Milly kept her eyes on the narrow track ahead. “You would have made a terrible doctor.”

“I know. She arranged for me to watch her operating, and I passed out and bashed my skull on the floor.” It seemed a strange thing to be talking about in the circumstances, but anything was better than focusing on the present.

There was a pause. “You’re an incredible actor, so I think we can agree you made the right choice.”

There was a time when praise like that from her closest friend would have given her a high. She’d been chasing validation for most of her life. Now she was numb.

“But I don’t save lives, do I? No one needs what I do.” Her mother had once asked her what she contributed to the world, and Nicole didn’t have an answer. No matter how many awards she won or box office records her movies broke, her mother always made her feel like a spectacular failure.

“Not true,” Milly said. “You enhance the lives of millions, and that’s important. There are ways of making a contribution that don’t involve being up to your elbows in someone else’s blood.”

“That’s gross.”

But the support, that tiny hint of their old relationship, made her feel a little better until she realized that their old relationship was dead and gone and that things would never be the same again because now Nicole had secrets. One particular secret that she wasn’t sure she could ever tell Milly. And that secret was a barrier to the intimacy that had made their friendship so rare and special.

They’d reached the end of the track, and Milly took a turn to the left, and there, perched on the water and surrounded by trees, was the boathouse. She pulled up outside and switched off the engine.

“We’re here.” Lights glowed on the deck, which stretched out over the lake.

Grateful for a distraction from her depressing thoughts, Nicole stared at the place that had been their forest hideout when they were young.

She hadn’t anticipated such a transformation. The dilapidated building of her childhood had been replaced by an architectural dream of wood and local stone.

“This is incredible.” She almost said that it was romantic and then realized that would be tactless. “Who did this?”

“Mostly Joel.”

“Who is Joel?”

“Joel is our everything guy.” Milly undid her seat belt. “By which I mean, he does a bit of everything. Plumbing, electrics, carpentry—whatever goes wrong in the cabins, Joel handles it. He’s a miracle, to be honest. There’s nothing Joel can’t fix.”

Maybe Joel could fix her life.

“He built this?” Nicole couldn’t stop staring. “But you had an architect, surely?”