ome time around midnight, a woman walked up to Blake. She was wearing a skintight black catsuit with a huge silver belt and black stiletto heels. With an easy smile, she sat down next to him. She tapped a long fingernail on the bar. “Vodka martini—two olives,” she said to the bartender.

In the background, a throaty Dwight Yoakam song came on, something about the pocket of a clown.

The woman turned to him. Nibbling on her olive, she asked him to dance.

Blake pushed off the bar stool and stumbled back from her, putting as much distance as he could between them. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m married.”

But he didn’t turn away; he couldn’t. He stood there like a man possessed, staring at the woman. He couldn’t help wondering how those breasts would feel in his hands—the young, solid breasts of a woman who’d never had children, the small, pink nipples that had never nursed a baby.

At that, Blake felt something inside him shift and give way. He realized the truth, the one he’d been denying for months. He loved Annie, but it wasn’t enough. He’d cheat on her. Maybe not tonight, maybe not even this year; but sooner or later, he’d slide back into his old routine. It was only a matter of time.

And when he did, he would be lost again. There was nothing on earth lonelier than a man who betrayed his wife on a regular basis. Blake knew how seductive it was—the temptation to possess a stranger, make love in the middle of the night with a nameless woman. But afterward, it left him broken somehow, ashamed of himself and unable to meet his wife’s gaze.

Shaken, he turned away from the woman in the catsuit and left the bar. He drove home and parked in the garage. Tiredly, he went into the dark, cool house. Without bothering to flick on any lights, he headed through the kitchen.

He found Annie waiting for him in the living room. She was sitting on the sofa, with her feet tucked up underneath her. “Hello, Blake,” she said in a soft, tired voice that seemed to cut through his heart.

He stopped dead. For no reason at all, he thought she’d seen him tonight, that she knew what he’d almost done. “Hey, Annie,” he said, forcing a smile.

“You’re late.”

“A bunch of us went to the sports bar on Fourth. We won a big settle—”

“It was Natalie’s birthday party tonight.”

Blake winced. “Oh. Shit. I forgot to mark it on my office calendar.”

“I’m sure she’ll love that answer.”

“You should have called to remind me.”

“Don’t turn it on me, Blake. You’re the one who screwed up. You can remember when a client owes an alimony check, but you forget your daughter’s eighteenth birthday.” She sighed. “You should go see her now—I’ll bet she’s still awake.”

“She’s probably tired....”

“She deserves an explanation.”

He turned and moved to the elegant stone table that hugged the wall, staring at his own reflection in a gilt-framed mirror. “Natalie’s angry with me,” he said softly. “When she was in London, I didn’t call her. I sent flowers every week. A girl loves to get flowers, that’s what Suz...” He realized what he was going to say and clamped his mouth shut.

“Suzannah was wrong,” Annie said tiredly, reading his thoughts. “A seventeen-year-old girl needs a lot more than flowers from her father’s secretary every Friday.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “Without you, I was... lost with Natalie. I kept thinking I should call, and then a deposition or a court date would come up, and I’d forget. I’ll make it all up to her, though, even tonight.”

He turned back to Annie. Now she was on her feet. She stood a few feet away, her arms crossed. In a pair of ratty sweats and a UW sweatshirt that had seen better days, she looked more like a runaway teen than his wife. “I’ll get her a laptop.”

“She’ll be leaving for school on Sunday. We won’t see her again until spring break, and soon... we won’t be seeing much of her at all. She’ll find her own place in the world and she won’t be coming home to us as much.”

Us. He tried to take courage from that single, simple word, but he couldn’t quite manage it. “So, what do I say to her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do. You always—”

“No more. If you’re going to forge a relationship with your daughter, it’s up to you. No more Cliffs Notes on the situation from me.”

“Come on—”

“Who’s her boyfriend, Blake?”

“She doesn’t have one.”

“Really? That will come as something of a surprise to Brian. And what does she want to study in school?”

It was hard to think with her looking at him that way. “Law, like me. She wants to be a partner in the firm some day.”

“Really? When did you last discuss it?”

