A Season for Second Chances(112)

“I’m not going to be able to sleep if I think you’re watching me,” he’d said.

Annie sighed, hanging around near the door.

“Can I get you anything before I turn in?” she asked.

“A glass of water, please,” said John. “My throat feels like sandpaper.”

The paramedic had said a mixture of choking on the seawater and all the shouting would leave him with a sore throat for a few days. Annie dutifully brought him a large glass of water and put it on the coffee table next to him.

“Okay, well, get some sleep. You know where I am if you need me, just holler.”

“Will do.”

“Well. Good night, then.”

“Good night,” John answered.

Annie was at the door when John said: “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Worrying about me. Letting me stay tonight . . .” The words hung as if there was more to say, but nothing else came.

“It’s even more your home than it is mine,” said Annie. She smiled at him, then turned and left.





Chapter 85



Annie couldn’t sleep. She had mentally redecorated Saltwater Nook and put together a three-course bistro menu—mental organizing was usually a great soother—but still sleep evaded her. The evening’s events kept playing on a loop behind her eyes. Fear and relief, fear and relief filled her chest repeatedly. She wondered if Alfred was okay. Maeve had messaged the group at half past midnight to say that Alfred was comfortable and that she was heading home. Though she wanted Alfred back to his old self as soon as possible, she hoped he was incapacitated enough tonight that he wouldn’t make a break for it and disappear off into the back streets of Margate.

Annie was glad she didn’t have a clock that ticked in the bedroom. Somehow a ticking clock seemed to elongate the hours when you couldn’t sleep. She’d read somewhere about the phenomenon of dry-drowning, and snippets of what she’d read returned to her now, despite her best efforts to dismiss it. Was that a thing? Dry-drowning? Was it only in children? She couldn’t remember. She began to worry about John dry-drowning on the sofa. Why wouldn’t he just go to hospital like a normal person? Now I’m responsible for him! She ran through the symptoms list Georgina had given her. How could she check these things from her bedroom?

After several long minutes of panicking that John might be dying quietly in the sitting room, she got up and tiptoed along the hall—silently cursing every squeaking floorboard—to the dark sitting room. She could just make out his silhouette. She listened hard and was rewarded with the sound of his breathing, slow and steady. Relieved, Annie crept back to her room, climbed into bed, and fell into a fitful sleep. She woke with a start at a quarter to two and tiptoed back into the sitting room, where she waited until she heard John breathing before returning to bed. After much tossing and turning, she drifted off again, only to wake up at ten to three in a panic that had no meaning before the events of the previous came crashing back to her with startling clarity.

When she crept in again at twenty past four, by now an expert in avoiding all the squeaky floorboards, she couldn’t hear anything. With fast-rising panic, Annie stepped farther into the room, holding her own breath, the better to hear his. There was a rustling sound from the sofa, and she let out her breath. She blinked into the gloom of the encroaching dawn and could make out John’s outline. She’d taken a step backward to creep back to her room when John’s outline moved, and she froze. John lifted his arm, the corners of the blankets in his hand, and shuffled back flat against the sofa.

“Come on,” he said in a gravelly whisper.

Annie hesitated.

“Neither of us is going to get any sleep if you keep coming in to check I’m still alive. Don’t ever take up being a cat burglar as a career, you’d likely get pinched on your first job.”

Annie smiled into the darkness and made her way to the sofa. She lay down, nestling in against him, her back up tight against his front on the small sofa. She wiggled briefly to get comfortable before John brought his arm and the blankets down and draped them over them both.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

“Very,” she replied.

“I’m sorry about before. When I saw you with Max . . .”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I realized that not being with you was not an option, however complicated it makes things.”

“After tonight, I’ll happily take complicated, so long as you’re with me.”

“You should know, I’m useless at wooing,” he whispered, nuzzling his face into her hair.

“Good. I’ve had enough wooing for one lifetime.”

“But I can promise you, I will never cheat.”

“No wooing and no cheating; I’ve never had a better offer.”

She yawned and John tightened his embrace around her, pulling her closer still, and Annie reveled in the weight of his arm across her body. Warm, if slightly squashed, with the slow rise and fall of John’s chest against her back and his feet wrapped around hers, she drifted off to sleep.





Chapter 86



Annie woke up alone on the sofa; she was too hot under the blankets. She reached to the coffee table and picked up her phone, where she saw a yellow Post-it note stuck to the screen that read: