I’ve decided that Bluebeard is an appropriate name for the yacht that delivered Russ to me and then took him away.

He was a pirate.

He stole my heart.

Mama was the one who noticed that I looked peaked and that I wasn’t eating much. When had I ever said no to her blackened mahi tacos with pineapple-mango salsa? Never was the answer. But they just didn’t seem appealing. Nothing seemed appealing.

She said, “Do you want to come to the clinic at lunchtime tomorrow and I’ll slide you in?”

I couldn’t tell her that I was suffering from a broken heart, and there’s no cure for that except time, and for all the technological advances going on in the world, no one has figured out how to speed time up or slow it down—or stop it. Whoever figures out that trick is going to be rich. “Nah,” I said.

“No, but thanks for offering,” Mama prompted.

I retreated to my room. I needed to put less energy into pining for the pirate and more into saving money so I could get a place of my own.

Then, a couple of days ago, I woke up feeling dizzy and nauseated and I thought, Damn it, I really am sick. I had planned to go to Salomon Bay—the best thing for me to do was get back into a routine—but it looked like it would be the clinic instead.

I raced to the bathroom and puked into the toilet. I heard Mama knocking on my bedroom door, asking if I was all right, and then I heard Huck say, “LeeAnn, leave the poor girl alone, no one likes to be bothered when they’re praying to the porcelain god.”

And Mama said, “You’re right, handsome. I’ll leave her be. She’ll be okay as long as it’s not morning sickness.”

Morning sickness, I thought.

It was off to the Chelsea drugstore for a test, but I had to wait until my mother’s friend Fatima left for lunch because Rosie Small buying a pregnancy test would win Fatima a gold medal in the Gossip Olympics.

I hurried home, praying, praying, and then I peed on the stick.

I’m pregnant.

Today a package addressed to me was hand-delivered to the house. The package contained ten thousand dollars in cash.

I’m being bought off.

There wasn’t a note but I don’t have to be a wizard to know the money is from Todd Croft. But has Todd Croft told Russ that I’m pregnant?

Let me go back.

When I found out I was pregnant four weeks ago, all I could think was that I needed to tell Russ. I was pretty sure he would offer to help. And by help, a part of me was thinking he would leave his wife, move to St. John, and raise this baby with me. It was a long shot, I knew, but not impossible. Maybe instead of making Russ’s marriage stronger, the weekend affair (I’m shying away from the word fling) had been a breaking point. Maybe Russ would say yes to the job and goodbye to Irene and start a whole new life. The boys were teenagers; the older boy was headed to college in the fall and the younger one was only a year or two behind, so they were nearly out of the house. If anyone was poised for a second act, it was Russ.

Or so I let myself momentarily believe.

I called Iowa City information and asked for the phone number for Russell or Irene Steele.

“Irene Steele,” the operator said. “Hold for the number.”

I hung up the phone. The listing was under Irene’s name. She paid the bills. She was in charge of the household. She intimidated me—indeed, scared me—even from afar. I would never call the house, I decided. I wasn’t that desperate.

I had to somehow circumvent Irene. I needed an e-mail. I knew there was probably an e-mail attached to the room reservation at Caneel. I had worked at Caneel long enough to know that all reservations were kept in a database, but that database couldn’t be accessed on any of the restaurant computers.

So I would have to ask the restaurant manager, Estella, to get it for me.

I said to her, “Please don’t tell my mother”—Estella rolled her eyes as if to say, Rosie-child, no matter how you implore me, you know I could never keep a secret from LeeAnn—“but a gentleman who stayed here over Presidents’ Day weekend begged me for the conch-fritter recipe. He wants to give it to the chef at his country club so they can serve them at his wife’s surprise birthday party and I promised him I’d send him the recipes for the fritters and the aioli. He gave me his e-mail, but I lost it, Estella. And I feel terrible. I remember he said his wife’s birthday is May twenty-third because that’s a day after mine and so time is of the essence. Can you help me find the man’s e-mail, please, Estella? I want to provide the kind of service Caneel is famous for.”

Estella huffed for a minute. Didn’t I know that accessing the guests’ personal information was forbidden?

I said, “But he already gave it to me and I lost it! It’s his wife’s fortieth birthday!”

Estella hesitated, then she ushered me into the back office, and together, we looked. The name Russell Steele didn’t turn up in the system, which was perplexing. Had he used a fake name? Was he not only a pirate but an impostor?

Then I said, “Let’s check the name Todd Croft.” And it popped right up—room 718 for two nights, total bill $1,652. There was an e-mail, but it was Todd’s, and my heart sank, though I did think it was encouraging that it was a BVI e-mail address.

