Return to Willow Lake

Particularly in light of what had happened after. The humiliation still made her cringe. After their mad lovemaking, they’d been lounging on the bench seat of the boat, speechless with the lush saturation of sexual fulfillment. Finally, Zach had tried to say something. “That was…that…God, Sonnet.”

She hadn’t done much better. “I think we’d better… I’m… Is there any more champagne?”

He reached for the bottle. He paused, and she saw him frown in the dim light. “Shit, it was on.”

She was still limp with pleasure. “What was on? You mean that camera thing? No way. Oh, my God. Can you fix it?”

He laughed. “Relax, I’m a professional.” He’d popped out the camera’s SD card. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

“You totally have to erase that, Zach. I don’t care if it recorded anything or not. You have to promise.”

“Of course I’m going to erase it,” he said. “What do you take me for? Hey, I can do better than that.” He flicked the tiny card into the lake. Then he had turned to her, this sexy stranger who had once been her best friend. “Now, where were we?”

And the mind-blowing sex had continued. Dawn had crept in, and they’d sneaked away from the boathouse, only to encounter Shane Gilmore, president of the local bank and the town gossip, out for his morning jog by the lake. Her mom’s ex, of all people. And there had been no mistaking the expression on his face.

Sonnet cringed all over again as she reached the edge of Central Park, heading for the subway to catch the train to the restaurant. She emerged from the lush gardens of the park onto Fifth Avenue, where the sidewalk was crammed with hurrying pedestrians who all seemed to be in a pointless race with one another.

To refocus her thoughts, she slipped her hand into her pocket and closed it around the key. No one else in the surging stream of humanity had any clue what the key meant to her or even why. Despite the warmth of the day, she felt a chill.

It was a chill of excitement. Of anticipation. The key had been given to her by Orlando, aka the ideal boyfriend. He was one of those guys who really was as good as he looked on paper—background, education, career path, manners, looks. And because her father had introduced them, Orlando had arrived in her life preapproved. And he said he was in love with her.

He was the first man to say so. Hearing the declaration hadn’t been the exhilarating free fall of emotion she’d imagined as a girl. It was better than that. He was mature, he knew what he wanted, and he wanted to share his life with her.

As the crowd on the sidewalk halted for a traffic light, she gave a couple of bills to a guy strumming “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on a ukulele. A block farther, she played a secret game of peekaboo with a toddler being jiggled on his mother’s shoulder. Oblivious, the mother gabbed away on her phone about a fight she was having with her boyfriend. The baby had cheeks like ripe apples and eyes that looked perpetually startled, and a wisp of blond hair rising from his forehead like the flame of a candle.

He looked like half the dolls Sonnet used to play with when she was a little girl. The other dolls looked more like the little African-American girl in the umbrella stroller a few feet away. When Sonnet got older, her mom had explained that baby dolls who looked like Sonnet were hard to come by. Santa’s elves, apparently, had not caught up with the times. Mixed race babies were common enough; dolls that resembled them, not so much.

The light changed and she walked on, her fingers clenched around the key until its teeth bit into the palm of her hand. She wasn’t so sure herself. The way her career was going at UNESCO, there was scarcely time to squeeze in a trip upstate to see her own mom, let alone raise a kid.

On the other hand, her twenty-eight-year-old body was awash in hormones raining from an invisible emptiness inside her, just begging to procreate.

She wondered what Orlando would say if she brought it up. He’d probably bolt for the nearest exit. They were still too new, key or no key. He had told her long ago that he wanted to postpone having kids. There would be plenty of time for that unspecified “someday.”

As far as she was concerned, nothing could dampen her spirits today. She had the ultimate good news to share, and she was about to share it with the two people who would totally get how cool it was.

She’d been racing around madly all day, trying to get ready for this new chapter in her life. A Hartstone Fellowship. She, Sonnet Romano, from the tiny town of Avalon on Willow Lake, had been chosen for the honor. People who won the Hartstone Fellowship tended to change the world. She’d always been eager to measure up to her father’s expectations. Personal accomplishments were so important to her father. She could understand that. They validated you, told the world you did things that mattered.

As usual, she was in a hurry. It was her normal mode. She had hurried through school, graduating with a 4.0 GPA and zooming ahead to her dream school, American University. From there she’d pursued a double major in French and international studies, then raced ahead to grad school. Sometimes she asked herself what the hurry was, but mostly, she didn’t slow down long enough to wonder.

And it was working well for her. The letter in her satchel was proof of that, for sure.

As she hurried down the stairs to catch the train—she was on the verge of being late, an unforgivable offense in her father’s book—her phone chimed, signaling an incoming text message, sneaking in just before she lost the signal underground. At the same time, she heard the train rattling into the station. She rushed to slip her pass through the turnstile and proceed into the fecund heat of the underground station.

The train’s moon-yellow headlights were filmed with the ever-present dirt of the subway, and its brakes gave a tired-sounding squeal. The doors clanked apart, disgorging streams of passengers. Just as quickly, people on the platform boarded. She paused and bent down to help a woman with a stroller over the gap between the platform and the train car.

At the same time, she thought about the text message that had come in. She didn’t know what made her grab for her phone just in that moment; she got text messages all the time. Habit, probably. Or it could be Daisy’s cryptic comment about checking in with her mom.

As Sonnet stepped across the gap and took out her phone. someone jostled her from behind. Both the phone and the key dropped from her hand. She saw a coppery flash as the key disappeared onto the tracks, and her heart sank along with it. The phone screen stayed lit momentarily. Before it slipped from her hand, she saw the name of the sender of the incoming message: Zach Alger.

