So many thanks go to Emily Carpenter for being a fantastic first reader and an even better friend. Emily and our fellow Calamity Dames, Amy Impellizzeri and Kate Moretti, have talked me off many a ledge. I can’t wait to hug your necks again. Thanks, too, to Laura Drake, who reads my first crappy attempts and ever so kindly points out where they could use some work, and to Allison Anderson, whose winning bid got her the dubious honor of having a character named after her father, Gordon Howard. Gordon, I hope I did you proud.

And finally, the biggest thanks go to my kids, Evan and Bella, and to my very own darling husband, who in no way resembles Cam Lasky. My world begins and ends with you three.

Stranger in the Lake

by Kimberly Belle

1

I untie the dock cleats and shove the boat into water as gray as the sky. Sometime in the past few hours, gunmetal clouds have rolled over the mountaintops, shooting down icy gusts that froth the surface of Lake Crosby into a million white peaks. My stomach churns, and not from the water’s chop.

Maybe morning sickness, maybe nerves at the words I need to say to my new husband out loud.

Surprise! I’m pregnant.

I sink onto the helm seat and shove my hands into the pockets of my new down jacket. A gift from Paul, who has impeccable taste—the kind that comes from good breeding and a big bank account. We’ve only ever spoken about children in the vaguest of terms. Things like “this room would make a good nursery” or “we would make pretty babies,” the “one day” silent but implied. He and his first wife never tried for a baby before she died, a little over four years ago. I haven’t known him a year. This wasn’t exactly the plan.

But neither was falling for a man eleven years older than me, a man who always claimed he’d never marry again. The thirty-seven-year-old wealthy widower falls for a gas station clerk from the muddy side of the mountain, both of us touched by tragedy. A combination that everybody from our town said would never work.

“I don’t give a damn what people think,” Paul is constantly telling me. “I love you and you love me, and that’s all that matters.”

But now... My hand feels under the jacket to my still-flat stomach. What will he think about this little surprise blooming inside my belly? I have no idea.

His mother, the people in town, friends who’ve known him all his life. I know exactly what they’ll say.