Island Of Second Chances

“You’re still on me about Halloween? I was eight. You were six. We were kids.”

Mark shrugged. “The story just seems relevant, considering you always wanted what I had.”

Edward exhaled. “Look, I know you’re pissed at me, but—”

“Pissed at you?” He took off his work gloves in jagged, angry movements and tossed them on his workbench. “I’m not pissed at you. I can’t stand to look at you. You screwed me out of my business and you screwed my wife.”

“She’s your ex-wife now.” Edward sounded stoic, even steely. Not even an inkling of regret. None. “And you know why she made that choice. After what you did to her.”

Mark felt a pang of guilt. He knew what he did, and he knew why he did it. I never meant her any harm, but something had to be done.

“You know why I did that. And deflecting this back to me is still not an apology. For God’s sake. She’s pregnant with your baby.”

Edward visibly flinched.

“Didn’t think I knew?” Mark challenged him. “Did you forget how small this island is? How people talk?”

“I...” Now Edward was on his heels. “I was going to tell you.”

“Uh-huh. Sure you were.” Mark ground his teeth together. His heart pounded in his chest and he felt hot and cold all over. Mark hated the anger that bubbled up inside him, that threatened to take over, that bleached the already bright sand at his feet a starker white. He wanted to punch his older brother in the face, craved to see the shock and pain flood his features. He wanted to yell until his voice gave out, but he also knew there’d be no point. Edward never listened.

Edward let out a long, weary-sounding sigh. Since when did he get to sound exasperated? He wasn’t the one betrayed by the only family he had left.

“I came with a peace offering,” Edward said, holding up a manila folder. “It’s a contract. You should come back to work with Tanner Boating.” He nodded at Mark’s husk of a boat in the sand. “This isn’t good for you. For your head or your bank account. Restoring that old hunk of junk is a waste of time.”

Just when Mark thought Edward couldn’t tick him off any more, somehow his brother found a way to do it. He felt the fury grow hot inside him.

This was the boat that belonged to their father, and it wasn’t much, but it was his. That’s why it made it all the more important to restore it. For Timothy. And how dare Edward ask him back, as if he’d ever in a million years work under his brother?

“Not interested.” Mark turned his back on his brother, signaling the conversation was over. It had to be over, before Mark really lost it and did punch his brother in the face. He might be friends with the St. Anthony’s police chief, but he doubted that even he could worm his way out of an assault charge.

“Mark, look, bud, come on. Come back to work for me. You can help Tanner Boating build the fastest boat on the island. We’re going to win the St. Anthony’s Race again this year. We’re going to break the island record.”

Mark clenched his fist. “No, you’re not. I’m going to win that race. And the prize money.” A hundred thousand dollars.

“You don’t have enough time to finish this, and you’re just one person. Come on, come join our team.”

“I’m never going to work for you,” Mark ground out between clenched teeth. Why did Edward never realize when he stood on thin ice? “I’m going to build this ship. I’m going to win that prize money and I’m going to sail around the world. For Timothy. That’s what I’m going to do.”

He left out the part that he might not come back. Why go there? Edward wouldn’t care anyway.

Edward just shook his head. “You can’t do it by yourself.”

“I’m not. I have friends.” Mark thought about Dave and Garrett. They’d help him. They promised.

“Are you sure you can count on them?” Edward asked him, making Mark doubt himself for a second. Was that a threat? Had Edward somehow gotten to his friends? No. Dave would stay true. They’d known each other twenty years. When Mark and Elle had been married, Dave and his wife would do everything together with them. That kind of friendship didn’t just disappear overnight, did it?

Edward dropped the manila folder down on the worktable. “I’m going to leave this in case you change your mind.”

“I won’t.”

Edward clucked his tongue in disapproval and left. Mark’s hands shook with anger as he clenched them into fists. He listened as his brother’s steps faded away, and then he knocked the manila folder off the table, papers flying everywhere. The ocean breeze kicked up then, scattered them everywhere.

Mark knew his brother spoke some truth; he was just one person and he could only work so fast. The competition was in two months and he wasn’t sure he had enough daylight between now and then to get it done. If he didn’t, the Timothy would never even leave the beach.