“Last year?” It came out as a question, and at her look, he knew it was wrong. “Two years ago?”

“Really?”

She kept throwing that word at him like a dart. He felt like a man reaching for a lifeline that was just beyond his grasp. At last he gave up trying to lie and told the truth. “I don’t know.”

Annie’s face softened at the admission. “You have to talk to her, Blake. But mostly you have to listen.” She gave him a smile that was as sad as it was familiar. “And we both know you’re listening-impaired.”

“Okay. I’ll go talk to her.”

He said the words, softly and in exactly the right tone of voice, but they both knew the truth. They’d had this same discussion a hundred times before, with Annie begging him to spend time with Natalie.

They both knew he’d never quite get around to doing it.

On the last day of January, Terri showed up bright and early, holding a bottle of Moët & Chandon and a bag of croissants. “When a woman turns forty,” she said brightly, “she should begin drinking early in the day. And before you start whining about nursing and alcohol in the breast milk, let me reassure you that the champagne is for me and the croissants are for you.”

They sat together on the big wooden deck. The hot tub bubbled gently beside them.

“So,” Terri said, sipping her champagne. “You look like shit, you know.”

“Thanks a lot. I hope you’ll come by to celebrate my fiftieth birthday—when I really need cheering up.”

“You’re not sleeping.”

Annie winced. It was true. She hadn’t slept well in weeks. “Katie’s been fighting a cold.”

“Ah,” Terri said knowingly, “so Katie’s the problem.”

“No... not really, Dr. Freud.” Annie glanced out at the glittering surface of the sea, watching the white-tipped waves lick gently at the sand. She didn’t have to close her eyes to see another place, a place where winters were real. There, nature would have reclaimed its rain forest. The tourists would be long gone, driven away by the swift and sudden darkness that came with winter. There would be alpine mountainsides where the snow was five feet deep, where tiny purple flowers would still bloom amid the whiteness, against all the laws of nature. Deep in the woods, where the land had never been damaged by human hands, the trees would seem to draw closer together, creating a curtain of black tinged only occasionally with the faintest hint of green. In the middle of the day, it would be dark, and not even the brightest winter sun would make it to the cold, frosted forest floor. Anyone crazy enough, or desperate enough, to venture into that gray and black wilderness this time of year would be lost forever.

Annie longed to see it now, to feel the crisp winter air on her cheeks. She wanted to bundle up in layers and layers of clothing and lie in the snow, to make angels with her arms and legs while she watched her breath puff into the silver air.

“Why do you stay with him?”

Annie sighed. She had known the question was coming; she’d expected it every day since the fiasco of Natalie’s birthday party. It was the same thing she asked herself at night, as she lay in her bed, beside her husband, unable to sleep.

She thought so often about Natalie, grown now and on her own, and Katie, with so many years before her. At those times, achingly lonely, she would stare into the darkness of her own life, searching for some dim reflection of herself. And when she looked back, she saw a skinny, brown-haired girl who’d done what was expected of her, always.

She missed the woman she’d become on the shores of Mystic Lake, the one who dared to dream of her own bookstore, and learned to wager her heart on a game as risky as love. She missed Nick and Izzy and the family they’d quilted together from the scraps of their separate lives.

It was the kind of family Annie had always dreamed of... the kind of family Katie deserved....

Did you know I have no memories of Dad?

Terri touched her shoulder. “Annie? You’re crying....”

She’d been holding it in for too long, pretending that everything was okay, pretending that everyone mattered but her. She couldn’t hold it in anymore.

“I matter,” she said quietly.

“Well, praise God,” Terri whispered and pulled Annie into her arms. Annie let herself be held and rocked by her best friend.

“I can’t live this way anymore.”

“Of course you can’t.”

Annie eased back, shakily pushing the grown-out hair away from her eyes. “I don’t want some day to hear Katie tell me that she has no memories of her dad, either.”

“And what about you, Annie?”

“I deserve more than this... Blake and I don’t share anything anymore. Not even the miracle of our two children.”

