“Shall I read it to you?” he asked, and he began reading without waiting for her reply. “Olivia Simon, one of the Kill Devil Hills Emergency Room physicians vying for the position of medical director, was involved in a cover-up in the death of one of the Outer Banks’ most beloved citizens, Annie Chase O’Neill. So states Dr. Jonathan Cramer, another emergency room physician who is also in the running for the director’s position. ‘Dr. Simon has made serious mistakes in judgment,’ Cramer said yesterday. ‘She often acts as though she owns the emergency room.’ He cited in particular the O’Neill case. Ms. O’Neill was shot last Christmas while working as a volunteer at the Manteo Battered Women’s Shelter. Cramer stated that, ‘in that type of case, usual procedure is to stabilize the patient and send them by helicopter up to Emerson Memorial, where they have the facilities to deal with severe trauma. We can’t handle that sort of thing here. I argued that we should prepare the patient for transport, but Dr. Simon insisted we treat her in the ER. Annie O’Neill didn’t stand a chance.’”

“Oh, Alec, that’s crazy,” Olivia said, but Alec continued reading, and Olivia knew this one article was enough to kill any chance she’d had at the directorship position.

“Dr. Simon worked in the emergency room of Washington General in the District of Columbia for ten years prior to coming here. ‘She’s used to the heavy stuff in D.C.,’ Cramer said. ‘She doesn’t understand the limitations of a small facility like this.’

“Michael Shelley, current director of the free-standing emergency room, denied any cover-up and said the entire case was being blown out of proportion. Dr. Simon could not be reached for comment.

“Because,” Alec said with a biting touch of sarcasm, “as we all know, Dr. Simon had unplugged her phone.” He dropped the paper on the coffee table and stared at her. “Why didn’t you tell me there was some question about how to treat her?” he asked. “Why did you hide the facts from me?”

Olivia sank wearily into the nearest chair and looked up at him. He stood in the center of the room, directly in the light spilling from the kitchen, like an actor caught in the spotlight.

“Alec,” she shook her head. “There was no cover-up. I didn’t tell you there was a question about treating her because in my mind there was no question. Jonathan Cramer dislikes me and he’s afraid I might be selected over him for the director spot. He’s looking for a way to hurt me.”

“Right this minute I don’t give a damn what he’s doing to you,” he said. “I want to know what happened to my wife.”

“I’ve explained everything that hap…”

“You made it sound like you only had one option.”

“I felt like I did.”

He paced, out of the spotlight, into it again. “It’s always struck me as insane—the idea of one lone physician performing open heart surgery, whether you had the necessary instruments or not. I tried to put that thought out of my mind, but this article just…” He shook his head and turned to look at her again. “Why didn’t you send her up to Emerson?”

This way her blood’s on your hands.

“I didn’t think she could possibly make it, and…”

Alec gestured toward the newspaper on the coffee table. “This guy obviously thought her chances were better if she went up, and he’d been working there longer than you. Didn’t you stop to consider that he might have known what he was talking about?”

“I really thought that surgery…”

“You don’t do that kind of surgery in that kind of setting, Olivia. You don’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to figure that out. You’d intubate her, put a couple of IV lines in her, and get her out of there as fast as you could.” He stood directly above her now, and his voice had risen, hurting her ears. “If you’d sent her to Emerson, maybe she would have had a chance. Maybe she’d still be alive.”

Tears spilled over Olivia’s cheeks. She looked up at Alec. “Jonathan was scared,” she said. “He’d never seen that kind of wound before, and he had no idea what to do with it. Think about it, Alec. Please. She had two holes in her heart. Jonathan neglected to mention that to the press. How do you stabilize a person with two holes in her heart? I had no choice but to operate. She would have died in that helicopter. I have absolutely no doubt about it. She was losing blood so quickly.”

Olivia paused. Above her, Alec was breathing hard, his eyes still narrowed, angry, but he was listening to her, hearing her out.