Dave and Garrett would help him finish it. He texted the two of them, asking to meet this week. Plan, strategize and figure out how to make this boat faster than Edward’s.

Taking the Timothy out to sea on an extended voyage was the only way Mark could think of to keep his boy’s memory alive, to make sure he was not truly forgotten, even as his own memories grew dim. That’s why it was more important than ever that he focus, that he work harder and longer and that he get this done.

* * *

LAURA GLARED OUT her balcony sliding glass door, doubting for a minute whether or not she should’ve even come to St. Anthony’s. Did I make a mistake?

She thought about how she’d cashed in her 401(k). It’s done now, she thought. She’d already be paying the penalty on the money, even if she put it all back tomorrow. Besides, any time she thought about packing up her things and heading back to San Francisco, she just got nauseous.

The entire town reminded her of Dean. She couldn’t leave her apartment without being flooded with a hundred unwanted memories. The dark restaurant with the cozy table in the back where they’d met sometimes. The convenience store they’d ducked into when they’d been carrying on a torrid affair and worried about running into people they knew. Laura knew it was wrong. She did. But she’d also never intended for it to happen.

She and Dean had worked on a software launch together, heads bent together for hours over their desks, which sat across from one another in the open floor plan of the company. She’d liked Dean’s outrageous, irreverent humor, which always made her laugh. She’d told herself that theirs was strictly a professional relationship, even though a part of her had known the flirting wasn’t just in her head. Now she knew none of that was as harmless as she’d thought.

She and Dean would go out to lunch, first with a group of colleagues and then increasingly one on one. Dean would share details about his unhappy marriage and his aloof, uncaring wife, and she would admit the loneliness of being single and her fear that she’d remain that way forever. She realized now how clichéd all of it was, how wrong she’d been to let things go so far with Dean. But she’d never meant for it to get physical. She really hadn’t.

Dean had joked that she was his work wife, and she’d loved the title, because she loved how in sync they were. It had felt like they shared the same brain at times. He completed her sentences in board meetings and she anticipated his every work need. Then came the office holiday party at an upscale San Francisco sushi restaurant, where he cornered her near the bathrooms.

“I’ve fallen in love with you,” Dean had told her and kissed her. She’d been shocked, and yet, she tentatively had kissed him back, and in that instant, everything changed.

After that, she became the star in her own star-crossed lovers tale, fighting valiantly for true love despite all the many obstacles. She knew it was wrong to think so. She knew that, but sometimes love came in surprising ways, a powerful force she couldn’t control.

Even now, even after everything Dean had done to betray her...to betray their love...she still felt the itch to contact him. She glanced at her phone, noticing, of course, the lack of new messages. Should she contact him? See how he was doing?

No! What was she thinking? Text Dean? Why should she care how he was? He didn’t care about her. Dean had made that abundantly clear the last time she’d seen him.

The worst part was that she felt like the heartache, everything she’d lost, was a punishment from God. She’d done the wrong thing, and this pain was what she’d earned.

She lay down on the bed, feeling as if she’d never be whole again, wondering if she could ever heal.

* * *

AFTER STARING AT the ceiling for an hour, unable to fall back asleep, Laura decided she wasn’t going to waste a beautiful day in the Caribbean and quickly donned her sturdy black one-piece suit and her newly purchased floppy straw hat.

After walking at least a mile to reach a spot of desolate beach, she couldn’t hear Mark’s buzz saw anymore, thank goodness. Beside her sat a brand-new cooler she’d found in the condo that she’d filled with drinks and snacks. She’d wanted to get away, and get away she had. Not a single sail dotted the blue-green horizon as the sun blazed down, coating everything in a thick warmth. Down the beach, she saw a figure walking—a woman in a shawl?

Laura tilted her head back on her bamboo mat and let the sunlight warm her cheeks. She inhaled deeply the smell of the ocean breeze and listened to the gentle rustling of palm tree leaves near her. She could almost feel the beach healing her from the outside in. This was why she came. To get away from it all.