It was the truth she’d been avoiding all these months. Their love was gone, simply gone, extinguished as cleanly as candlelight, with the sooty scent of smoke the only reminder that it had ever burned at all. She couldn’t even remember those days, long ago, when they had been in love.

She couldn’t help grieving for the loss of that fire, and she was as much to blame as he. She’d spent a lifetime in the shadows, too afraid of failure or abandonment to reach for even the light of a single candle. Their marriage was what they together had created—and that was the saddest truth of all.

Blake wasn’t happy, either. Of that she had no doubt. He wasn’t ready to let go of Annie quite yet, but the Annie he wanted was Annalise Bourne Colwater, the woman she’d become after years and years of living in a rut of their combined creation.

He wanted back what couldn’t be had.

Faint strains of music came from the bedroom speakers. Blake stood in front of the baby’s bassinet, staring down at the tiny infant swaddled in pink.

He reached into his pocket and withdrew a slim black velvet box. His finger traced the soft fabric as he remembered a dozen gifts he’d given Annie in the past, presents on Christmas mornings, on anniversaries, on birthdays.

Always, he’d given her what he thought she should have. Like her wedding ring. On their tenth anniversary he’d bought her the three-carat diamond solitaire, not because she wanted it—Annie was perfectly happy with the gold band they’d bought when it was all they could afford—but because it made Blake look good. Everyone who saw his wife’s ring knew that Blake was a successful, wealthy man.

He’d never given her what she needed, what she wanted. He’d never given her himself.

“Blake?”

At the sound of her voice, soft and tentative, he turned around. She stood in the open archway, wearing a beautiful blue silk robe he’d given her years ago, and she looked incredibly lovely.

“We need to talk,” she said.

Steeling himself, he moved toward her. “I know.”

She stared up at him, and for a second, all he wanted to do was hold her so tightly that she could never leave him again. But he’d learned that holding too tightly was as harmful as never reaching out at all. “I have something for you. A birthday present.” He held the box out to her. It lay in his palm like a black wound.

Tentatively, still staring up at him, she took the box and opened it. On a bed of ice-blue silk lay a glittering gold bracelet. The name Annie was engraved across the top.

“Oh, Blake,” she whispered, biting down on her lower lip.

“Turn it over,” he said.

She eased the bracelet from the box, and he saw that her hands were trembling as she turned it over and read the inscription on the underside.

I will always love you.

She looked up at him, her eyes moist. “It’s not going to work, Blake. It’s too late.”

“I know,” he whispered, hearing the unmanly catch in his voice and not caring. Maybe if he’d cared less about things like that in the past, he wouldn’t be standing here, saying good-bye to the only woman who’d ever truly loved him. “I wish...” He didn’t even know what he wished for. That she had been different? That he had? That they’d seen this truth a long time ago?

“Me, too,” she answered.

“Will you... remember the words on that bracelet?”

“Oh, Blake, I don’t need a bracelet to remember how much I loved you. You were my life for more than twenty years. Whenever I look back, I’ll think of you.” Tears streaked in silvery lines down her cheeks. “What about Katie?”

“I’ll support her, of course....”

He could tell that she was hurt by his answer. “I don’t mean money.”

He moved toward her, touched her cheek. He knew what she wanted from him right now, but it wasn’t really in his power to give. It never had been, that was part of their problem. He wouldn’t be there for Katie, any more than he’d been there for Natalie. Suddenly, he grieved for all of it. For the good times and the bad, for the roads not taken and the lives that had carelessly grown apart. Sadly, he gazed down at her. “Do you want me to lie to you?”

She shook her head. “No.”

Slowly, he pulled her into his arms. He held her close, knowing he’d carry this image in his heart for as long as he lived. “I guess it’s really over,” he whispered into her sweet-smelling hair. After a long moment, he heard her answer, a quiet, shuddering little “Yes.”

Natalie’s dorm room was cluttered with memorabilia from London. Pictures of new friends dotted her desk, mingled with family photos and piles of homework. The metal-framed twin bed was heaped with expensive Laura Ashley bedding, and at the center was the pink pillow Annie had embroidered a lifetime ago, the one that read: A PRINCESS SLEEPS HERE.

