Not that it mattered. He didn’t owe her anything. She was just another pain-in-the-ass summer renter.

With only two weeks left at the beach.

Screw it, Ellis thought.

She jumped out of bed and padded barefoot down the stairs, and out through the kitchen. She wasn’t worried about encountering Ty Bazemore again, as she had last time. He was out tomcatting around Nags Head.

Ellis found the deck of cards the girls had abandoned on the kitchen table. She dealt herself a hand of solitaire, but gave up on it after fifteen minutes. She couldn’t even beat herself at cards, she thought, slapping the cards down in disgust. It was hot in the kitchen too—suffocating, really. She wet a paper towel and dabbed her forehead and wrists to cool herself down.

A walk on the beach, she decided, might be the only thing to calm herself down. Upstairs, she pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. She picked up the sandals Madison had loaned her only a few hours earlier, and tiptoed upstairs. She paused outside Madison’s door. The light was on, but she heard no movement from inside. She was probably reading. Ellis thought about knocking, about blurting out the truth of her whole, awful evening to a pair of neutral ears, but decided against it. Madison wasn’t the kind of girl who wanted to hear about somebody else’s drama. Instead, Ellis set the shoes carefully on the floor and left.

She let herself out the kitchen door and sped over the boardwalk and down to the beach. A slight breeze ruffled the sea oats, but otherwise, it was quiet. She left her flip-flops on the soft sand at the base of the steps and hurried out to the water’s edge, not stopping until her toes were licked by the cool wavelets. The moon was still near full, shining brightly on the gleaming silvery beach.

Better. She took a deep breath and started walking on the hard-packed wet sand. She wove her way up the beach, side stepping the incoming tide, although occasionally a wave caught her, slapping water up as high as her thigh. She kept walking. The farther south she went, the closer together houses were packed. Lights were on in some of the houses, and occasionally she heard a drift of music, or laughter, but the beach was otherwise deserted.

Ellis stopped occasionally, bent over and picked up a seashell, but dropped the ones that were crushed or broken. At one point, she found a perfect, white, palm-sized sand dollar at the water’s edge. With her fingertip, she traced the indentations in the brittle surface of the shell, trying to remember what Sister Marguerite, her biology teacher back at Our Lady of Angels, had told her the indentations meant. Something about the cross, and the trials of Jesus. Carefully, Ellis tucked the sand dollar into the pocket of her shorts and kept walking.

At some point, the wind picked up, and the waves began crashing harder into the sand, the tide creeping up. Ellis stopped, turned around, and stared up at the cluster of unfamiliar buildings at the edge of the dunes. She shivered and crossed her arms over her chest. Just how far had she come?

Time to turn back. The encroaching tide had driven her closer to the dunes. She tried walking faster, struggling as her feet sank into the powdery soft sand. Each time she came to a set of stairs leading up and over the dunes, she looked up, trying to decide if it was her stairway, leading back to Ebbtide.

But now, in the dark, all the dunes and stairways looked alike. She felt her heart racing, and told herself this was silly. She wasn’t lost. Couldn’t be. After two weeks, she knew her own stretch of beach perfectly. There was a faded, pale yellow catamaran pushed into the beach rosemary and sea oats below Ebbtide. The battered red metal trash barrel bolted to a piling near their house was crisscrossed with painted-on graffiti: “TIGERS RULE, COCKS SUCK” and “RENE LOVES BUSTER.”

And her shoes! Her lime green flip-flops. She’d left them right at the base of the steps. All she had to do was find those flip-flops. She powered onwards, squinting in the dark, looking for the catamaran and the red trash barrel. After another thirty minutes, her calf muscles burned, and she was nearly out of breath. The tide kept inching closer, until it was lapping right at the base of the dunes, and still there were no familiar signs.

Finally, exhausted, she stopped and sat on a worn wooden step. The water swirled around her ankles, and she realized it would have swept her flip-flops away. What should she do? She stepped into the water and craned her neck to look up. These steps led up to a boardwalk similar to the one at Ebbtide, and a house that looked nothing like Ebbtide. Should she climb up, cross the boardwalk, and find her way to the road?

And then what? Walk barefoot on the asphalt for who knows how far, with cars whizzing past and God-knows-who looking at her in her soggy shorts and windblown hair, not to mention the fact that she was braless?

No. She’d stick to the beach. She stood and started trudging. Ten minutes later, she heaved a sigh of relief when she spotted the yellow catamaran. Thank God! She almost felt like kissing the paint-spattered red trash barrel. Almost. Instead, she grabbed the handrail of the staircase and heaved herself up the steep first step.

It wasn’t until she’d reached the top step that she smelled it. Cigar smoke. In the darkness, she saw the glowing red tip first, and then the outline of the beach chair. And Ty Bazemore, beer in hand.

29

He’d been sitting on the deck for at least an hour, smoking a cigar, nursing a Heineken. After the disastrous aborted date, he’d gone up to the garage, shed the jacket and khakis, and tried to forget about it and just get some work done. He’d been reading about a small agribiz company in Kentucky that had recently patented a new kind of grass seed with promising drought-tolerant qualities. But he was glassy-eyed from reading all the technical reports, not to mention the company’s P&L statements.

Ty’s heart wasn’t in it, anyhow. He’d tried to shake off the depression that was settling over him like a thick woolen blanket, but didn’t have much luck. And anyway, he was seriously starving. So he’d jumped in the Bronco and hit the drive-through at the burger joint up the road.

Sometimes, a good greasy cheeseburger and fries were the only antidote to misery. He’d eaten the burger and half the fries, and lit up the last of his good cigars, but he wasn’t feeling that much better about life. He was, however, developing a bad case of heartburn.

The wind had picked up, and the surf was pounding away at the beach below. And suddenly, he looked up, and there she was, climbing up the last stair.

Cinderella was gone, and in her place the old Ellis Sullivan seemed to have washed ashore. The carefully arranged hairdo had been blown all to hell. She was barefoot, her baggy pink shorts were soggy, and her damp T-shirt clung to her body. It was apparent, even from where he sat in the darkness, that she’d been crying.

“Oh,” she said when she spotted him. “It’s you.”

“I live here,” Ty said. He stubbed out the last of his cigar on the top of the beer can. “Are you all right?”

She looked down at her sandy legs, wiped her nose with the sleeve of her T-shirt, and nodded. “I think the tide took my shoes. Other than that, I’m just peachy. I thought you were gone.”

“I was,” he said, gesturing to the paper sack with the remnants of cheeseburger and French fries. “I ran out for a little midnight snack. But now I’m back. What were you doing down there? Going for a midnight swim? Not to scare you or anything, but there are sharks out there.”

“I went for a walk,” Ellis said, leaning against the deck railing. “What time is it?”

He consulted his watch. “Nearly midnight. Must have been a hell of a stroll. I’ve been out here for over an hour.”

She slumped down onto the deck, her legs suddenly rubbery with fatigue. “I guess I lost track of where I was going. God, I must have walked a couple of miles along the beach. And then the tide started coming in, and I sort of freaked out. At night, in the dark like this, all these stairways look alike.”