Outside the wind roars, freight train loud.
Straus can’t even hear his own thoughts, and terror grips him. He lived through Hurricane Allen, just barely, and for the first time he fears none of them will survive this night.
His wife squeezes his hand. “Tell me it’ll be okay, Heathcliff.”
“It’s going to be okay,” he whispers, pressing his lips close to her ear.
“Promise me.”
Straus clings to her. He loves this woman with every fiber of his being. “I promise.”
The emergency generator kicks on, but it’s only got enough power to fuel the lights in the hallway and delivery room that lies just beyond the main ward. He can make out shadows of beds and patients, but that’s it.
Winnie and the shift supervisor switch on pocket flashlights. In the crook of her elbow, Winnie holds a baby out to the shift supervisor. The woman whisks the newborn away to another area where Straus assumes is an awaiting incubator.
“The baby,” Robin whispers. “The baby is here.”
“Yes.” Straus nods. His gaze follows the retreating shift supervisor. “The lady had her baby.”
“No,” she whispers so softly he can barely hear her. “Our baby.”
Stunned, Straus moves to investigate.
Blood is everywhere. So much blood. Too much blood. Warm and sticky. The taste of fear fills his mouth, hot and slick and coppery.
“The baby isn’t crying. Heathcliff, why isn’t our baby crying?” Robin’s voice is weak, almost inaudible.
Alarmed, he knows the truth before he ever sees his child.
A girl.
She is still and pale, with blue lips and the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. He removes the cord as if doing so will save her and scoops the child into his arms. She’s covered in her mother’s blood.
Still she does not move. Her eyes are forever closed.
No, no, no!
Tears wet his cheeks. It cannot be. His heart is beating out of his chest. How will he ever tell Robin? They’ve waited years for this baby. She can’t be dead. He shifts his attention to his wife, but she has fainted.
Winnie and the shift supervisor tend patients on the far side of the room.
Straus opens his mouth to scream, but no sound emerges.
From the bed next to him, Fedora yells, “The twins! The twins!”
Winnie comes running, the gleam of her flashlight bathing their dark little corner in a thin beam of illumination.
Pop, pop.
Two babies.
Screaming and wriggling, fully robust and vocal, they are alive. Winnie catches one, the shift supervisor the other, and they exchange triumphant glances.
The twins’ mother doesn’t ask after her infants. She flops back on the mattress, an arm draped dramatically over her eyes, and exclaims, “I’m exhausted. Knock me out. Knock me out. I want drugs. Knock me out now!”
“I’ll put this one in the incubator,” the shift supervisor says to Winnie. “You stay with the mom until I return for the other baby.”
“I’ll come with you.” The new father’s tone brooks no argument. “I want to see my daughter.”
The shift supervisor nods, and they disappear.
Straus stands there, holding his daughter. Someone makes a keening noise and he realizes it’s him.
Winnie turns to see what is happening.
Their gazes meet.
Her eyes widen, and when she sees his infant, her expression collapses.
He reads the truth in Winnie’s eyes. She knows a stillborn when she sees one and her gentle face fills with unnamable sorrow. Heathcliff and Winnie have shared a great sorrow before. It bonds them.
Their mutual grief.
The baby in Winnie’s arms wiggles and squalls. Their eyes lock in the dim glow of her flashlight and Straus understands that the same insane thought bulleting through his brain has just entered Winnie’s mind.
His baby is dead while the other mother has two healthy infants. Two babies, while he and his wife have none. These out-of-towners. These interlopers. These strangers.
It’s not fair.
Straus trembles. Tears spill down his chin and drip onto his shirt. He tries to imagine life without his beloved daughter—knowing how devastated Robin will be when she wakes up to find that their girl has died—and pain slices his heart wide open.
Winnie nods at him, yes.
Heathcliff stops breathing. Does he understand correctly?
There is an unprecedented opportunity. The storm has circumvented protocol. No one is paying close attention. Not in a hurricane. Not in the dark. These other parents live far away. They will soon leave town. No one in Moonglow Cove need ever know. Not Robin. Not anyone. Just his secret and the midwife’s.
Winnie Newton extends the lively twin toward him.
His pulse gallops and he feels dizzy.
Could he? Should he?
Winnie pulls the curtain so no one in the dim room can witness their dirty deed. For one second, Straus hesitates.
Their fates not yet sealed. There is still time to turn back.
And then without a word ever passing between them, they do the unthinkable and switch babies.
Holding the live child in his arms, Heathcliff melts. He is instantly in love. As much in love as if the baby was biologically his.
“Wait,” Winnie whispers.
He stops. Yes, she’s right. They can’t do this. Resigned, he prepares to switch the babies again.
“Here.” Winnie grabs one of the keepsake bracelets from the nightstand and presses it into his palm. “Take this.”
Grateful to the bottom of his soul, Straus vows to take this secret to the grave.
As he turns to rouse his wife and show her their healthy newborn daughter, he sees that Winnie has handed him Anna.
Chapter Two
Amelia
The Long-lost Twin
Irony.
Such a contradictory word.
The first four letters straight as the flatiron Amelia once used to control her unruly salmon-colored locks before she’d whacked off the mop with pinking shears three days ago. She did the chop job in distress after she’d discovered her identical twin sister, Anna, had not died at birth as she’d always believed.
Reaching up, she fingered the jagged edges of her spiky pixie, her mind still toying with the concept.
Iron. Hard, humorless, functional. All that cold strength followed up by the saucy curlicue Y. Playful, mocking, ornate. That one letter morphed something staid and serious into an astonishing, the-joke-is-on-you truth.
How ironic, irony.
Irony had brought her to Moonglow Cove, Texas. She, the woman who’d set up her life so that she’d never need anyone for anything, had come begging for a favor of epic proportions from a complete stranger.
Rolling down Moonglow Boulevard that bright first Tuesday of June in a crazily inappropriate stretch Hummer limousine the shiny bright color of Meyer lemons, droplets of sweat sliding between her breasts, Amelia felt a surge of panic.
She was in the town where she’d been born during a hurricane. The town she hadn’t set foot in since she’d come squalling into the world one August night, thirty-five years earlier.
“Just call me Jumping Jack Flash,” she muttered.
No, not just me.
Her, too.
Us.
“Miss?” The driver eyed her in the rearview mirror. “Did you say something?”