“Get her into the boat!” Pete shouted, and he and Daria pulled the woman from the plane and passed her to the men in the rescue boat. The boat sped off, and Andy drew his small craft close to them again.

“Get Shelly in first,” Daria said.

“She’s been in the water the longest.”

Shelly was weak now, and Andy had to pull her into the boat.

Daria could barely climb into the boat herself. Her feet were numb and her entire body trembled from exertion and anxiety. Pete pushed her, while Andy pulled. Pete was winded and exhausted when he managed to crawl into the boat himself.

Andy rowed the boat toward shore, and the breakers caught them and carried them onto the beach. They could hear shouting and, in the distance, the whirring of a helicopter.

Too late, Daria thought. She shook with the cold, and her legs threatened to give out from under her as she climbed out of the boat.

She was dressed only in her wet underwear, and she shivered as she staggered over to the cot where the medic was working on the pilot.

The young woman was intubated, bagged and hooked up to an ECG. Daria peered over the medic’s shoulder and saw the flat line on the ECG screen. The defibrillator paddles rested in the sand, obviously no longer needed. The pilot was dead, her brown eyes still open. Fighting tears, Daria turned away, but even with her own eyes shut, she could still see the pilot’s pleading gaze.

“Sorry, Dar.” Mike, who’d arrived with the ambulances, handed her a blanket.

“We’ll take over from here. Do you need a form for your field notes?”

Paperwork. How could Mike even think of that right now?

“I’ve got one in my car,” she said. She tried to wrap the blanket around herself, but her fingers would not do what she wanted them to, and Mike had to help her.

“You’re freezing,” Mike said.

“Go get warm.” He walked back to the ambulance, and she turned away from the scene. She was dazed and dizzy. Where was Pete? Where were Shelly and Andy? Her breath was like fire moving in and out of her chest, and her throat was tight with the need to cry. She hugged the blanket tighter around her body, then spotted someone in the crowd handing Andy a stack of towels. Shelly was near him, and he passed a couple of them to her. She clutched the towels to her chest, and even with the sparse lights from the ambulances, Daria could see her violent shivering. “Do you need a towel?” A woman walked up to Daria and pressed a couple of towels into her arms.

“Thanks,” Daria mumbled. She turned around again, looking for Pete, and finally saw him several yards away, his back to her. By the way he was bending over the water, she knew he was sick. She walked toward him and put one of the towels over his shoulders. He was trembling uncontrollably and didn’t even look at her as he took another towel from her arms and wiped his mouth with it.

She felt his need to be silent, to be asked no questions or receive no words of empty comfort. She rubbed his back through the towel as he stared at the ground, his breathing ragged.

Finally, he glanced at her, his gaze darting quickly to her face before turning out to sea. In the darkness, at least, it appeared the plane had disappeared.

“Do you know what happened out there?” he asked.

She was confused by the question.

“Do you mean… I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

He looked at her directly now, and his eyes were cold.

“Do you know why I yelled at Shelly when we were out there?”

She shook her head.

“I have no idea.”

“Your sister,” he said slowly, deliberately, “was leaning on the propeller, trying to see inside the plane. That’s what pulled the plane under. That’s why the pilot is dead.”

Daria was speechless.

“But when I turned to look at her, she was just treading water. I think she was trying to buoy the plane up.”

“After I yelled at her.”

“Yes,” Daria admitted. Horrified, the weight of his words sank in.

“I

can’t believe it,” she said. Surely Shelly would have known she was making matters worse by leaning on the propeller.

“Believe it,” Pete said.

“I was this close” -he held his thumb and forefinger apart by half an inch “—to freeing that woman—that girl—when the plane went under. Shelly has no common sense.”

“Oh, my God, this is horrible.” Daria thought of the report she would have to write on the accident and the debriefing that would occur the following day. What could she say happened? It would destroy Shelly to know her role in the pilot’s death.

Pete seemed to soften at seeing Daria’s distress. He put his arm around her.

“Look,” he said, his gaze toward the sea once again, his jaw tight.

“No one else knows what happened out there. Just you and me. Shelly doesn’t have a clue what she did. I doubt Andy realized what was going on, and there’s a good chance the plane would have gone down, anyway,” he conceded with a shrug.

