I pulled away from him. Looked at my watch. Four minutes. I headed back to the ambulance and climbed inside.
“Daddy!” Bella said. “I want to go home!”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying. “One thing at a time, Bell,” I said. “First we make sure your lungs are okay.” And then what? Then what? Where would we go? One look at the house and you knew everything we owned was gone. I closed my eyes, picturing my mother running into the house through smoke and flames to find Bella. Thank God she had, but God had done a half-assed job this time. I hoped my mother had been unconscious when she fell. I hoped she never had a clue she was dying. Please, God, no clue.
“I want to go home!” Bella wailed again, her voice loud in the tiny space of the ambulance.
I held her by the shoulders and looked her straight in the eye. “Our house burned down, Bella,” I said. “We can’t go back. But we’ll go to another house. We have plenty of friends, right? Our friends will help us.”
“Tyler?” she asked. Tyler was the five-year-old boy who lived a few houses down from us. Her innocence slayed me.
“All our friends,” I said, hoping I wasn’t lying. We were going to need everyone.
I saw something in her face I’d never seen before. How had it happened? She was two weeks shy of her fourth birthday, and overnight she seemed to have grown from my baby daughter to a miniature adult. In her face, I saw the girl she’d become. I saw Robin. There’d always been hints of her mother in her face—the way her eyes crinkled up when she laughed. The upturn at the edges of her lips so that she always looked happy. The rosy circles on her cheeks. But now, suddenly, there was more than a hint and it shook me up. I pulled her against my chest, full of love for the mother I’d lost that afternoon and for the little girl I would hold on to forever—and maybe, buried deep inside me where my anger couldn’t reach, for the teenage girl who’d long ago shut me out of her life.
3 Robin
Beaufort, North Carolina
JAMES AND I STOOD UP WHEN DALE WALKED into the waiting room. Dale always seemed to have a gravitational field around him and sure enough, the seven other people sitting in the room turned to look at him as he walked toward us. They would sail right through the air toward him if they hadn’t clutched the arms of their chairs. That was the sort of pull he had on people. He’d had it on me from the first moment I met him.
Now, he smiled at me and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, then shook his father’s hand as if he hadn’t seen him at home only a few short hours ago. “How’s she doing?” he asked quietly, looking from me to his father and back again.
“Eight centimeters,” I said. “Your mom’s with her. Alissa’s miserable, but the nurse said she’s doing really well.”
“Poor kid,” Dale said. He took my hand and the three of us sat down again in the row of chairs. Across from us, an older woman and man whispered to one another and pointed in our direction, and I knew they’d recognized us. I had only a second to wonder if they’d approach us before the woman got to her feet, ran her hand over her flawlessly styled silver hair and headed toward us.
Her eyes were on James. “Mayor Hendricks.” She smiled, and James immediately stood up and took her hand in his.
“Yes,” he said, “and you are …?”
“Mary Wiley, just one of your constituents. We—” she looked over her shoulder at the man, most likely her husband “—we have such mixed feelings about your retirement,” she said. “The only good thing about it is that your son will take over.”
Dale was already on his feet, already smiling that smile that made you feel special. I once thought that smile was only for me but soon came to realize it was for every single person he met. “Well, I hope that’s the case,” he said modestly. “Sounds like I can count on your vote.”
“And the vote of everyone I know,” she said. “Really, it’s a given, isn’t it? I mean, Dina Pingry? She’s completely wrong.” She gave a little eye roll at the thought of Dale’s opposition, a woman who was a powerhouse Realtor in Beaufort. Of course, the people we hung out with were all Hendricks supporters, so it was sometimes easy to forget that Dina Pingry had her own fans and they were fanatical in their support. But James had been mayor of this small waterfront town for twenty years, and passing the torch to his thirty-three-year-old attorney son seemed like a done deal. To us, anyway.
“It’s never a given, Mrs. Wiley,” Dale said. He was so good at remembering names! “I need every vote, so promise me you’ll get out there on election day.”
“Oh, we work the polls,” she said, nodding toward her husband. “We never miss an election.” Her eyes finally fell on me, still in my seat between the two men. “You, dear, are going to have the wedding of the decade, aren’t you?”
I didn’t stand, but I shook the hand she offered and gave her my own smile—the one I had quickly learned to put and keep on my face in public. It came pretty naturally to me. That was the thing Dale said first attracted him to me: I was always smiling. For me, it had been his gray eyes. When I saw those eyes, I suddenly understood the phrase Love at first sight. “I’m very lucky,” I said now, and Dale rested his hand on my shoulder.
“I’m the lucky one,” he said.
“Well, we’re waiting for our daughter to have her third.” The woman gestured toward the double doors that led to the labor rooms. “And I guess you’re waiting for Alissa …?” She didn’t finish her sentence, but raised her eyebrows to see if she was right. Of course she was. Alissa was the Hendricks’ barely seventeen-year-old daughter, my future sister-in-law and the poster child for Taking Responsibility for your Actions. The Hendricks had turned what might have been a scandalous event into an asset by publicly supporting their unwed pregnant daughter. This was a family that didn’t hide much, I’d discovered. Rather, they capitalized on the negative. To the outside world, their actions might have looked like complete support, but I was privy to their inside world, where all was not so rosy.
“Mrs. Hendricks is with her,” James said to the woman. “Latest report is she’s doing very well.” He always called Mollie, his wife, Mrs. Hendricks in public. I’d asked Dale not to do the same to me after we were married. I’d actually wished I could keep my maiden name, Saville, but that wasn’t done in the world of the Hendricks family.
“Well, now,” the woman said, “I’ll leave you three in peace. It’s the last peace you’ll have for a while with a baby around, I can tell you that.”
“We’re looking forward to the chaos,” Dale said. “So nice meeting you, Mrs. Wiley.” He gave a little bow of his head and he and his father sat down again as the woman returned to her seat.
I was tired and wished I could rest my head against Dale’s shoulder, but I didn’t think he’d appreciate it here in public. In public were words I heard all the time from one Hendricks or another. I was being trained to become one of them. I think they’d started grooming me from the moment I met them all two years earlier, when I’d applied for the job to assist with running their Taylor’s Creek Bed and Breakfast at the end of Front Street. It was a job I’d handled so well that I was now the manager. I’d met with all three of them in the living room of Hendricks House, their big, white, two-story home, which was right next door to the B and B and almost identical in its Queen Anne–style architecture. They told me later that they knew I was right for the job the moment I walked in, despite the fact that I was barely twenty and had zero experience at anything other than surviving. “You were much younger than we’d expected,” Mollie told me later, “but you were a people person, oozing self-confidence and full of enthusiasm. After the interview, you left the room and we all looked at each other and knew. I picked up the phone and canceled the other applicants we’d scheduled for interviews.”
I’d wondered later if they knew then