“Oh, that’s cool,” she said, interest apparently waning. “But he’s not here today. Neither is his wife. Sorry.”
Damn. “Can you tell them Maddy Fitch stopped by?”
“Yeah, sure,” Cami answered distractedly. “But it’ll have to be after they get back from their trip.”
Trip? They? I thought. As in Sean and Ami were away? Instantly I had the sense that something was amiss.
But just as I was about to question Cami further, the elderly lady with the blue-tinged hair called her over to the sale table. “Honey, I need some help over here picking out a backpack for my grandson.” Cami brushed past, effectively halting my opportunity to dig for more information.
Back behind the wheel of my car, I sat, ignition off, lost in thought. How could Ami be traveling with Sean? She’d been huge; she’d told me her due date was only a month away. That would’ve put the expected delivery at no more than a week from now, give or take. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something vital. Turning the key in the ignition, I made a mental note to ask Adam about Ami once I was back on the island. Surely he’d know something, since she was, after all, one of his employees.
Brody took me back over to Fade Island, and Adam met me, as promised, at the dock.
Never one to miss much, he immediately noticed something was off. “What’s wrong?” he asked as we got into the Porsche. “You look distracted. Did everything go well with your dad?”
“Everything was fine with my dad,” I replied, fastening my seat belt.
I’d eventually get the nerve up to ask Adam if he’d been checking Chelsea’s cell phone records, but at this moment, the strange Ami development took precedence.
So I said, “There is something kind of bothering me.”
Adam turned to me, the car idling, and raised a questioning eyebrow.
“I stopped by Hensley Discounters on my way back. Uh, to ask about the baby—”
“Baby?” Adam interrupted, his tone clearly troubled.
“Yeah, Ami’s baby.”
Adam sighed and raked his fingers through his hair. “Did Ami tell you that she was pregnant?”
“Adam, yes,” I looked at him in disbelief. “I mean, haven’t you seen her lately? It’s kind of obvious.”
“Maddy,” Adam said softly. “There is no baby. Ami is not pregnant.”
My first thought, which I voiced loudly, was “Oh my God, did something happen to the baby?”
Adam placed his hand over mine, and said, “No, nothing happened. There never was a baby.”
“Yes, there was,” I insisted. “I saw her! She was definitely pregnant, Adam.”
“No, Maddy,” Adam said slowly, as if I wasn’t comprehending what he was saying. “Sean and Ami can’t have children.”
That sick feeling was back. “Adam, what’s going on?” I asked, my voice shaking.
Squeezing my hand gently, he said, “I think I’d better tell you about what happened to Ami Dubois-Hensley a few years back.”
Chapter 14
Before delving into the tale of Ami Dubois-Hensley, Adam drove me back to my cottage, where he pulled in behind the Lexus he and Trina had, as promised, picked up earlier from the café. With a turn of the key, the purr of the Porsche’s engine silenced. In the shadows I watched as Adam breathed in deeply and then shifted his tall form so that he was angled toward me. “I should have told you sooner,” he said, sighing. “But I had no idea it had started up again.”
“Adam, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong with Ami?”
In the darkness of the car, lit only by the ambient glow of a half moon, Adam told me Ami’s story. And what a story it was.
Unbeknownst to me, my former best friend had suffered some kind of a mental breakdown four years earlier. Ami had ended up in a mental health facility that autumn. After locking herself in the master bathroom of the house she shared with her husband, she’d attempted to commit suicide by downing a crazy cocktail of prescription pills and booze. Luckily Sean had come home from work early that day and found her lying unconscious on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor.
At the hospital, after her stomach had been pumped, Ami was moved to the psychiatric ward for observation. Following a series of tests, exams, and sessions with a psychiatrist, she was deemed to be a danger to herself but not to others. So she’d been moved to a Harbour Falls mental health facility for further, more intensive treatment.
Searching for a possible catalyst for her breakdown, which appeared to have come out of nowhere, the new psychiatrist treating her began to suspect it stemmed from her inability to have children—a condition which she and Sean had discovered that summer after a year of failed attempts to conceive.
Following two more months of treatment, Ami was finally released and initially appeared to be “cured.” She’d gone back to her house and her loving husband, and even returned to her job at Harbour Falls Realtors.
“I didn’t have the heart to fire her,” Adam explained, “She’d been a model employee, and I saw no reason to let her go. In fact, I hoped if she returned to a normal routine, it might actually help.”
“Did it?” I asked, though by Adam’s pained expression I sensed it hadn’t.
He explained that, at first, she really had seemed like her old self. But then one day, after showing a property located in Harbour Falls to a nice young couple who were expecting their first child, Ami was seen later sporting a rather impressive baby bump. In this “condition” she went to a local grocery store and a gas station. She later confessed she’d purposely sought out opportunities to talk with people about her “pregnancy.”
For example, a man at the grocery store had allowed her to go ahead of him in the checkout line. She thanked him and then proceeded to tell him how much she appreciated his kindness and how she’d just been