Natalie sat cross-legged on the bed, her long, unbound hair flowing around her shoulders. Already she looked nervous and worried—a normal teenage response to both parents flying up to see you at college.

Annie wished there were some way to break the news of their divorce without words, a way to silently communicate the sad and wrenching truth.

Blake stood in the corner of the room. He looked calm and at ease—his courtroom face—but Annie could see nervousness in the jittery way he kept glancing at his watch.

Annie knew this was up to her; there was no use putting it off any longer. She went to the bed and sat down beside Natalie. Blake took a few hesitant steps toward them and then stopped in the middle of the room.

Natalie looked at Annie. “What is it, Mom?”

“Your dad and I have something to tell you.” She took Natalie’s hand in hers, stared down at the slender fingers, at the tiny red birthstone ring they’d given her on her sixteenth birthday. It took an effort to sit straight-backed and still. She took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “Your dad and I are getting a divorce.”

Natalie went very still. “I guess I’m not surprised.” Her voice was tender, and in it, Annie heard the echo of both the child Natalie had once been and the woman she was becoming.

Annie stroked her daughter’s hair, untangling it with her fingers like she used to when Natalie was little. “I’m sorry, honey.”

When Natalie looked up, there were tears in her eyes. “Are you okay, Mom?”

Annie felt a warm rush of pride for her daughter. “I’m fine, and I don’t want you to worry about anything. We haven’t worked out all the details yet. We don’t know where we’ll each be living. Things like addresses and vacations and holidays are all up in the air. But I know one thing. We’ll always be a family—just a different kind. I guess now you’ll have two places in the world where you belong, instead of only one.”

Natalie nodded slowly, then turned to her father. Blake moved closer, kneeling in front of Natalie. For once, he didn’t look like a three-hundred-fifty-dollar-an-hour lawyer. He looked like a scared, vulnerable man. “I’ve made some mistakes....” He glanced at Annie and gave her a hesitant smile, then turned back to Natalie. “With your mom and with you. I’m sorry, Sweet Pea.” He touched her cheek.

Tears leaked from Natalie’s eyes. “You haven’t called me that since I fell off the jungle gym in third grade.”

“There are a lot of things I haven’t said—or done—in years. But I want to make up for lost time. I want to do things together—if that’s okay with you.”

“Phantom of the Opera is coming to town in May. Maybe we could go?”

He smiled. “I’d love to.”

“You mean it this time? I should buy two tickets?”

“I mean it,” he said, and the way he said it, Annie believed him. Of course, she always believed him.

Slowly, Blake got to his feet and drew back.

“We’re still going to be a family,” Annie said, tucking a flyaway strand of hair behind Natalie’s ear. “We’ll always be a family.” She looked at Blake and smiled.

It was true. Blake would always be a part of her, always be her youth. They’d grown up together, fallen in love and built a family together; nothing would ever erase that connection. A piece of paper and a court of law couldn’t take it all away—it could only take what they were willing to give up, and Annie was going to hold on to all of it, the good, the bad, the in-between. It was part of them. It made them who they were.

She reached out. He took her hand in his, and together they drew around Natalie, enfolding her in their arms. When Natalie was little, they’d called this a “family hug,” and Annie couldn’t help wondering why they’d ever stopped.

She heard the soft, muffled sound of her daughter’s crying and knew it was one of the regrets that would be with her always.

It was like going back in time. Once again, Annie and Blake were strolling through the Stanford campus. Of course, this time Annie was forty years old and as much of her life lay behind her as lay ahead... and she was pushing a stroller.

“It’s weird to be back here,” Blake said.

“Yeah,” she said softly.

They’d spent the whole day with Natalie, being more of a family in one afternoon than they’d been in many of the previous years, but now it was time to go their separate ways. Annie had driven the Cadillac up here, and Blake had flown in, renting a car to get to the campus.

At Annie’s car, they stopped. Annie bent down and unstrapped Katie from the stroller.

“What will you do now?” he asked.