I copied it down and thanked Estella, who closed the file and hurried us out of the office, saying, “That was the easy part. Good luck convincing Chef to hand over his recipes.”

I wrote to Todd Croft, explained who I was, and said merely that I would like an e-mail address for Russ so that I could send him the conch-fritter and aioli recipes that he’d requested.

But I guess Mr. Croft saw right through my ploy because here I am, holding ten large.

I know I should feel insulted but all I feel is relieved. Because if Mama kicks me out, and she very well might, I’ll have money to get a place for me and the baby.

I’m telling her tomorrow.

I was so nervous that I got out of bed early after barely sleeping all night. I couldn’t wait another hour, another minute. Once I heard both Mama and Huck in the kitchen, I walked down the hall, comforted by the idea that in thirty seconds, the secret would be out. They could holler; they could scream, call me names, and cast me out, but all of that would pale against the relief of speaking the truth.

When Mama saw me, she was shocked. “Rosie? What are you doing awake? Is everything all right?”

In that second, everything was still all right. Mama was dressed for work in her raspberry scrubs and her white lab coat, her towering bun wrapped in a brightly patterned scarf. She’d had her nails done—she was vain about her nails, and they were the same shade of raspberry—and I noticed her fingers against the white porcelain of her coffee cup. Every morning, Huck makes her coffee, one poached egg, and a piece of lightly buttered wheat toast. Huck was standing at the stove tending to the egg. He was wearing cargo shorts with a lure hanging from the belt loop and a long-sleeved T-shirt advertising the Mississippi. He had a bandanna wrapped around his neck and was ready for a day of fishing. I didn’t dread Huck’s anger; what I dreaded was his disappointment in me. We’d had a rocky start to our relationship. When he started courting Mama seven years ago, I resented him. I thought, He sees a single woman and her wayward daughter and thinks they need to be saved—but we don’t need to be saved. But I quickly grew to love Huck and, yes, to count on him. I remember one time when he’d told me to help myself to twenty bucks from his wallet so I could go into town to meet my friends, I found a folded-up, faded picture of Huck with another woman. The picture was obviously old, from the seventies or eighties. In it, Huck was a young man. He had a full head of strawberry-blond hair and a mustache but no beard; he wore jeans with what looked like a white patent-leather belt and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. The woman was in a crocheted chevron-print dress and had on white patent-leather boots. Her blond hair was feathered and she wore too much black eyeliner.

I took the picture to Huck and said, “Who’s this?” Huck had had a sister who had died of cancer and I thought maybe this was her; he rarely talked about her but I knew her name was Caroline.

“Her?” Huck said. I thought he might be angry that I’d snooped in his wallet for more than just the twenty, but he didn’t seem angry. “That’s my first wife, Kimberly.”

I was shocked by this. I didn’t know Huck had been married before. I felt affronted, maybe even betrayed—for Mama’s sake, but also my own. He and Mama had been married a year or two when I found this picture and the three of us had become a happy family. I didn’t like the idea of sharing Huck with anyone. “I didn’t realize you’d been married before.” I swallowed. “Does my mother know?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. He smiled sadly. “Sorry, Rosie, I should have told you. There just never seemed to be an appropriate time and it doesn’t matter anyway.”

“If it doesn’t matter, why do you keep the picture?” I asked. I handed it back to him, though really I wanted to tear it to shreds.

“Well,” Huck said. He thought about it for a minute. One thing I love most about Huck is that he’s a straight shooter. He doesn’t candy-coat the truth or brush it away because he doesn’t want me to see it. “Kimberly ended up being a disappointment to me. She was an alcoholic, a really, really mean drunk, and that destroyed our marriage. It destroyed just about all of her relationships, actually. But in this picture, we were happy, so I keep it as a reminder that my time with her wasn’t all bad.” He slipped the picture back into the wallet. “In even the bleakest situations, there’s usually some good to be salvaged.”

Facing Mama and Huck to tell them I was pregnant was a bleak situation. Would any good be salvaged from it?

“I’m pregnant,” I said.

Huck turned from the stove.

“What?” Mama said.

“I’m pregnant.”

She set down her coffee cup and stood up. Her face was unreadable. Shock, I suppose. Huck was watching her.

“Oscar?” she said.

“Not Oscar,” I said. “It was a man at the hotel, someone you don’t know. I was stupid. He’s gone now and I don’t know how to reach him.”

There was a moment of such profound silence that I felt like the world had stopped. She was probably deciding whether or not to believe me.

Then, finally, she opened her arms, and I entered them.