“Thank you,” Annajane called after him.

“Prick,” Mason muttered. He turned without a word and went to the intake desk to start filling out the paperwork.

Annajane found herself alone in the emergency room waiting area, a cheerless room with beige linoleum floors, beige painted walls, and a row of army-green straight-backed leatherette chairs that faced a wall-mounted television showing a video of proper hand-washing techniques. The only other entertainment option in the room was a beige metal magazine rack holding a handful of well-thumbed copies of Highlights for Children and Modern Maturity.

Choosing Modern Maturity only because all the brain-teaser puzzles in Highlights had already been worked, she was idly scanning an article about prostate health when Mason returned, slumping into a chair once removed from her own. He sighed loudly and buried his head in his hands.

Annajane looked at the clock. “It’s barely been fifteen minutes,” she pointed out.

He didn’t respond.

“She’s a perfectly healthy little girl,” Annajane added. “And Dr. Kaufman really does know what he’s doing.”

“I know that,” Mason said, his voice muffled. “It’s just … this place.” He raised his head. His voice was strained and full of despair. “This place. You know?”

“I do know,” Annajane said softly. She hesitated, but after a moment, she reached over and squeezed his upper arm. His hand found hers, and he patted it briefly before letting go. They both knew this room all too well.

A little over five years ago, she’d rushed into this same emergency room and found Mason sitting in almost the same place, slumped over, despondent, waiting for news from this same doctor, Max Kaufman. Only that time, the patient had been Mason’s father, Glenn, and the news, when it did come, had been devastating.

Funny. That day was the beginning of the end of their marriage.

*   *   *

There had been other fights. Annajane wouldn’t have called them fights, really. Quarrels, or tiffs, if anybody ever really used that word.

They’d been married less than two years, when the little fissures in their happiness began to appear.

Mason and Annajane were living in the caretaker’s cottage at the lake. It was only a temporary address, Mason assured her, a rent-free solution until they saved enough money for a down payment on a house of their own.

The cottage had been abandoned for years. As children, she and Pokey had appropriated it for a playhouse, furnishing it with cast-off furniture from the big house, a wobbly kitchen table, a pair of rickety wooden chairs, and an army cot for campouts. They played at cooking with a battered saucepan, once nearly burning the place down after attempting to heat up a can of SpaghettiOs on Davis’s Boy Scout camp stove.

And yes, she and Mason had snuck away to the caretaker’s house for stolen hours in the first few months after they’d started dating.

At first, Annajane had been enchanted with the quaint honeymoon cottage, with its deeply pitched slate roof, leaded-glass windows looking out onto the lake, and stacked stone fireplace.

But living there was a different matter. The kitchen’s warped wooden cabinets didn’t close, the refrigerator barely cooled, and that adorable roof had a spot that leaked—directly over their bed. It was drafty in the winter and hot in the summertime, and damp and mildew from the lake seemed to creep in year-round. Also, there were mice. There was no washer or dryer, which meant they had to either troop into town to the coin Laundromat or drag their basket of dirty clothes up to the big house, like a couple of college students.

All that Annajane might have cheerfully accepted. She hadn’t grown up in a mansion, as Mason had. Her family’s two-bedroom brick ranch had one window air-conditioning unit—in Ruth and Leonard’s bedroom—and just one bathroom. The real problem with the cottage was its location—directly in the looming shadow of Sallie Bayless, a constant presence in their lives, who was prone to dropping over uninvited to offer Annajane unsolicited advice on everything from housekeeping: “Annajane dear, you really must use lemon oil every week on Mason’s grandmother’s walnut dresser, to keep the wood from drying out”; to cooking, “Annajane dear, we never, ever use dark meat in chicken salad”; to marriage itself, “Annajane dear, no man wants to see his wife in the morning before she’s fixed her hair and her makeup—and his breakfast.”

Her mother-in-law never came right out and criticized the new bride in front of Mason. That wasn’t Sallie’s style, but the slow drip-drip-drip of her constant nitpicking had the effect of sand in Annajane’s newlywed sheets.

Annajane knew it was no good trying to extricate their life from Mason’s family, or his family’s business. They were too tightly woven together now.

And it was all Pokey’s fault.

She’d shown up, unannounced, at Annajane’s studio apartment in Raleigh, on a freezing weeknight in February.

“Guess what?” she’d demanded, as soon as she’d stepped into the room. “I’m pregnant!” And next came, “You’re gonna be my maid of honor. And I won’t take no for an answer.”

Pokey had been in no hurry to finish college. She’d declared herself on the six-year plan, until she met Pete Riggs at a fraternity party in Chapel Hill. He was from a wealthy Charleston family who owned a chain of fine furniture stores. He was tall and redheaded and had earned a full four-year golf scholarship to Wake Forest. Fun-loving Pokey called Annajane that night, dead serious, to announce that she’d met her future husband. And as always, what Pokey wanted, Pokey got.

Before Annajane knew it, she was being dragged to bridal boutiques for fittings and, yes, back to Passcoe, for a seemingly endless round of brunches, teas, dinners, and showers.

Mason was a no-show for all of the prenuptial hoopla. He was working as a regional manager for Dr Pepper, in Memphis, with his father’s blessing, to gain experience outside his own family’s business. He was, Pokey confided, being a major pill about the whole thing. “Mason doesn’t approve of Pete, and he doesn’t approve of me getting married and dropping out just a semester short of graduation, and he most definitely doesn’t approve of me having a baby. He threatened to put a beat-down on Pete for knocking me up, until I admitted I actually got myself knocked up on purpose. But if you ever tell that to Sallie, I’ll never speak to you again,” Pokey said.

“Too bad,” Annajane had murmured, trying to sound unconcerned about Mason’s opinions. She was desperate to see him again, and desperate to pretend he’d never entered her life. It wasn’t until she had to walk up the aisle on his arm, the day of Pokey’s wedding, that Annajane allowed herself to remember how she felt when Mason Bayless touched her. It wasn’t Mason, she told herself, it was just spring fever.

Still, she tried to avoid him at the reception, dancing with every man in the room who was under the age of seventy and hiding out on the veranda of the country club, behind a huge potted palm, between dances.

That’s where he found her, leaning against the veranda railing, sipping a glass of lukewarm champagne toward the end of the evening.

“Shoes hurt that bad?” he’d asked, gesturing toward the high-heeled silver slingback sandals she’d slipped out of.

“They’re killing me,” Annajane said, taking a large sip of champagne, hoping he wouldn’t notice her suddenly flushed face in the darkness.

He picked up the sandals and flung them high into the air and out over the women’s practice green.

“Great,” she said glumly. “Two hundred dollar shoes. Gone.”

“I’ll buy you another pair,” Mason offered. “Maybe a pair you can actually walk in?”

She didn’t smile. “What do you want, Mason?”

He sighed. “I really screwed up, didn’t I?”