Free Sound of Secrets by Darlene Gardner Page A

pressed on the accelerator. He wondered if she realized what she had committed to. He wouldn't hurt her. He could never do that. But he would find out why she was lying to him.

    Cool ocean water rushed over their bare feet, soaking the bottom of Cara's pale yellow slacks and Gray's rolled-up blue jeans.
    Instead of retreating to the water's edge, Cara gazed up at the full moon. The day had been clear so there were no clouds to obscure it, and the moon looked close enough to touch.
    Her apprehension vanished like the tiny, scurrying crabs that burrowed into the soft, wet sand
    As long as she was with Gray, nothing and no one in Secret Sound would hurt her. She knew that as clearly as she knew that the moon was glowing overhead. She just wasn’t sure how she knew.
    "I love the beach at night." The sentiment was strong enough that she couldn't keep the words bottled inside her. They tumbled forward, like seaweed on an onrushing wave. "I love it any time, really. Maybe that’s because I’ve only seen it a handful of times in my entire life."
    "You don’t take your vacations at the beach?"
    "I don’t take vacations. Period. My parents both died a few months ago, but they were sick for years before that. Since I’m an only child, it was up to me to care for them. That didn’t leave much time for frolicking in the surf."
    "I’m sorry," Gray said, and somehow she knew he was referring both to the loss of her parents and the loss of her freedom.
    "Thank you." She took a deep breath. The pain of the loss was still so great that it felt as though she’d inhaled a jagged lightning bolt.
    "How about when you were a kid?" he asked, and she was grateful that he didn’t dwell on the deaths of her parents. "Did your parents take you to the beach then?"
    "They weren't much for vacations," Cara said, shaking her head. She had a vague memory of her parents wading in the surf, but no recollection of them being young. Their movements had been slow, their hair already graying. "I think I was at the beach with them once, but it must have been when I was very young. I can remember my mother wearing a black bathing suit with the kind of short skirt that flared at the hips."
    "I remember my mother wearing a suit like that, too.” Gray absently kicked at the water as though battling an invisible demon. The droplets formed an arc against the night sky, and they looked like shimmering diamonds on a backdrop of black velvet.
    "How did she die?" Cara asked softly. He didn't answer for so long she thought the roar of the waves had drowned out her question.
    "The disease is called cardiomyopathy," he said finally, his eyes on the empty stretch of beach ahead of them. "It's a cruel sickness that strikes without warning, destroying the muscles of the heart. They get so flabby they're not strong enough to pump blood around the body. The lungs and other organs fill up with fluid, making each breath a struggle. There's no cure."
    She heard the pain lace his voice, felt it as though it were her own. "How about a heart transplant? This would have been the early 1980s, right? Wasn’t the first one done in the 1960s?”
    "It was 1967. A South African doctor named Christiaan Barnard," Gray said, as though he'd long ago memorized the knowledge. "Even though the patient only lived for nine days, Barnard considered the operation a success. The next year, there were a bunch of heart transplants worldwide. But all the patients died, and all but a few doctors stopped performing them."
    "Isn't there some kind of drug that prevents patients from rejecting the new hearts?"
    "Cyclosporine," Gray answered, his voice detached. "But it wasn’t until the late 1980s that doctors started to have wide success with heart transplants, and that was too late for my mother.”
    The rush of the waves filled the sudden silence, and Cara’s heart went out to Gray and his family. She wondered how losing his mother in such traumatic fashion had affected the boy he'd been and the