“Jonathan walked out on me when I said we should operate. He left me alone to take care of her. I realized that I was taking a risk when I elected to do surgery, especially by myself. Maybe it was crazy of me to try. I knew I was walking a fine line, legally and medically. But not ethically.” She brushed the back of her hand across her wet cheek. “Sending her up, making her someone else’s responsibility, would have been the easy way out, but she would have died. I did what I thought was right, and if we could have somehow closed that hole in the back of her heart she might very well have made it.” Her hand started to throb, her fingers grew hot with the memory. She looked up at Alec again. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

His chest rose and fell rapidly with his breathing, but his eyes had softened while she spoke. He reached down to touch her shoulders, pulling her up to him, pulling her silently into his spotlight, into his arms.

“You don’t know how hard it was, Alec,” she whispered against his shoulder. “You can’t know.”

“I’m sorry.” He kissed the top of her head. “I’m really sorry, Olivia. I read that article and just…lost it. I thought you’d lied to me. Kept things from me.” He sighed. “I guess I still need someone to blame.”

She pulled her head away to look at him. “Please, Alec, talk to Mike Shelley. Talk to the nurses who were on duty that night. I need you to believe me.”

“I do,” he said. “I believe you.” He pulled her head to his shoulder again and held her that way for a minute, maybe longer. She closed her eyes, gradually becoming aware of the depth and pace of his breathing. He drew away from her slightly, tipping her head back with his fingers to kiss her temple, her eyes, her wet cheeks, and she turned her head to catch his next kiss on her lips.

His anger was gone, and in its place was a heat. He slipped his hands between them and untied the sash to her robe, letting it fall open a few inches. Then he stepped back and stroked the back of his fingers between her breasts.

“This is nice,” he said, tracing the line of her gold chain with his fingertip. He pulled off his T-shirt and opened her robe further, until the satin had slipped over her breasts and she was bathed in the white light coming from the kitchen. Her body was so hungry for this. Alec raised his hands to her breasts, and she arched forward to meet the lightness of his touch.

He lifted the robe from her shoulders and let it drop to the floor in a soft pile around her feet. She was melting, liquid. She drew her hand to the front of his shorts, tentatively resting the back of her fingers against the unmistakable firmness of his erection beneath the cloth.

“Yes,” he said, his breath warm against her ear. “Please.”

She turned her hand and felt a tremor run through his body as he pressed hard against her palm. He lowered his hands from her breasts, and she parted her legs slightly, waiting for his touch, aching for it, but his fingers froze on the swollen rise of her belly, and everything in him seemed to cool at that moment. She tightened her hand on him, but he was already drawing away from her, and he slipped his fingers into hers and lifted them up, holding them just below his chin. The light from the kitchen glimmered on his braided gold wedding band. He looked at her squarely.

“What are we doing, Olivia?” He shook his head. “I mean, you’re a married woman. I feel like I’m still married. Your husband’s a friend of mine. You’re going to have his baby.”

His hair brushed her thigh as he bent down to pick up her robe. He slipped it onto her arms and up over her shoulders, closing it across her breasts, tying the sash. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment that he, not she, had been the one to stop. She had been so eager, so willing.

She hugged her arms across her chest as he looked into her eyes, his face once again as serious, as unsmiling as when she first met him.

“Maybe we’d better not see each other for a while,” he said. “Today was a little too intense, all the way around. It was one thing when I felt as though we were just friends, but friends don’t do what we just did and it’s… You’re vulnerable, I’m vulnerable. I’m working with your husband…” He stared at her in exasperation. “Olivia, say something.”

She looked down at the floor, still hugging her arms. My husband made love to your wife. The words were so close; she could barely hold them in. She wanted him to understand why that night in the ER had been so hard. She wanted him to share the pain with her.

“All right,” she said, raising her head, but she found she could not look at him, and she bent down instead to pick up his T-shirt.

He pulled the shirt over his head. “I’d better go,” he said. She followed him to the door, her legs shaking, and a great, vast hollowness in her chest. Her head was light. She wondered if she was about to be sick.

Alec opened the door and turned to look at her, the porch light catching the pale blue of his eyes. “Maybe you should come to the lighthouse meetings,” he said. He reached forward to lightly touch her arm. “It would help me to see you and Paul together, and it would probably be good for the two of you. You know, a shared interest.”