Annie paused. It was the same question he’d asked her when Natalie had left home last spring. Then, it had terrified her. Now, these many months later, the same words opened a door, through which Annie glimpsed a world of possibilities. “I don’t know. I still have tons to do at the house. Twenty years has to be sorted and catalogued and packed away. I know I want to sell the house. It’s not... me anymore.” She straightened, looking at him. “Unless you want it?”

“Without you? No.”

Annie glanced around, a little uncertain as to what to say. This was the fork in the road of their lives; after all these years, he would go one way and she another. She had no idea when she would see him again. Probably at the lawyer’s office, where they’d become a cliché—a cordial, once-married couple coming in as separate individuals to sign papers....

Blake stared down at her. There was a faraway sadness in his eyes that made her move closer to him. In a soft voice, he asked, “What will you tell Katie about me?”

Annie heard the pain in his voice, and it moved her to touch his cheek. “I don’t know. The old me would have fabricated an elaborate fiction to avoid hurting her feelings.” She laughed. “Maybe I’d have told her you were a spy for the government and contacting us would endanger your life. But now... I don’t know. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. But I won’t lie to her.”

He turned his head and looked away. She wondered what he was thinking, whether it was about lying, and how much it had cost him over the years. Or if it was about the daughter he had lived with for eighteen years and didn’t know, or the daughter he’d hardly lived with at all, and now would never know. Or if it was the future, all the days that lay ahead for a man alone, the quiet of a life that included no child’s laughter. She wondered if he’d realized yet that when he was an old, old man, when his hair had turned white and his eyes had grown coated with cataracts, that he would have no grandchildren to bounce on his knee, no daughter to kneel in the grass beside his wheelchair and reminisce about the time-worn antics of the past. Unless he reached out now, in the days that mattered, he would learn that some roads could not be refound and that true love took time and effort... that a life lived in the glare of summer sunlight never produced a rainbow.

“Will you miss me?” he asked, finally looking at her again.

Annie gave him a sad smile. “I’ll miss who we used to be—I already do. And I’ll miss who we could have been.”

His eyes filled slowly with tears. “I love you, Annie.”

“I’ll always love the boy I fell in love with, Blake. Always...”

She moved toward him, pressing up on her toes to kiss him. It was the kind of kiss they hadn’t shared in years; slow, and tender, and heartfelt. There was no undercurrent of sexuality in it. It was everything a kiss was supposed to be, an expression of pure emotion—and they had let it go so easily in their life together. She couldn’t remember when kisses had become something perfunctory and meaningless. Maybe if they had kissed this way every day, they wouldn’t be here now, standing together in the middle of the Stanford campus, saying good-bye to a commitment that had been designed to last forever.

When Blake drew back, he looked sad and tired. “I guess I screwed up pretty badly.”

“You’ll get another chance, Blake. Men like you always do. You’re handsome and rich; women will stand in line to give you another chance. What you do with that chance is up to you.”

He ran a hand through his hair and looked away. “Hell, Annie. We both know I’ll screw that up, too.”

She laughed. “Probably.”

They stared at each other for a long minute, and in that time, Annie saw the arc of their love; the bright and shining beginning of it, all those years ago, and the way it had eroded, one lonely night at a time for years.

Finally, Blake checked his watch. “I have to go. My plane leaves at six o’clock.” He bent down to the stroller and gave Katie a last, fleeting kiss. When he drew back up, he gave Annie a weak smile. “This is hard....”

She hugged him, one last time, then slowly she drew back. “Have a safe flight.”

He nodded and turned away from her. He got into his rented car and drove away.

She stood there watching him until the car disappeared. She had expected to feel weighed down by sadness at this moment, but instead she felt almost buoyant. Last week she had done what she’d never thought she could do: she’d traveled alone. Just for fun. She’d given Katie to Terri for the day—complete with two sheets of instructions and a shelf full of expressed milk—and then Annie had just started to drive. Before she’d even realized where she was going, she’d arrived at the Mexican border. A flash of fear had almost stopped her as the rickety red bus pulled up to the curb, but she hadn’t let it own her. She’d boarded the bus with all the other tourists and ridden into Mexico. All by herself.

