employ the nanny. Afterward, they would “see what the next step should be.”

“If you want to quit, to be home with the children, of course that’s fine. If not—”

If not, Jiselle knew, they would need to find another nanny.

She had not met the present nanny, but when she’d called Mark’s house once, a bright-sounding young woman had answered and called out to Mark in singsong, “The phone’s for you!”

“Where does she sleep?” Jiselle asked.

“When I’m here,” he said, “she sleeps at her apartment in town. When I’m gone, I don’t know. The couch? Why would I care? I hope you’re not jealous. I’m not one of those widowers who’s so desperate he sleeps with his children’s nanny.”

“Of course not!” Jiselle had said.

Who knew better than she that Captain Mark Dorn could have any woman he wanted?

Still, twice in two weeks, Jiselle had tried to make an appointment with her therapist to discuss the issue of quitting her job to take care of Mark’s children. She knew she could afford no fuzzy logic here, with her wedding only weeks away, but when she called Dr. Smitty Smith’s office, she got only his answering machine, on which he’d left a recording saying that his patients should leave a message, which he would return when he was over his illness.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The chapel in which Jiselle had been baptized, the one they’d reserved for the wedding, was damaged by the flooding that started the first week of July, after the long week of relentless rain at the end of June, so Jiselle quickly reserved the small garden behind the restaurant, where the reception was to be held as