“Neighbor.” The car bounced in a rut and he held on to the armrest.

“Where the hell are we going, Annie?”

She pointed into the darkness ahead of them and in a moment he saw a flash of light.

“A lighthouse?”

“The Kiss River Light. We’re going to visit the keeper.”

He fell silent, surrendering. He would let her be his guide.

She turned onto a dirt road and they bounced through the darkness for a few minutes before coming to a clearing. Annie pulled into a small area of packed sand close to the light and closer still to a large white house. Paul got out of the car and looked up at the dizzying tower above them just as the beam of light brushed over his eyes.

“It’s phenomenal,” he said.

“I know. Come on.” She took his hand and they walked up the brick path to the house. Lights were on in a few of the downstairs windows, but he couldn’t get a good look inside.

Annie knocked briskly on the door and after a moment it was opened by a tall, elderly woman dressed in a long dark skirt and white blouse.

“Come in, Annie,” she said, stepping aside.

“This is Paul Macelli, Mary. Paul, this is Mary Poor, the keeper of the incredible Kiss River Lighthouse.”

Paul nodded solemnly at Mary. What the hell was going on? Were they going to spend the evening talking with an old woman?

Annie kissed Mary’s cheek. “Do you need anything, sweetie?”

“No, no.” Mary waved her hand. “You go on up.”

Annie grabbed Paul’s hand and led him up the stairs to a small bedroom with a quilt-covered double bed. She closed the door and swung around to kiss him. “Oh, God, Paul you were so beautiful on that stage. I’d forgotten.” She started unbuttoning his shirt, but he caught her hands.

“Annie, I don’t understand…”

“Shh.” She pulled her own blouse, still buttoned, over her head and took off her bra. “Hold me,” she demanded, and he held her, the sun-filled scent of her hair achingly familiar, and the bare skin of her back warm against his hands. Every few seconds the white light of the beacon flooded the room, catching the red of her hair, the creamy whiteness of her skin, but otherwise it was too dark to see.

“Touch me,” she whispered. “Everywhere.”

He stripped off his own clothes and laid her down on the bed to carry out her order. Her body was more alive than he’d ever known it, and he did not like to think that he owed her new fervor to her husband. She wrapped her legs around him. “I need you close to me, Paul,” she said. “As close as you can get.”

He slipped inside her, briefly aware of the bed creaking, of the old woman downstairs, but surely Mary Poor knew what was going on up here. He put the sounds out of his mind and focused on Annie. He was with her, inside her, after all this time. She rocked with him, but when he slipped his hand between their bodies to touch her, she shook her head.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said.

He was insistent. Persistent. And finally she came, the spasms of her body propelling him over the edge.

He started to roll off her after a few minutes, but she held him fast. “No,” she said. “Stay close.”

“I love you, Annie.”

“Hold me.”

“I am. I’m right here.” He concentrated on holding her tightly enough to still the trembling in her body. Then he did roll off her, halfway, so that when the light filled the room he could see her face. “I don’t understand this arrangement, Annie,” he said. “The old woman…”

“Mary. She knows I need to see you. I visit her a lot when Alec works. I’ve told her all about you.”

“Can we meet again?”

“We have to. Afternoons might be better. Can you make it in the afternoon?”

“Of course. But let’s meet at my apartment.”

“No,” she said. “It has to be here. People might see me with you. A lot of people know me, Paul. I’m too familiar a face. Way out here, we’re safe.”

And so it continued. It was Paul’s most blissful summer, with the possible exception of the summer he had spent with her in New Hope. She would let him know in the mornings, by hanging a red scarf from the corner of the little front deck of her studio, whether she could meet him that day. She asked him never to come into the studio—she didn’t want to have to explain his presence to Tom Nestor.

A few times during the summer, he would see her from a distance with Alec. He spotted them together in the grocery store, and once throwing a frisbee on the beach. She laughed a lot with Alec, the dimples deep in her cheeks, and Paul would not be able to get the image out of his mind until he was with her again.

The scarf hung from the deck more often than not. Annie and Paul met at Mary’s house and spent the afternoons in the upstairs bedroom. They spoke often of the past, but never of the future. He was careful of his demands on her, but by the middle of the summer he could no longer tolerate the clandestine nature of their relationship. He wanted more.

“I think it’s time you left Alec,” he said one afternoon, after they had made love.