The day had been wonderful, magical. She’d walked down the dingy, overcrowded streets, eating churros from the stands along the way. At lunchtime, she’d found a seat at a restaurant and eaten unrecognizable food and loved every bite, and as night had begun to fall and the neon sputtered to life, she’d understood why she’d always been afraid of traveling alone. It changed a person somehow— wasn’t that the point, after all? To go to a wildly different place and learn that you could negotiate for a silly trinket in a foreign language, and then to hold that item a little closer to your heart because it represented something of your self. Each peso she’d saved had somehow become an expression of how far she’d come. And when she finally had returned home that night, dragging her tired body up the stairs, snuggling up with her cranky daughter in her big king-size bed, she’d known that finally, at forty years of age, she had begun.

“Come on, Katie Sarah. Let’s go.” She picked up her almost-sleeping daughter and strapped her into the car seat in the back of the Cadillac. Then, throwing her clunky diaper bag onto the passenger seat, she climbed into the car and started the engine. Before she even pulled out, she flicked on the radio and found a station she liked. Humming along with Mick Jagger, she maneuvered onto the highway and nudged the engine to seventy miles per hour.

What will you do now?

She still had months of responsibilities in Southern California. Closing and selling the house, packing everything up, deciding where she wanted to live and what she wanted to do. She didn’t have to work, of course, but she didn’t want to fall into that life-of-leisure trap again. She needed to work.

She thought again about the bookstore in Mystic. She certainly had the capital to give it a try—and that Victorian house on Main Street had plenty of room for living upstairs. She and Katie could be very comfortable up there, just the two of them.

Mystic.

Nick. Izzy.

The love she felt for them was as sharp as broken glass. Sometimes, when she woke in the middle of the night, she reached out for Nick—only he wasn’t there, and in those quiet moments the missing of him was an actual pain in her chest.

She knew she would go to him again when her life was in order; she had planned it endlessly in the past few weeks.

She would buy herself a convertible and drive up Highway 101 along the wild beaches, with her hair whipping about her face. She would play show tunes and sing at the top of her lungs, free at last to do as she pleased. She would drive when the sun was high in the sky and keep going as the stars began to shimmer overhead. She would show up without warning and hope it was not too late.

It would be springtime when she went to him, in that magical week when change was in the air, when everything smelled fresh and new.

She would show up on his porch one day, wearing a bright yellow rain slicker that covered most of her face. It would take her a minute to reach for the doorbell; the memories would be so strong, she’d want to wallow in them. In her arms would be Katie, almost crawling by now, wearing a fuzzy blue snowsuit—one they’d bought just for Mystic.

And when he opened the door, she would tell him that in all the long months they’d been apart, she’d found herself falling, and falling, and there’d been no one there to catch her....

Ahead, the road merged onto the interstate. Two green highway signs slashed against the steel-gray sky. There were two choices: I-5 South. I-5 North.

No.

It was crazy, what she was thinking. She wasn’t ready. She had oceans of commitments in California, and not even a toothbrush in her diaper bag. It was winter in Mystic, cold and gray and wet, and she was wearing silk....

South was Los Angeles—and a beautiful white house by the sea that held the stale leftovers of her old life.

North was Mystic—and in Mystic was a man and a child who loved her. Once, she had taken love for granted. Never again. Love was the sun and the moon and the stars in a world that was otherwise cold and dark.

Nick had known that. It was one of the last things he’d said to her: You’re wrong, Annie. Love matters. Maybe it’s the only thing that does.

She glanced in the rearview mirror at her daughter, who was almost asleep. “Listen to me, Kathleen Sarah. I’m going to give you lesson number one in the Annalise Bourne Colwater book of life. I may not know everything, but I’m forty years old and I know plenty, so pay attention. Sometimes you have to do everything right and follow the rules. You have to wait until all your ducks are in a row before you make a move.” She grinned. “And other times... like now... you have to say ‘what the hell’ and go for it.”

Laughing out loud, Annie flicked on her turn signal, changed lanes—

And headed north.