She found his room easily. First floor, oceanfront. They could leave the sliding glass doors open and listen to the sea. She’d gotten the number from Tara, telling her she needed to talk to him about a midwifery case. She hated lying to Tara about why she wanted Sam’s room number. Somehow the lie felt even worse than what she was doing now. But Tara, ever trusting, bought her excuse. It wouldn’t be the first time Noelle had consulted with Sam about one of her patients. He was focusing on health law, which pleased her, and she liked to think she had something to do with his choice since she was always bending his ear with her concerns about child and maternal health. When the five of them got together, she and Sam often wound up talking shop while everyone else discussed wedding plans or the real-estate market. She felt closer to him than ever. He was the only person who knew that she was Emerson’s sister, the only person she could ever talk to about how that relationship gave her both joy and pain.

She knocked on the door to his room, then waited in the silence. Nothing. She knocked again, harder.

Sam pulled the door open and she knew she’d awakened him. His dark hair was tousled, his jeans unsnapped, his chest bare. His eyes widened when he saw her, his lashes so long that they cast shadows on his cheeks from the hallway lights.

“What’s wrong?” he said. “Is Tara all right?”

“Everyone’s fine,” she said. “I just wanted to see you.”

He hesitated a moment, and she knew he was trying to make sense of what she’d said. What she was doing here at two in the morning, two weeks before his wedding.

Reaching for her wrist, he drew her into the room. She walked straight to the unmade side of his bed and sat down on the edge. She felt the light from the night table pool over her and wondered what he saw in her face.

He looked at her, hands on his hips, and for the briefest of moments, neither of them spoke.

“Ah, Noelle,” he said, finally. The words sounded tired. They sounded a little bit like surrender. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to keep you from making a mistake,” she said. “A mistake for both you and Tara. And for me.” She swallowed. For the first time since making the decision to come here, she felt nervous.

He looked toward the curtained sliding glass doors. “I don’t want to have this conversation in here.” He nodded toward the bed as if it could overhear them. He switched off the lamp, then began opening the curtains. Beyond the glass, she could see the white ripple of waves as they rushed toward the shore. Sam snapped his jeans, then slid open one of the doors. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

She slipped off her sandals and dangled them from her fingertips as she followed him out to the patio. They climbed over the iron railing and crossed the grass to the beach where the air was dark and balmy, filled with salt and the rush and fall of the waves. A crescent moon bisected the ocean with a sliver of light. He took her hand. Yes. She’d needed that. Needed to know he wasn’t angry that she’d come.

“No babies tonight?” he asked.

“None. Last night, I delivered my doula’s first.” It had been a peaceful birth in the small candlelit bedroom Suzanne shared with her husband, Zeke, who had been by her side every minute. The infant with the big name, Cleveland Ezekiel Johnson, had slipped into Noelle’s hands with such ease for a first baby. “It went very well.” Now Emerson was talking about a home delivery. Being the midwife of a relative was frowned upon, but the thought of delivering her own niece or nephew made Noelle smile. No one—except Sam—would be any the wiser.

“You’ll be there for Tara and me when we’re ready,” Sam said, like a test. “Right?”

She focused on the way his hand felt in hers. “Sam,” she said, “you can change your mind. People do it. People realize they’re making mistakes that will impact so many people for the rest of their lives. You can—”

“Shh.” He squeezed her hand hard. “Please, just…don’t mess with my head, all right? I’ve thought about it inside out and backward these past couple of years, Noelle. You know that. You know I’ve wrestled with this and I’ve made a choice. Please respect it.”

“You love me,” she said.

He didn’t deny it. “There’s more to consider than love,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“I love Tara, too, and we’re better matched than you and I are. You know that. I want a house in the burbs. I want—”

“The white picket fence. The dog. The kids. I know you say that, but—”

“You’re one of the best people I know.” He interrupted her. “On the scale of incredible women, you’re up there with Tara. In some ways, you even top her. But she wants the same life I want, Noelle. Admit it to me. You don’t want to entertain a roomful of lawyers, do you? You don’t want to do the Wilmington social scene, the things I’ll need to do—my wife will need to do—for my career.”