She imagined her problems existing far, far away, and now the only thing she’d have to worry about was when high tide might come and wash away her cooler. This is what she needed...the absence of stress, nothing here to remind her of Dean. Just the gentle roll of waves against the beach.

Then came a distant cry.

A seagull? she wondered. She propped herself up on her elbows and glanced down the beach. The sound came from the woman walking along the water. Laura realized now that the woman wasn’t wearing a shawl at all. It was a baby sling. She held a baby, probably no older than three months, who was now wailing as the mom adjusted the baby in the fabric against her chest.

Laura felt her stomach tighten.

In her mind, she saw herself that morning she’d taken the pregnancy test. The positive filling her with both dread and excitement all at once. She was going to have Dean’s baby.

Then, she remembered Dean’s reaction. How he yelled, blamed her for the accident. Then she remembered the sudden cramping, the bright red blood. The trip to the emergency room in the ambulance as she miscarried.

Her sister had been there in the hospital when she woke up. Maddie told her she dodged a bullet, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt like the bullet hit her right in the chest.

She felt like she couldn’t breathe as she watched the mother and baby coming closer.

Anytime she saw a baby, she thought of her own, who would now never be born, the baby she’d carried inside her for a slight twelve weeks. How could something so small have changed her life forever? She knew it sounded irrational, but to her, the minute she’d found out she was pregnant, everything changed. She became a different woman, her life suddenly veering down a different path. With every baby she saw, she saw her own laughing back up at her.

I lost a baby. I lost my future. I’m thirty-five. I won’t have another one. Hell, maybe my body doesn’t even know how to make one the right way. The man I thought loved me didn’t at all. Of course I’m not fine.

She wished her mother was still alive. She wanted to hug her, wanted to ask her what she should do now.

She couldn’t look at a baby without feeling that profound sense of loss, because something deep inside her told her that she’d never be a mother now. She was thirty-five, and she’d had one chance at being a mom, and her body failed her.

She glanced at the happy mother, cooing to her baby. She wouldn’t be able to stay here, watch this, see the life she would never have.

Laura knew she couldn’t ask the woman to leave. It wouldn’t be fair. It wasn’t the baby’s fault. Or the mother’s.

In a rush, Laura packed up her things. She threw on her ankle-length cotton cover-up sundress and began walking. The buzz saw would be better than the baby crying. If she listened to the baby much longer, she knew she’d burst into tears.

After she’d walked a bit, she could hear the buzz saw again. She gritted her teeth. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.

She thought about marching in there and giving Mark Tanner a piece of her mind, when she suddenly saw a gray tendril of smoke rising up from his workshop. An acrid, unmistakable smell filled the air.

Was that...a fire?

Chapter Three

SOMETHING WAS BURNING. At first, Mark thought it might be just his imagination, just sawdust flying from his saw as he hacked into the planks before him. Then he thought it might be someone grilling, except the fire smelled decidedly closer. He cut the buzz saw and turned around to find that the manila folder his brother brought had landed near his gas generator, and somehow had managed to catch alight. Smoke poured from the folder and heavy bits of sawdust that coated his small workspace.

Mark spun around, looking for something to douse the fire. He tried to kick sand on the flames, but that only seemed to add more sawdust to the fire, fueling it, making the flames grow.

He rushed into his kitchen, looking for a towel or a blanket, anything he could use to suffocate the flames. But before he could, a blur in a dark cover-up rushed past him and dumped a cooler full of ice on the fire, as well as two cans of some soda, and the small flames went out in a sizzling hiss.

She also happened to douse his saw, too, which now had pieces of ice covering the blade. And the flying soda cans knocked over one of the boards on his sawhorse, which clunked against his nearby worktable and sent Timothy’s bronze booties flying in the air. They landed with an awkward thump in the sand. The picture of his boy as a baby also came loose, fluttering down to the ground.

“Hey!” he cried, lunging at the photo and the bronze booties. If they were dented, so help him... “What are you doing?” He scooped up the small bronze shoes from the sand, clutching them protectively in his hands.

“Helping you,” she said, putting a hand on her hip.

She wore a muumuu, that was the only way he could describe it. The ankle-length sundress exposed only her elbows and left absolutely everything to the imagination.

