She spoke as though she and her husband were still together. Maybe in the week since he’d seen her things had changed. Maybe he’d moved back in.

They got a table on the deck outside the tiny restaurant. They were directly over the water, and a few fat geese looked up at them expectantly as he and Olivia took their seats.

They both ordered crab salad. Alec was relaxed, a different person than he’d been a week earlier. He remembered ordering their sandwiches in the deli, his body coiled and tense, ready to bolt. He’d been afraid to hear Olivia talk about the night Annie died, but it had helped him immeasurably to listen to her describe what happened, to hear her talk about feeling the same desperate need to keep Annie alive that he had felt.

He ordered wine, but Olivia did not, patting her stomach by way of explanation, and he remembered the baby.

“How are you feeling?” he asked. She looked healthy, except for the nearly translucent whiteness of her skin, which he assumed was natural for her.

“I’m all right,” she said. “A little tired. I worry about how the baby’s being affected by the stress I’m under.”

“You husband’s still gone?”

“Yes.” She looked down at her hands in her lap, probably playing with her ring as she had the week before. “I never imagined going through a pregnancy alone, much less raising a child by myself.” She smiled up at him. “I have nightmares that it might be twins. That’s all I’d need.”

“Are there twins in your family?”

“I’m one.”

“Really? Identical?” He tried to picture two of her.

“No. He was a boy.”

“Was?”

“He died a few years ago.” Olivia brushed her hand through the air, obviously whisking that topic away. “Anyway, I’d get this feeling every once in a while that there were two of them in here and it made me panicky. But I heard the heartbeat at my doctor’s appointment this week, and there was just one.”

They were quiet while their food was set in front of them. A ray of sunlight shimmered in Olivia’s dark, arrow-straight hair.

“How are things with your husband?” he asked when the waitress had left their table.

Olivia lifted her fork. “Not good,” she said. “He seems completely disinterested in me. I called to tell him I love him—as you suggested—and he said I shouldn’t bother, that he’s not worth it.” She tried to smile, but didn’t quite succeed.

“Maybe he feels guilty about the affair.”

He saw her start. “He didn’t have an affair. I told you it was more of a fantasy.”

“Sorry,” he said.

She took a bite of her crab salad, chewing and swallowing before she spoke again. “He worked with her, and then he became obsessed with her, talking about her all the time. He’d compare me to her, and I didn’t compare too well.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“She was married and not the least bit interested in him.

He admitted that it was completely one-sided.” She spoke forcefully, as if she were trying to convince herself as much as she was him. Maybe more. “Nevertheless,” she continued, “I didn’t measure up to his image of this woman, so when she…so even though he couldn’t have her, he still left me.”

Alec frowned. Her husband sounded like a jerk.

“She was all he’d talk about, and I put up with it. I thought I shouldn’t overreact, I should let him talk and get it out of his system, but he never did.”

“Did he leave so he could get closer to her? I mean, forgive me, Olivia, but maybe he wanted to have an affair with her and didn’t feel right about it while he was still with you. So he…”

Olivia shook her head. “She moved away before he moved out.”

“Where did she go? Could he still be in touch with her?”

She suddenly laughed, then covered her mouth with her hand. “No, I’m sure he isn’t.” She picked at the crab salad with her fork. “She’s in California.”

“California’s not on another planet. What makes you so sure he’s not still communicating with her?”

“He would have told me. He never hid his feelings from me, although at times I wished he had.” She looked across the table at him. “She was a better person than me in some ways,” she said. “Ways that were important to my husband.”

Alec sat back in his chair. “Hey, listen,” he said, “the man’s obsessed. Irrational. Don’t get sucked into thinking he’s right. He never really knew her. If he’d ever had the chance he probably would have figured out she was a shrew.”

She lowered her head, and he saw a small, glistening tear-drop on her lower lashes, watched as it fell to her lavender blouse, where it made a dark round spot above her breast.

He leaned toward her. “Olivia?”

She raised her napkin to her eyes, glancing at the other diners. “I’m sorry,” she said softly, “I’m sure you didn’t invite me to lunch so that I could embarrass you.”

