Still, she didn’t budge from the bathroom. She stayed there so long that Sam finally knocked on the door. “Noelle? You okay?” he asked.

She splashed water on her face and walked out of the room into the hallway. “I’m all right.” She didn’t look at him. She wasn’t sure what was written in her face, but she didn’t want him to read it.

“Tara and Emerson wanted to say goodbye.”

“I just…I was nauseous for a minute.”

Sam looked at his watch. “I can’t believe it’s only two,” he said. “It feels like days since that call came this morning.”

“I know.” She felt him staring at her. “I’m going to read in my room for a while,” she said.

“Sure you’re okay?” he asked.

“Are any of us okay right now?”

He shook his head. “I guess not,” he said, but he was looking at her with a mixture of worry and curiosity, and she had to turn away.

She wanted to call her mother to tell her what had happened and yet she wasn’t ready. She would cry too hard and her mother would worry about her, but Noelle knew she would not be able to sympathize. Not the way she needed her to. Her mother already had such mixed feelings about Noelle’s secret closeness to her biological family.

She picked up the phone a few times and started to dial the number at Miss Wilson’s, but each time she put the receiver down again. Finally, she walked out to the beach where Sam was sitting in a beach chair, an open book resting on his bare thighs. She knelt in the sand next to his chair as if she were about to pray. She wrapped her hands around his arm, warm beneath her palms.

“Can I talk to you?” she asked.

He set down his book, and although she couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses she saw the concern in his face. “Of course you can talk to me,” he said.

She reached forward to lift his sunglasses to his forehead. “I can’t see your eyes,” she said. “I need to see them.”

He squinted, studying her for a moment. “Are you all right?”

She shook her head.

“Let’s go inside.” He handed her his book, then stood and folded his chair. He carried the chair in one hand and put his other arm around her shoulders as they walked back to the cottage.

Noelle’s throat felt tight and achy. Could she do this? Could she tell someone? Would she be able to get the words out? Should she?

Sam motioned to the rockers on the screened porch and they sat down. “Talk to me,” he said.

She opened her mouth, but her throat locked tight around her voice and she lowered her face to her hands. Sam pulled his rocker right in front of hers and she felt his hands on either side of her head, his lips against her temple. It was exactly what she needed. The comfort of a friend. The comfort of a friend she knew loved her.

She lifted her head, wiping her tears with her fingers, and Sam sat back in his rocker, unsmiling. He rested his fingertips on her bare knee as he waited for her to get her emotions under control.

“What I say now…” She shook her head. Tried again. “If I tell you something, Sam, can you promise me you’ll never tell anyone? Not even Tara. Not ever.”

He hesitated, a line of worry between his eyebrows. “Yes,” he said. “I promise.”

Noelle licked her lips. “Emerson is my half sister,” she said.

The line in his forehead deepened. “She’s…” He cocked his head to the side as though he must have misunderstood her. “What are you talking about?”

“Her mother was my mother.”

“But I’ve met your mother,” he said.

“You’ve met my adoptive mother.”

Her meaning was slowly sinking in. He rocked back in his chair. “Holy shit,” he said.

“No one knows,” she said. “Only my adoptive mother and me. And now you.”

She explained everything. The file she’d found. How she’d felt when she saw Emerson’s name on the list of students at Galloway. How her mother made her swear she would never tell any of this to a soul.

“Was it legal?” Sam asked. “Your adoption?”

“Yes, although there might have been some…I think my parents got some preferential treatment because my mother was involved in my birth. I don’t know. At this point, it really doesn’t matter.”

“So you… Shit.” His eyes widened. “You lost your biological mother this morning and you can’t tell anyone.”

She felt her lower lip tremble. “Except you.”

“Your father,” he asked. “Do you know who…?”

She looked down at her knees where his tan fingers still rested against her fair skin and shook her head. “Some boy she met at a party,” she said. “I don’t even have a name for him.” She pounded her own knee with her fist. “That was my grandfather at the door earlier!” she said. “My grandfather. And I just stood there staring at him.”

“I’m so sorry, Noelle,” Sam said.