She didn’t answer. It was all true. She didn’t want any of that, but she believed with all her heart that, deep down, Sam didn’t want it, either.

He stopped walking, turning to face her. She saw the moon—two little silver crescents—reflected in his eyes. “You’re a fantasy,” he said, “and Tara’s my reality. With you…I always feel as though if I touch you, my hand will pass right through you. Like you’re an apparition.”

She lifted his hand, slid it beneath her shirt to her bare breast. “Does this feel like an apparition?” she asked. She let go of his hand but he didn’t lower it. She felt his thumb graze her nipple and knew he was making a decision. She knew in her heart, though, it wasn’t a decision that would erase the wedding coming up in two weeks. He was making a decision for tonight. For right now.

He leaned forward, pressing his lips against hers. She felt his erection through his jeans, through her skirt. Right now was not what she’d come here for. She wanted forever. Yet as her nipple tightened beneath the touch of his fingers and her heartbeat thrummed between her legs, she forgot about forever. She would take whatever he would give her tonight. It would have to last all their lives, through his world of picket fences and expensive haircuts and clean, pressed suits and her world of patchwork furniture and middle-of-the-night runs filled with blood and birth. If tonight was all she could have of him, she would make it worth remembering.

They lay on their backs in the sand afterward, staring at the bowl of stars above them. They’d rolled her skirt up to form a pillow beneath her head and Sam rested his own head on his jeans. She could feel spray from the waves on her bare skin as she rolled toward him, running her hand across his chest. “Are you all right?” she asked.

He didn’t answer, but he sank his fingers gently into her hair. “I should feel worse than I do,” he said finally.

“You feel guilty for not feeling guilty?” She smiled.

“I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. You know, I’ve never cheated on Tara. In the seven years we’ve been together. Never.”

“Don’t use that word. Cheat. Please.”

“This…you understand this doesn’t change anything?” His chin brushed her temple as he spoke.

“It changes something for me,” she said. “It gives me a memory to hold on to.”

He curled a strand of her hair around his finger. “You could have any of a hundred men who want you,” he said. “Ian, for example.”

She ignored the comment. She knew Sam’s new law partner had a thing for her, but the attraction was one-sided. Ian was nice enough, good-looking in a clean-cut sort of way and smart as a whip. She’d considered sleeping with him, but thought that might be a mistake. He was the type who’d want more, and the truth was, if she was going to be with a man for anything long term, he would need to be a Sam clone, and Ian wasn’t.

“I don’t want you to worry about this,” she said. “About tonight. I’m not going to ask anything of you like this, ever again. If you feel sure you’re doing the right thing by marrying Tara, I’ll support that one hundred percent because I love you both.” She heard the crack in her voice, completely unexpected. Sam rubbed her shoulder. “I’ll go out with Ian a few times and give him a chance, okay?”

“Good,” he said. “You’ll make him a happy man.”

She sat up with a sigh and reached for her clothes. “I should go,” she said, pulling her blouse over her head. She stood and dusted the sand from her thighs as Sam began to dress. It was good she had done this, she thought. Yes, she’d betrayed one of her closest friends and she knew that would haunt her, but she’d needed to do it to let Sam go. Otherwise, she’d be mooning over him for years. Decades. And that could only have been more harmful to her friendship with Tara in the long run. Now she was finished, she told herself as she slipped into her skirt. This chapter of longing was closed.

She pointed toward the parking lot behind the Blockade Runner. “My car’s on this end of the lot,” she said.

He put his arm around her as they walked across the sand. His silence worried her, but once they reached her car he hugged her, holding her for a long time, and she pressed her hands flat against his bare back. “No regrets, Sam,” she said. “Please.”

He pulled away from her slowly, running his palm down the length of her arm before opening her car door for her. “Be well,” he said.

“You, too.” She sat down behind the wheel and, without looking back at him, drove away.

Her tears surprised her with how quickly they came. Her body convulsed with them as she drove and she could barely see the road in front of her. The night was inky black as she crossed the bridge to the mainland, and when she stopped at a red light she could see no other cars on the road at all. She pressed her hands to her face, wishing she could escape from her body.