She lowered her camera and watched the pewter, shifting swells of ocean water rise and fall, the sound of it crashing against the rocks directly below her. Its rhythm connected with her own pulse, the beat of her heart. The wind picked up, cold and unforgiving, and blasted her flesh like ice. Clare had wanted her approval that day, had wanted Eileen to say how proud she was of her.

She wished, now, that she’d been able to hug her sister. Marvel at her beautiful home, congratulate her on her success, tell her how amazing it all was, truly. Clare had dragged herself up and out of their broken, dysfunctional home in the middle of nowhere Wyoming and built her own American fucking dream, book by book, with her own two hands. The truth was, Eileen was proud of Clare and all she’d done. How could she not be? But Clare’s every success had cast Eileen’s every choice deeper into the shadow of so what. Everything Clare accomplished made Eileen wonder, what if, with regard to her own life, her own abandoned dreams. Armed with the only accomplishment she knew Clare could never have, Eileen had lobbed Clare’s most painful truth into her face.

Her body, broken in the accident that had almost killed her, wasn’t capable of creating a child.

Chapter 14

Clare

Twenty-two years before her death

Bright light, like two shards of glass, sliced the darkness. Garbled voices filled her ears. Clare swallowed, and her throat burned. She opened her mouth, took a breath. Pain registered, a nauseating wave of signals firing throughout her system but with no specific source. It was simply everywhere. Her lids fought to open, erratic and hard to control. Her eyes were uncooperative. It would be easier to just close them again, pull back closed whatever heavy curtain was lifting and taking its protection away, letting in light and sound and pain.

What was happening?

The voices grew louder, and a dark image moved into her sight line, an eclipse breaking up the intensity of the white glare. A head, a person was in front of her and they were speaking, their voice impossible to make out. It was like when she and Adam were kids and on hot summer days, bored with cannonballs and searching the bottom of the city pool for pennies, they would try to speak to each other underwater. This person sounded exactly like that, but she knew it wasn’t Adam because…why? Why did she know that?

Adam.

Something was wrong. Something had happened. It was why she couldn’t see or hear right. It was also why she hurt so much.

Adam.