Annie’s head shot up from his shoulder. She looked stunned by his request. “I’ll never leave him, Paul. Never.”

“Why not? I could support you better. And Clay. I’d adopt Clay. I could…”

“Don’t talk that way!” She sat up. “You said you’d take whatever I was willing to give. This is it.”

“But I love you.”

“And I love Alec.”

For the first time, he was furious with her. He pushed her aside and got out of the bed, but she quickly grabbed his arm. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that to sound the way it did.”

“You hardly ever see him. He’s gone all the time, leaving you with a baby and…”

“Because he worries about money. It’s the only kind of work he can get right now. If we wanted to live in a city, he wouldn’t have to work so hard, but we want to live here. So that’s the price we have to pay.”

He looked down at her. “You’re using me.”

“No.”

“You are. I’m just filling a need when Alec’s not around, right? Good old Paul.”

“Don’t say that.” She began to cry, reaching for him, wrapping her arms around his waist, and he put the argument aside.

She held his hand when she walked him out to his car that night. “I’ll never leave Alec, Paul. If you want me on those terms, you can have me. Otherwise, don’t come here again.”

Of course he continued to come, enduring the knowing nod from Mary Poor, the telltale creaking of the bed. He never lost the hope that Annie would reconsider. The Lost Colony play closed on Labor Day and he got a job as a waiter in Manteo. It was hardly what he’d been trained to do, but he could not leave. Then things suddenly, abruptly changed.

For several days in a row, the red scarf did not appear. He worried she was ill, or angry with him, and he had made up his mind to call her when he spotted the scarf hanging once again from the corner of the deck. He drove to Kiss River that afternoon, greatly relieved.

“She’s upstairs,” Mary Poor said when she met Paul at the door. Paul could never look this woman squarely in the eye. He felt disliked by her, his presence merely tolerated. “She’s not feeling well.”

Annie looked terrible. Her hair was tied back and the skin around her eyes was puffy. There were lines in her face he had never noticed before, at the corners of her mouth and across her forehead.

“What’s wrong?” He touched her forehead for fever, but it was cool. “Poor Annie. You look awful.” He tried to draw her into his arms, but she pulled back.

“We can’t make love,” she said, sitting down on the bed.

“Of course not. Not with you feeling so bad.”

“No, that’s not it.” She was agitated. Hot-wired. “We need to talk.”

Alec must have found out. This would be it, then. Things were finally coming to a head and in the next few minutes, Paul would learn either that he had won or lost.

Annie kneaded her hands together in her lap. “I can’t do this anymore,” she said.

“What’s happened? Does Alec know?”

“No. I’m just…disgusted with myself.” With that she jumped up from the bed and ran down the hall to the tiny upstairs bathroom. He heard her getting sick. He thought then of how she wouldn’t let him use rubbers because they could interfere with his pleasure. She’d assured him, though, that he didn’t need to worry, that she had replaced the strange bevy of birth control devices she’d used in college with a diaphragm. Exactly how foolproof was a diaphragm?

Her skin was damp and gray when she returned to the room. He forced her into his arms, and she clung to him, weeping.

“You’re pregnant.” He spoke quietly into her hair.

“No!” She pulled away, wild-eyed. “Please Paul, just leave the Outer Banks and don’t come back.”

“I won’t go. Not until you tell me what’s wrong.”

“Please.” She started sobbing, far too loudly. She pleaded with him to leave, all the while clutching his arm. He heard Mary Poor’s slow footsteps on the stairs, and he grabbed Annie’s hands to try to calm her as the door swung open.

Mary walked into the room, and suddenly she did not seem the old woman Paul had thought her to be. She stood very tall, a light burning in her blue eyes. “Get out now and stop upsetting her,” she said. She sat down on the bed and pulled Annie’s head against her shoulder, and Annie clung to her. “Hush, Annie. You’ll make yourself sick again.” Mary looked up at Paul. “Get out,” she said, her voice soft now, not unkind, and Paul felt his own tears starting.

“Don’t I have a right to know why?”

“Leave now,” Mary said.

Annie clung more tightly to Mary, drawing her knees up, trying to fit all of herself into the protection of the old woman’s arms, and Paul had no choice but to leave. He returned to his apartment, where he packed up his belongings. He left the Outer Banks that same night, after taping his family’s address and phone number in Philadelphia to the door of Annie’s studio.