“I don’t exist for that family. I couldn’t say anything.”

“Maybe…” Sam looked through the screens toward the beach. “You know how sometimes women who relinquish their kids for adoption later agree to have the records unsealed if both parties want to—”

“She didn’t,” Noelle said. “I’ve checked. I’m just a giant hideous reminder of a mistake she made. That’s all right. I have a great mother, so I lucked out. But I thought I’d…” Her voice broke and she struggled to go on. “I thought I’d get to meet my birth mother someday,” she said. “I thought there was time.”

Sam stood and held out his hand. “Come here,” he said, and when she stood, he closed his arms around, holding her while she cried. There were men who would be afraid of what she’d told him, she thought. Men who’d fear that level of intimacy or who’d crumble under the weight of such a monumental secret. But Sam felt like a pillar beneath her arms. Someone she could lean on. Someone she could talk to about anything. Her biggest wishes. Her worst secrets. Someone she’d be able to talk to. Always.

They spent the next three days together in the cottage. Tara would return on the evening of the third day, though Emerson would stay with her relatives in California another week. Noelle would always treasure those three days with Sam—days of a friendship that deepened by the hour. The only difficult thing was that she knew there was only one Sam and he was not hers. She’d always thought she could live without a man, easily. This man, though, she was not so sure she could live without.

By the morning of the third day, she’d found her smile again. She and Sam had cooked together, gone out to eat one night, rubbed sunscreen on each other’s backs, swam in the sea and talked and talked and talked. The words felt like an aphrodisiac to Noelle, but she fought back the desire. He was not hers. Don’t ever hurt another woman the way Doreen hurt me, her mother had told her. Never, she thought, lying in her bed at night, wishing Sam could be beside her. Never.

“I want you to know something,” he said to her the night before Tara returned. They’d built a small illegal fire on the beach and were toasting marshmallows on bamboo skewers they’d found in the cottage.

“What’s that?” Noelle nibbled the gooey white candy from the skewer.

“That I love you.” Sam had his eyes on his skewer instead of on her. “But Tara is it for me. I think you know that.” He glanced at her.

She felt dizzy from the heat of the night as well as from his admission.

“I love you, too,” she said.

He nodded. That was no surprise to him. “You understand how it is with Tara and me, don’t you? Our history. And how we’ve always just known we’d be together.”

She nodded. “I love Tara, too,” she said honestly. “If I can’t have you, I’d want her to have you.”

“The sort of life I want, I can have with her.” He seemed lost in his own thoughts. “A normal, settled-down kind of life.”

She felt the slightest sliver of pain. “What am I?” She smiled. “A freak?”

He laughed. “You’re different, Noelle. Wonderfully different. You’re never going to want the big house and the white picket fence and the two kids and a dog.”

She wondered if that was really what he wanted. There was a very large part of Sam Vincent that was not a white-picket-fence sort of guy. But she didn’t want to hurt him or Tara, and debating the merits of a settled-down life with him could only lead down that path.

“Just be my forever friend, okay?” she asked.

He held his skewer in front of her, offering her the perfect golden marshmallow. “You’ve got it,” he said.

She slipped the marshmallow from the skewer with her fingertips and popped it into her mouth, feeling proud of herself for not asking more of Sam, proud of herself for not hurting Tara, not daring to think that forever was a long, long time.



24

Tara


Wilmington, North Carolina

2010

Noelle’s house looked sad to me as I pulled into the drive way. The painters had scraped much of the blue from the front of the cottage and the siding was mottled and ugly. The sun had just risen, glowing pink in the windows. It was Saturday and I didn’t know if the painters were working today. I hoped not. I was here to work on the garden and I wanted the time to think.

Emerson had found Anna. She was the head of a missing children’s organization, which made her into a real human being to me, a woman who’d lived through an unimaginable horror and come out of it strong and determined. I’d felt sick to my stomach when Emerson called to tell me what she’d learned. With each new piece of information, this woman’s story was going to feel more real and our need to do something about it more inescapable. Emerson was coming over to my house that afternoon and we’d figure out what to do next. I knew she regretted ever opening that box of letters.