“Do you know what she did?” I ask Damien, after I’ve told him all of that. “She came home from school the next day with a tiny jar of lime green paint she’d swiped from the high school art department.” I blink back the tears that have gathered with the memory. “She told me I needed some green, and so we painted a tiny green square right behind my bedside table, and then we took a pencil eraser and wrote our initials in the paint. It would have been right about here,” I say, leading him to the far side of the room and pointing to a pile of boxes.

He bends, moves a couple of the boxes aside, and then crooks his finger for me to join him. I do, then suck in a breath when I see what he’s found. It’s been covered, but I can still clearly see the hint of a green square beneath the flat white. And in the middle—more texture than image—are the initials NF and AF.

My knees go weak, and I let myself slump to the ground, Damien’s arms going around me to cushion my fall.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” I murmur, my back to his chest.

“I’ll never be anywhere else.”

I nod, acknowledging the simple truth that is the shining miracle of my life as I lean back against him, grateful for his warmth and strength.

“I don’t want to remember,” I admit. “And yet just being here—it’s all coming back. Good. Bad. It’s crashing over me like waves. All these memories, and I don’t have the strength to stop them coming.”

“Then don’t,” he says. “Let go, baby. Let the tide take you. I’ll be your tether. I’ll always pull you back home.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, lost in the magic of his words. In the promise that he will always protect me. That he’ll always love me.

A shiver cuts through me. Not from a chill. Not from fear. But from the simple realization that I should have known that kind of all-encompassing, unrelenting love from my mother. But I’d had to find it in my sister. In my friends.

In Damien.

“My mother didn’t have a clue,” I whisper. “Not even an inkling of how to be a mother.”

The tears flow freely now as I recall the day I got the phone call that Ashley was dead. My mother’s flat voice that she’d killed herself. And not flat with regret or mourning, but with disapproval. As if Ashley hadn’t lived up to expectations.

The irony, of course, was that it was expectations and insecurities that had killed my sister. Her deep-seated certainty that she had no clue how to be a wife. That when her husband left her for another woman, it was proof that she was a failure—just like my mother had always said.

She’d killed herself because she’d believed she was nothing. But to me, Ashley had been everything.

“We were sitting here when she told me she was going to get married. On the floor beside my bed. And she said she was going to have a good life and be a better mom than ours.”

My words tumble out as fast as my tears. I love Ronnie and Jeffery, my niece and nephew, but Ashley’s child should have come first. I wanted so badly to be Aunt Nikki. To be the very best aunt ever, just like Ashley had said. “She never got the chance.”

Suddenly, the loss of my sister is like a physical pain in my chest. I turn in Damien’s arms, bury my face against his chest, and sob.

I’d come to this house wanting to exorcise my demons, but now it seems like the ghosts are everywhere.

I gulp in air, then try to force words out past my tear-clogged throat. “Please,” I beg. “Please, can we just get out of here?”

“We’re already gone.” He kisses me gently, then takes my elbow to lead me out of the room. But I just stand there beside him for a moment, hating how weak and fragile I feel. I try to gather myself, determined to get out of this house without Caroline or Misty seeing any evidence of pain on my face.

And yet I can’t manage. My knees are weak. My skin clammy. I start to take a step to the door, but the world seems to turn inside out, and me along with it.

I have only enough time to look up at Damien—to see the worry etched on his face—before the grayness takes over, and I collapse into my husband’s arms.

3

“Nikki!”

Damien’s voice—tense, afraid—seems to wrap around me. Something tangible that, maybe, I can cling to. That I can use to pull myself back.

“Sweetheart? Baby? Come on. That’s it. You can do it.”

I feel the warmth of his body surrounding me. Cradling me. His words are soft with encouragement, but the gentleness only hides an undercurrent of fear. I imagine his face in front of me, coming in and out of shadows.

Then I realize that it’s not my imagination. Instead, my eyelids are fluttering open, my body trying to return to normal even though my mind is still lost in this odd netherworld where time seems so painfully slow and Damien’s arms so deliciously warm.

“That’s it, baby. You’re going to be fine.” I see the worry that tightens the lines around his mouth. That sharpens the amber of one eye and transforms the onyx depths of the other into a hopeless abyss. Then he turns to speak to someone else, his voice low and strained. “Where the hell is the damned ambulance?”

“On its way. I think I can hear the siren.” Caroline stands behind him. Her brow is furrowed, and she’s twisting her hands. Farther back, Misty clings to her little boy, her expression pinched, and I wonder if she is concerned about me or about what her new neighbors will think.

I hear the approach of sirens, too, and despite the summer heat, my skin prickles from the ice water that suddenly floods my veins, the chill pushing me all the way into consciousness. With a vague sense of wonder, I realize we’re back on the front lawn. But I have no idea how we got here.

“What happened?” My voice is raspy, but it’s enough to send relief washing over the three faces around me.

Carolyn steps forward, and though she puts her hand on Damien’s shoulder, her eyes are on me. “Nikki, sweetie, it’s going to be okay. It’s probably just the heat. Nothing to worry about at all.”

I try to push myself more upright. It’s harder than it should be—I’m light-headed and unsteady—and when I see fresh worry on Damien’s face, I stop trying and simply let him hold me. “I fainted?” Of course, I did, but the thought is so startling that I can’t help but state the obvious as a question.