“And maybe the pilot would have died no matter what we did. I think we should just keep this to ourselves.”

“I have to write a report,” Daria protested. “Then write it just as you would have without my input,” Pete said.

“Pretend I didn’t tell you anything.”

“It would kill Shelly if she…”

“I know,” Pete said.

“That’s why… you should just forget about what I said.”

She nodded woodenly. She had little choice, and what difference would it make now? The pilot was gone. Nothing would bring her back.

She spotted Shelly wandering among the thinning crowd, walked over to her and put an arm around her shivering shoulders.

“Come on, hon,” she said.

“My car’s at the cottage where I was working. I’ll drive you home after I write my report.”

They walked in silence to her car. Daria spotted Pete’s truck a few cottages down the street and wondered how long he would stay at the scene. Wrapped in the blanket, she sat in the driver’s seat and pulled the notebook containing her field-note forms from the back seat. She propped the notebook against her knees and started writing. The plane simply began sinking and the rescuers had been helpless to do anything about it, she wrote. She would have to recount the same story in her verbal debriefing the following day. This was the first time she had ever lied in the course of her job as an EMT, and she wondered if anything could ever ease the sick, guilty feeling in her gut.

When she finished the report and slipped it inside the notebook, she looked down the street to see that Pete’s truck was gone. He would have had to walk right past her car to get to it, and he had not even bothered to say goodbye. She was worried about him, as worried as she was about herself.

Neither she nor Shelly said a word on the drive home. The only sound inside the car was that of Shelly’s teeth chattering.

That night, after she and Shelly had eaten a quiet dinner in the kitchen of the Sea Shanty and fallen, exhausted, into bed, Pete called. Daria pulled the phone from her nightstand onto her pillow.

“How are you doing?” Pete asked.

“Not so great,” Daria said. Everything seemed wrong. She’d lied on a report. Shelly had unknowingly made a terrible mistake, a young woman had died a horrible death before her eyes. She stared at the darkened ceiling, the phone against her ear.

“I know,” Pete said.

“That was one ugly scene.”

“Mmm.”

She heard Pete draw in a breath.

“I think we need to talk about Shelly,” he said.

She stiffened. This would not be their first discussion about Shelly, but this time she knew he had the upper hand.

“I don’t want to,” she said.

“We have to,” Pete said.

“Today was a clear indication that she needs more than you can give her, Daria. I know you don’t want to hear that, but you have to face it. Her judgment is very poor. She needs a supervised living situation. You can see that now, can’t you? Daria?”

Daria closed her eyes.

“She’s staying with me.”

Pete sighed.

“I know why you want her to be placed somewhere,” Daria said.

“If she were in some … supervised-living situation, as you call it, then I’d be free to move to Raleigh with you.” Pete had been offered an administrative position with a large construction company in Raleigh, a job he really wanted, and he’d been begging Daria to come with him.

But when she’d agreed to marry him, she never thought it would mean leaving the Outer Banks. Leaving Shelly. She could not imagine Shelly ever being able to live on her own, but this supervised-living situation Pete kept pushing was out of the question. Those last few weeks, she’d been feeling torn down the middle between her sister and the man she wanted to marry. She could not move to Raleigh without Shelly, and Shelly would never leave the Outer Banks, the only place in the world she felt secure and safe.

“Well,” Pete said, “that would be a bonus. But I’m really thinking about what’s best for Shelly.”

“So am I,” Daria said.

Pete tried again.

“So what would happen,” he said, “if I agreed to have Shelly live with us, and” — “She would never move to Raleigh.”

“I know, I know,” Pete said.

“But speaking hypothetically, let’s say I did agree to have her live with us and then you and I had children.

After this incident today, I would never be comfortable leaving Shelly alone with our kids. “

That was ridiculous, Daria thought. Shelly was no danger to anyone.

Yet after what had happened that afternoon, how could she argue with him?

“Look, Daria,” Pete said with another sigh.

“I hadn’t wanted to make this into an ultimatum, but the more I think about this, and especially after today, the more I feel the need to press the issue. I really want that job in Raleigh. And I really want to marry you. But if you won’t move to Raleigh with me—and without Shelly—well, then, I don’t see how this is going to work out.”