He pulled his chair closer to the table. “I didn’t invite you to lunch to upset you, either.” His knees touched hers beneath the table, and she pulled back slightly.

She began slowly shredding her napkin into long, ragged strips. “I just don’t understand it,” she said. “He was so wonderful before he met her. Our marriage was really good, excellent, and then suddenly it fell apart. I keep waiting for the old Paul to come back, but it’s as if he died.”

Alec shook his head. “Probably just hibernating. Stay in his life until he wakes up, Olivia. Remind him how good things used to be.”

She had stopped crying, but her nose was still red and it made her look helpless. Nothing like the woman he’d met the week before, the woman who had meticulously described her attempt to save Annie’s life.

“I’ve been trying to be a little more like her,” she said. “Like the other woman.”

Alec frowned again. “It’s Olivia he fell in love with, right? It’s Olivia he had the healthy relationship with, not this—” he wanted to say bitch, but he did not quite feel comfortable using that word in front of her “—this woman who brings out the craziness in him.”

She folded her arms across her chest, her hands balled into tight, white fists. “I was infertile,” she said. “I think that’s when it changed. When his feelings changed. I had surgery, but it was too late to snap him out of it.”

“Maybe if you told him about the baby?”

“Then I’d never be sure if it was me or the baby he wanted.”

There was a sudden bleating sound from her purse, and she reached in to turn off her beeper. “Is there a phone here?” she asked.

“I’m sure they’ll let you use the one inside.”

She stood up, straightening her spine and giving a slight toss to her shimmery dark hair as she walked into the restaurant, once again the competent doctor.

He picked apart his uneaten slice of bread and was feeding chunks of it to the geese by the time Olivia returned to the table and took her seat again.

“Do you have to go?” he asked.

She shook her head. “They can handle it without me.” She looked down at her shredded napkin, frowning, as though she had no idea how it had gotten there. She scooped the shreds and deposited them on her plate, giving him a rueful smile. “I’m sorry, Alec,” she said. “Next time I start babbling about my problems, shove a cork in my mouth, okay?”

“I don’t mind listening,” he said, dropping the last piece of bread into the water. The geese fought over it, noisily. “Your circumstances are very different from mine, but the bottom line is that we’re both alone. I know how that feels.”

She played with the straw in her iced tea, now that her napkin was no longer available. “When I start missing Paul, I think about you without Annie—without the possibility of Annie—and I…” She hesitated, shook her head. “I miss touching. I don’t mean sex, exactly, but just…holding hands, just that intimacy with another person. You don’t know how good you’ve got it till it’s gone.”

He nodded, and she leaned back in her chair and dropped her hands to her lap again.

“I’ve started getting massages just so I can feel someone touching me,” she said.

He smiled at her candor, and he understood what she meant. He wondered if she went to a man or a woman, or if it would matter, or if he should get a massage himself. How would it feel, paying someone to ease the pain of a body suffering from neglect?

They stopped for the light at the corner of Croatan and Ash on the way back to the studio, and Alec pointed down Ash toward the sound. “See the third cottage on the right?” he asked. “That was where Annie and I first lived when we moved here.” The small cottage stood on stilts above the sand. It was blackened with age; it had been black even when he and Annie lived there. “We didn’t have much money, as you can tell.”

Olivia was quiet as the Bronco began moving again, slowly, through the heavy summer traffic. “I started working at the shelter after the night Annie died,” she said finally.

He glanced over at her. “Why?” He hated that place.

She shrugged. “Well that was the first I’d become aware of its existence. My husband was gone and I had the time.” She looked over at him. “The staff still talk about Annie.”

He smiled. “Do they?”

“They adored her. They talk about how she was always full of ideas and how everyone depended on her creativity. The place is falling apart without her. At least that’s what they say.”

“Like my house,” he said, almost to himself.

He pulled into the studio parking lot. Olivia unbuckled her belt, but turned in her seat to face him. “What was she really like, Alec? When they talk about her at the shelter she sounds like she should be canonized.”

He laughed. “I doubt they canonize atheists.” He turned the air conditioner up another notch. “She had very strong values and she put her money where her mouth was, literally. She donated practically all the money she made to various causes. Animal rights, AIDS, the homeless, the right-to lifers.”