She was too young to be so...dowdy, he thought. He knew she had a good body; he’d seen her legs earlier and knew the woman kept in shape. So why was she wearing a blanket out on the beach? Must be shy. Or timid. Or worse, conservative. Very, very conservative. Straitlaced, clearly. Even her outfit annoyed him.

She thrust her oversize sunglasses upon her head, pushing back her short dark bob and glared at him, her eyes looking greener than the Caribbean in the sunlight.

“Help?” he cried, sweeping his arms wide to encompass the disaster before him, even as he noticed that one of the soda cans opened on impact, sending a spray of sticky liquid onto his bare feet and all over the expensive blade of his saw. Great, just great. “Why don’t you just punch me in the face next time? You’ll create less damage.”

An annoyed wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows. “Don’t tempt me,” she shot back, clutching the new empty cooler beneath one elbow, her green eyes shining like emeralds with just barely contained anger. “Maybe I should have. You were running around in a panic instead of dealing with the fire.”

Oh, good grief. He wasn’t panicked. He was calm and collected. He never panicked. What was she talking about?

“I wasn’t panicking,” he said. “I was going to get something to put the fire out.”

“By running around like a chicken with his head cut off.” A knowing smirk tugged at her mouth.

“I wasn’t.”

“You were.”

Now she was making him argue like a five-year-old. Unbelievable.

“Glad I was walking by because you clearly needed help. I saved your boat.” She nodded toward the husk of his boat. He glanced down and noticed that she’d also splashed one end, which carried the hint of char on one board, where the fire had lapped dangerously close to his baby.

He dropped to his knees to inspect the board and make sure it hadn’t been damaged. If he had to start the frame all over again... But, no, the damage was surface only, just a small smudge mark he could all but wipe off with his finger.

“I know you meant well, but I didn’t ask for your help.” He knew he was being ungrateful, and he didn’t like it, but she was like a cow skipping through a china shop, destroying everything in her wake and then demanding he thank her for the damage. He knew the woman was trying to help, but now he had to worry about his saw and whether the soda had damaged it.

But first, he inspected Timothy’s shoes, connected by a single string, and thankfully saw no damage. He gently placed them back on the nail, hanging by the particle-board backstop of his worktable. Then he picked up the saw. He unplugged it from the extension cord and wiped it down with a work rag nearby.

If it was damaged, he didn’t know how he’d replace it. And without a saw, what would he do? He’d never finish the boat on time.

Then he heard a sound. A high-pitched crying. A baby. His phone! Somehow, in the chaos, it had been flung into the sand. He grabbed it, noticing that the impact had started an old video of Timothy from when he was just a baby. He was crying, fussy for his nap.

Mark clicked off the video and wiped off the screen, which was covered in dots of sticky soda.

That’s when he realized she was still standing there. What was she doing? Hadn’t he made it clear she wasn’t welcome?

He glanced up and saw that she seemed frozen in place. She glanced at Timothy’s bronze baby shoes and at the phone he still held in his hand, her face a mixture of grief and pain. He felt all those emotions he saw fighting for control behind her sea green eyes. He knew them all—pain, grief and an aggressive, bottomless loss of hope. But why did hearing a simple video of Timothy make her feel this way? What had happened to her? Or was she just unhinged for some other reason?

“Laura,” he said, and then stopped. What was he going to ask her? Are you okay?

She turned then, eyes brimming with tears, and he knew with a certainty that whatever had triggered this grief was still fresh. Before he could say any more, she dropped the cooler and sprinted away from him.

He felt a sudden urge to go after her, but then what? Maybe she wasn’t grieving. Maybe she was just a crazy person. Maybe he was projecting his own feelings on her. What did he know?

Still, he felt guilty. Guilty because somehow he’d made her cry. And guilty because he knew she suffered in some deep, damaged way that only someone who’d lost something truly dear to them would know. It didn’t sit right with him. He felt the need to make it up to her.

“Well, damn,” he muttered beneath his breath as he swiped up the cooler she’d dropped. “Now I’m going to have to do something nice.”

