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She frowned. “I’m serious.”
“So am I, Nancy.” I took her hand. She didn’t yank it away. “This is Key West. It has special magical properties. People come here all the time and live somebody else’s life.”
She smiled. “And whose life do you think I should take?”
“You can have mine.”
The words were out before I knew I was saying them. Nancy turned her head sharply and stared at me. All the blood Doyle hadn’t spilled out of me slammed into my face.
Nancy smiled. It was a little better than the number-two smile this time, with a touch of the devil in it. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I couldn’t take all that getting hit on the head.”
She had taken it as a joke, and maybe that was better. But now that it was out there, I felt I had to say it anyway. “Listen, Nancy—”
She squeezed my hand. “I know, Billy. But we both have some thinking to do. And some talking.”
“I guess I know that. But I want you to know how I feel.”
“I do know. And I’m not saying no to that, either. I’m just—” She shrugged and took her hand away. “I still don’t know if it’s possible for us to be together. If we want the same things.”
“I don’t know, either. But I’d like to try.”
She turned to the window, where the morning sun was coming in off the bright green of the trees and the blue of the sky and the water outside the window. For a moment she seemed lost in the view. “Welcome to paradise,” she whispered.
“Nancy, they would probably hire you here at the hospital. I asked.”
“I know,” she said. “I asked, too.”
I took her hand again, and she gave mine a good solid squeeze.
I thought about what we had been through, and I thought about Doyle—how he’d come so close to killing us both, and how it was maybe only luck that he hadn’t.
And I thought of all that had gone before, the trip back to my past. And the ghosts who lived there. I did not want to live with ghosts anymore. I wanted to live in the now, and I wanted that now to have Nancy in it.
And she might not be able to say yet whether she wanted that, too, but she was thinking about it. And as she turned back to me she was giving me her number-one smile.
I looked at that dazzling smile and felt alive, because for the first time in two years I had hope, and if hope was all there was, it was still better than living with ghosts.
“Penny for your thoughts?” she said.
I just shook my head and kissed her hand.
Sometimes hope is enough.
