checked his watch. It was 6:00 a.m., and he was waiting for an update on Alison’s progress. She’d been in surgery twelve hours, and Andrew had heard nothing since three that morning, when they’d told him she should be able to resume a normal life, but it would take several more hours to reconstruct her face. He’d also been warned that this would be the first of several surgeries.
Thank God he’d insisted she be Medevaced to Saint Joseph’s. He’d called from the yacht on the way back into port, and there’d been an ambulance there to meet them. The paramedics had taken her directly to the trauma center at San Diego General, but after it had been determined that she had no serious internal injuries, Andrew had arranged for her to be transferred to Saint Joseph’s, where the reconstructive surgeons were the best in the world.
The trauma center’s surgeons could easily have repaired the broken bones in her body, but he knew it would take virtuosos to put her exquisite face back together.
Alison’s face. Andrew could see it so clearly in his mind, fine-featured and fair, the Rapunzel of her generation, which happened to be X. She would rather have lost a limb than her looks. As beautiful as she was, she was also deeply insecure and sought constant reassurance, which may have explained her crazy dreams of superstardom, and her belief that Andrew could use his connections to make those dreams come true. It wasn’t the only reason their marriage had fallen apart, but it was one of them.
A flash of blue in Andrew’s periphery caught his attention. A young female plastic surgeon, still garbed in scrubs, came through the waiting room door and approached him. Andrew recognized her as one of the operating room team.
He couldn’t read her expression. Obvious exhaustion masked whatever emotion she might be feeling. And doctors weren’t supposed to telegraph those things, anyway. Alison could be dead, and this doctor’s face would show nothing more than professional compassion. Right now, he didn’t even see that.
“How is she?” he asked.
She wiped her brow, and he saw the bloodstains on her sleeve.
“It’s delicate work,” she said, “but it’s going well.”
Andrew felt light-headed, probably from relief. “She’s going to be all right?”
“As you know, the worst damage was to your wife’s face,” she told him. “We’ve reset her jaw and reconstructed her nose. She’ll need more surgery in the future, possibly several operations, but there’s a good chance we’ll be able to restore not just the structure, but the character of her face.”
“You’re working from the pictures I gave you?” Alison had been nearly unrecognizable, even after they cleaned her up, so Andrew had described her at length and given them the wallet-size pictures he carried, most of them close-ups of her face. His hobby was boat design, precision work that made him very aware of details.
“Yes, from the pictures.” She smiled, seeming pleased despite her obvious fatigue. Her expression said that this was a victory for medicine, and for her personally. “We’ve even managed to remove what was left of the birthmark on her throat,” she said proudly.
“The birthmark?” Another wave of light-headedness caught Andrew, rocking him back on his heels. The room got very bright, and he didn’t realize he was staring at the doctor until he heard her calling his name.
“Mr. Villard? Are you all right?”
“Yes, fine.” He forced himself to smile at her as if everything was fine, but he was still unsteady. He kneaded his forehead, warding off the threat of a blinding headache. “It’s been awhile since I slept.”
“We won’t be much longer.”
“I’ll get some coffee,” he said, aware that he sounded out of breath. It had been several days since he’d slept, and he was exhausted. If he was acting strangely, that was the reason. And it was the only reason he was going to give, especially to this doctor.
1
New York, Six Months Later
Alison Fairmont Villard opened her eyes reluctantly. She was in her own bedroom, but the first moments of consciousness still brought bewilderment. Andrew had insisted she recuperate at his home on Oyster Bay in Long Island, but it wasn’t being on the east coast that confused her. Each day since the accident had started with a realization that felt almost physical, as if she had to grasp her mind and wrench it to this new time and place, to a world she actually knew very little about. And yet more about than she wanted to.
Her amnesia wasn’t as total as the doctors had thought. She remembered nothing about being battered against the reefs and nearly drowning, nothing about the plunge into the raging ocean, but she could remember just enough of what had happened before that to be terrified by it.
Those flashes of memory acted like a spotlight that could blind you to everything except its beam. What she recalled now were the harrowing moments. Everything else was hidden in the surrounding ring of darkness.
Maybe it was the pills. She took them to sleep and to keep the dreams at bay. Whether night or day, when she swallowed a tiny blue pill, she was transported to a cool, safe place, a shaded tropical lagoon, her mind free of clutter and turmoil. She slept in innocence, like Eve before the apple.
Her fingers clasped the small battered loop of copper attached to her charm bracelet. It was an ugly stepsister compared to the other delicate gold charms, but she was relieved to find it still there. She’d reached for it so often it had become a reflex. An embarrassing tic. But the brush with death had made her superstitious, and the old copper penny ring had literally saved her life when it snagged on a piece of driftwood. Its protective powers had been tested.
She rolled to her side and sat up, not bothering to cover her nakedness. There was no one to see her, anyway. She and Andrew didn’t share this beautiful suite where she slept her life away, and as far as she knew they never had. Before the “accident,” which was how they now referred to it, they’d lived in his Manhattan apartment. Here, in his much larger estate on Oyster Bay, their rooms were in different wings. Different rooms. Different lives.
She had almost no interaction with her husband these days, except occasionally to discuss a social or business event that he wanted her to attend with him, and there had been very few of those. In the first weeks after the accident, he’d spent hours with her, filling in the blanks of her life with him, as well as her life before him. He’d shared as much as he knew of her past, but it was what he’d told her about their relationship that made her realize they’d been on the brink of a divorce before the accident—and Andrew didn’t seem to have any desire to reconcile now.
He didn’t even seem to like her, which made her feel strangely empty and resentful, even though she wasn’t entirely sure how she’d felt about him before. He’d refused to go into the intimate details of their relationship, which had left her both curious and suspicious, but mostly, lost. How was she supposed to pick up pieces she didn’t have?
They were together now only because of the agreement they’d made—and that was strictly business. Once she’d recovered enough to lead her own life, such as it was, he’d left her to it. That was how he wanted it. What she wanted didn’t seem to enter into anything, though to be fair, he had asked her about that once.
What do you want to do with your second chance?
Her answer had surprised him. She told him
