clearly see the gray in Tom’s wiry blond ponytail and the glint of light from the small gold hoop in his ear.
“Some time after the first of the year,” she said.
“Where will you … holy shit.” Tom had driven from the gravel road into the parking lot, and the keeper’s house came into view in the evening light. The upper portions of nearly every window were aglow with her stained glass creations.
She followed his gaze to the house. “In the year and a half I’ve lived here, you haven’t seen the keeper’s house at night?” she asked.
Tom stopped the car in the middle of the lot and a smile came slowly to his lips. Shaking his head, he leaned over to pull Lacey toward him, wrapping her in the scent of tobacco as he kissed the top of her head. She had gotten him to stop drinking, but had failed at getting him to give up cigarettes.
“You’re your mother, Lace,” he said. “This is just the sort of thing she would do. Turn her home into a … I don’t know. Someplace magical.”
She felt defeated. She wanted to tell him that she was not her mother any longer, that she had worked hard this last year to rid herself of her mother’s persona. Apparently she had not succeeded. It was hard to succeed when you had no identity of your own to take the place of the one you were trying to discard.
She was surprised to see her father’s van parked in the lot next to Clay’s Jeep. “Dad is here,” she said. “Weird.”
“He doesn’t come to visit you much?” Tom asked, and she heard the competitive edge in his voice. Tom often displayed a quiet envy of Alec O’Neill for having had the honor of raising her.
“He’s smitten with Rani,” she said, not really answering the question. “He likes having a grandbaby.”
Tom laughed. “You have one hell of a complicated family, you know that?”
“I do, indeed.” Lacey unfastened her seat belt. The tight little nuclear family she’d grown up in had added and subtracted so many people that it sometimes seemed difficult to keep track of them all. To complicate her life even further, she worked with both her fathers, spending her mornings in the animal hospital run by the father who had raised her and her afternoons in the art studio with the father who had given her life.
“Is that a kennel?” Tom pointed toward the large fenced area near the edge of the woods. “Is Clay training dogs again?”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “He’s been back at it a few months now.” With Gina and Rani in his life, her brother had undergone a metamorphosis. He was a devoted husband, and practically overnight, he’d developed parenting skills she had never expected to see in him. But it was the day she’d watched him roll chunks of wood and concrete into the forest—obstacles for the dogs he trained in search-and-rescue work—that she knew he was once again a man at peace with his world.
She realized that Tom had not moved his car from the center of the lot.
“Park your car and come in for a while,” she said.
He shook his head. “No, I’ll just head on home.”
“You know you’re welcome,” she said.
“I know that, sugar. But … I just never feel comfortable around Alec. Your dad.”
Lacey smiled. “I’m nearly twenty-six years old, Tom,” she said. “What happened between you and my mother is ancient history and you know my father got over it a long time ago.”
“Some other time,” Tom said.
“Okay.” She opened the car door and stepped out. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She waved as he turned the car around and drove back onto the gravel lane. Slipping off her sandals, she dangled them over her fingertips and started walking across the sand toward the house. The air was thick with salt, and the rhythmic pounding of the waves against the shore was nearly drowned out by the buzz of cicadas.
She often wondered if she should tell Tom the truth about her mother. It was clear that he thought he had been her only affair, as if he alone had been so irresistible that he could cause a woman as saintly as Annie O’Neill to stray. As far as Lacey knew, he did not date anyone, still so haunted by Annie’s ghost that he thought it impossible to find a woman who could take her place. Yet Lacey couldn’t bring herself to hurt him with the truth.
Inside the house, Clay’s black lab, Sasha, ran into the kitchen to greet her, and she dropped her sandals on the floor and bent down to scratch the dog behind his ears. The room smelled of Gina’s cooking—cardamom and turmeric, coconut and ginger. She could hear voices coming from the living room.
“Who’s here, Sash?” she said, as if she didn’t know. “Let’s go see.”
Sasha led the way through the kitchen to the living room, tail wagging, and Lacey stopped in the doorway of the room, not wanting to interrupt the scene in front of her. Gina was stretched out on the sofa, grinning, her arms folded behind her head as she watched Clay and Alec playing on the floor with Rani and her dolls. Clay was making the Indian Barbie, which was bedecked in a pink sari, walk across the rug toward the plastic dollhouse.
“Let’s go to Rani’s house!” he said in a high-pitched voice.
Alec was walking a brown-skinned baby doll—a big blob of a doll compared to the slender, shapely Barbie—around on the carpet. “No,” he said. “I want to go fishing!”
Rani looked alarmed, reaching for the baby doll. “No, no, no!” she said, her enormous black eyes wide in her caramel-colored face. “Everyone comes to my house.”
Lacey laughed. At nearly two and a half, Rani tried hard to control her world. She’d had so little opportunity to control it during her first two years that she was making up for lost time. The little girl looked up at the sound of Lacey’s laughter, then jumped up from the floor.
“Lacey!” she said, running toward her. “I love you!”
Lacey bent down to pick her up. She was a little peanut of a child. So tiny. So full of joy. And so, so wanted.
“Hi, baby,” Lacey said. “I love you, too.”
Gina had struggled to adopt Rani, and once Clay had fallen in love with Gina, he had joined that struggle with his whole heart. They’d spent from July to September in India the year before, fighting the system to get the court’s permission to adopt Rani. The little girl had desperately needed heart surgery, but so many obstacles stood in the way of the adoption that Gina had feared the toddler might die before she could bring her home. Once permission had been received, the three of them were quickly ushered out of the country, escaping before the foreign adoption antagonists could become involved. By that time, Rani was so weak from her heart condition that she could barely hold her head up, and Gina and Clay feared it might be too late to save her. Gina had already made contact with a surgeon in Seattle, so she flew there with Rani. The surgery was successful and the two of them remained in Seattle as Rani healed. Clay had moped around the keeper’s house, unable to think of anything other than the woman and baby he had fallen in love with. He and Gina talked for hours on the phone—for so long, in fact, that Lacey had insisted he get a separate phone line installed in the keeper’s house. In February, Gina and Rani traveled across the country to the Outer Banks. Gina