A crush of passengers pressed in from behind. The doors clanked shut, and the train lurched away.

Sonnet grabbed a safety pole and clenched her jaw. Her stomach turned to a ball of ice. You made me drop the key, she silently seethed. Prepare to die.

His name on the screen reminded her that she should have taken him off her contact list months ago. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean she could erase him from her mind. She used to look forward with pleasure to his text messages, but now the thought of him made her shudder.

Given where she was now, her relationship with Orlando moving ahead, Zach could ruin everything. Having sex with him the night of Daisy’s wedding had been the ultimate boneheaded move on both their parts, and she bloody well knew it. As soon as she’d floated back down to earth, as soon as the pink cloud of champagne and wedding bliss wore off, she had felt a terrible twist of foreboding in the pit of her stomach. In one foolish act, they had changed their friendship irrevocably, and not for the better. Her father had just introduced her to Mr. Wonderful; she needed to focus on Orlando, not get drunk with Zach Alger.

She hadn’t spoken to him since. He’d called a bunch at first, sent text messages, and she finally texted him back and said, Don’t call me. Don’t text me. Can we just leave it at that?

His calls had stopped, and she told herself she was relieved. There was nothing to say. What were they going to say? Sorry I screwed up a beautiful friendship? Have a nice life?

Willfully she pulled her mind away from the lost phone and focused on the more immediate problem. The missing key. Now, there was a boneheaded move for you. When your boyfriend finally gives you a key to his amazing midtown east apartment, losing it immediately is a bad move. Sure, it was an accident, but the symbolism was hard to ignore.

On top of that, she was going to be late. Both her father and Orlando were sticklers for promptness, yet somehow she’d fallen behind. And now she didn’t even have a way to send Orlando a text.

Her stomach clenching, she found a vacant seat and sat down. Across from her sat a teenage girl and her mother. Sonnet studied their reflection in the window glass of the subway car. The two of them looked alike, except for the way the mother’s Nordic coloring and blond hair contrasted sharply with the girl’s nappy hair and café-au-lait skin. She wore her mixed heritage like an ill-fitting garment. Sonnet related to that kind of discomfort because once, not so long ago, she’d been that girl—biracial and wondering just where she belonged.

The girl had her iPhone turned up too loud, and through the earbuds, Sonnet recognized the thud and angry tones of Jezebel, the latest hip-hop sensation. The chart-topping song was called “Don’t Make a Ho into a Housewife” or some such nonsense. Though she was no fan of the genre, Sonnet was aware of Jezebel from the scandal blogs and magazines. She was the latest of many to be doing time for something or other.

The girl listening to the music looked angry, too. Maybe she was having a bad day. Maybe she was ticked off at her mom. Maybe she was wondering why her dad only got in touch with her on Christmas and on her birthday, and half the time he forgot the birthday. Maybe she was trying to figure out what she was supposed to do in order to get his attention.

In the window glass, her gaze met the girl’s. Both glanced quickly away, perhaps recognizing in each other a kindred spirit.

You’ll be fine, Sonnet wanted to reassure the girl. Just like I’m fine. Fine.

As she approached her stop on the subway, Sonnet tried to come up with something plausible to tell Orlando about the key. Saying she’d dropped it on the subway sounded so…so careless. And she did care. Having access to his apartment, his private space, was a huge step for them as a couple. It meant something, something big.

The very thought of it made her heart skip a beat. To Sonnet, this was not a pleasant sensation.

* * *

Zach Alger stared down at the screen of his iPhone. He shouldn’t have sent that text to Sonnet. He really, really shouldn’t have sent it. What was he thinking? He wasn’t thinking.

Maybe being in church affected his judgment. Although he wasn’t in church, attending services. He was doing wedding prep work at Heart of the Mountains Church, getting ready for a big video job here. So at the moment, it didn’t count.

He wrote down a couple of measurements—they were cramming too many people into the sanctuary, but he’d deal—and then paused to check his phone. Good, no reply. He scrolled to email, and his queue was full of work stuff. Endless work stuff, sandwiched between a few notes from women. Yeah, he was “dating.” In a town like this, with a population that couldn’t fill a high school stadium, that simply meant he was keeping his options open. On the menu today—he could go to the climbing gym with Lannie, and there were worse things than staring at her cute butt while holding the belaying rope. Or, he could go to Viv’s for dinner. She was a sous-chef at the Apple Tree Inn, and she had trained at the Cordon Bleu. Third option—an open invitation from Shakti, who practiced a form of yoga she liked to call Yoga Sutra.

His buddies on his mountain biking team envied him the attention from women. And hell yeah, he loved women. He loved their soft hair and their curvy bodies, the flowery scent of them and the lilt of their laughter. He loved them all, yet to his dismay, he wanted only one. And the one he wanted was Lady Insanity herself, Sonnet Romano.

No. Correction. She was not the one he wanted. She was the one he wanted to avoid.

Contacting her had been a bad lapse, and it was convenient to foist the blame on something other than himself. He hadn’t spoken to her since that night. Yeah, that night. But he’d felt compelled to contact her today because something weird was going on. After the epic night of sex, he’d been pretty sure it was their secret.

Yet now he was not so sure.

His friend Daphne, aka the ace internet mole, had alerted him this morning that something was up. A web-based rumor mill had published a nasty little bit hinting that the daughter of a certain candidate for the U.S. Senate was into, ahem, post-wedding hookups.

Politics was a dirty business. In the race for public office, nothing was off-limits, not even the candidate’s family. In making a run for national office, Laurence Jeffries was putting everyone in his orbit in the spotlight. Zach wondered if the guy had thought about that when he’d decided to go for it.