It went against his gruff, no-nonsense, let’s-not-spend-time-talking-about-our-feelings self. He’d never been a touchy-feely guy, but he couldn’t just let her suffer alone. He knew what that felt like.

* * *

LAURA FLED TO her condo and flung herself on the bed, angrily swiping the tears from her face. She hated that she’d become so weak, so completely unstable that a simple video of a baby and some bronzed baby shoes could so undo her in the moment.

It wasn’t right. She should be getting better, and yet, she just seemed to be getting worse. She was a walking sponge, just oozing tears all the time. She just wanted it to stop, all of it. St. Anthony’s was supposed to be the place where she got away from all the things that hurt her, where she could finally heal. After all, the island was named for the patron saint of lost things. And she’d never felt more lost in her whole life.

Why did this happen to her? Why had God seen fit to take her baby away before he could even be born? Why was she the only one mourning him?

But then again, she knew why. She’d been wrong, so very wrong, to be in love with Dean. This was God punishing her, she felt, for the mistake she made: falling in love with a married man.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Dean was a mistake. She knew that. But, the baby wasn’t. No matter what anybody said.

Her sister had told her that she’d have other babies. But Laura didn’t want another baby. She wanted the baby she lost. She glanced down at her flat belly, hidden beneath her flowing cover-up. Now it might never be full.

She wished she could talk to her mother. Get some measure of comfort, but her mother had died years ago.

Feeling lost and alone, her willpower crumbling, she grabbed her phone and dialed Dean’s work cell.

He answered on the second ring. “Hello?” he sounded harried, his voice low.

“Dean?” She hated how angry he sounded that she’d called, how disappointed. He used to always sound happy when he heard her voice. Now he always sounded like she was calling to deliver bad news.

“What are you doing calling me?” he whispered, his voice a furious, low buzz. Then, she realized that he must be at his house. The house he still shared with his wife.

“Dean. I’m sorry... I’m just...” Lost. Alone. Hurting. Wishing that you still loved me...or that you’d ever loved me at all. She hated all the desperate feelings that bubbled up, determined to break the surface. Dean sure had been happy to hear about the miscarriage. Ecstatic, even. Why did she think he’d comfort her now?

Dean sighed, a sound full of patronizing pity, and she felt even worse. “Look,” he said, voice softer. “I’ll try to call you when I get into work, okay?”

She heard shuffling in the background, and then a voice. His wife’s? She felt her stomach tighten with jealousy.

“I’ve got to go. I have to take my wife to the doctor,” he said, louder this time, in a voice that sounded too businesslike, and she knew that Angela was in the room. He was pretending to talk to someone at work.

“Is she all right?” Laura asked, cautious. After all, she wasn’t heartless.

“Well, we were going to tell everyone at the office this week, but she’s sixteen weeks pregnant.”

The words hit Laura like a ton of bricks. She felt all the wind knocked out of her lungs. Pregnant? His wife was...pregnant? Laura was speechless. Words failed her.

“Oh, yes, thanks,” Dean prattled on in a pretend conversation with a coworker who didn’t exist. Completely oblivious or not caring that he’d shattered what was left of her world. “I’ll check in with you when I’m back in the office. Thanks. Bye.”

And then he hung up, the line dead as she clutched her phone in her numb hand. Dean’s wife was pregnant. She was going to have a baby.

Sixteen weeks along?

She’d been twelve weeks along just a month ago when she’d lost her baby. That meant...

That meant that he had to have known that his wife was pregnant at the same time Laura was. That also meant that he had been having sex with Laura at the same time he had sex with his wife. The wife he claimed he hadn’t touched in two years, the wife who apparently hated sex. But she didn’t hate it enough to get pregnant apparently, Laura thought bitterly.

She knew Dean had lied, but this...this was a whole other level.

No wonder he’d been so relieved when she’d lost the baby. There was no way he’d leave his pregnant wife. Besides, there was no reason he’d leave his wife, period, not if Angela was actually a loving partner rather than the cold, distant monster he’d described.

Suddenly, she felt a searing rush of rage. She ought to pick up that phone and call his home landline to try to talk to his wife. Or message her on Facebook. Shouldn’t she know she was married to the worst kind of liar?