Page 1 of Fragile Designs

Prologue

Pawleys Island

Another wave of nausea hit Carly Harris the minute she opened her car door and got out in the garage. It was the stench of gasoline and oil mixing with the humid South Carolina heat swirling around the space that upset her stomach. The tourist trade in Pawleys Island was in full swing, and it had taken her longer to get home than she’d planned.

Eric’s truck was in its bay with the engine running, and she gritted her teeth. He knew better than to leave it running with the garage door down. For a police officer, her husband was surprisingly unconcerned with safety issues.

Her hand drifted to her belly, and she sighed. How would he take the news she needed to share tonight? They’d been fighting nearly every day, and she’d threatened to leave if he didn’t start to stick up for her with his mother. Ever since Carly and Eric had been married three years before, Opal’s criticism of Carly had gone unchallenged. And this past year had been unbearable.

Everything Carly did was wrong—she didn’t organize the kitchen right, she didn’t call often enough, she didn’t send Ericoff with the perfect lunch every day. And the greatest sin of all was that Carly didn’t want to give up traveling to flea markets and selling the collectibles she’d happily curated from garage sales, online websites, and estate sales.

When she’d first broached the idea of attending a writers’ conference this weekend, he hit the roof, and she knew it was because he didn’t want to tell his mother she was gone. Opal was constantly whispering in Eric’s ear that he couldn’t trust his wife to be faithful if she was out of town without him.

Carly was afraid Eric was beginning to believe it. Even worse, now that she was pregnant, she was beginning to doubt her career choice herself. What she’d wanted to do since she was a teenager was to write historical novels. Selling collectible items had seemed a good option instead of putting a toe in the craziness of the publishing world, but the itch to create her own novel had blossomed lately. Maybe she was finally ready to try. Eric wouldn’t be on board with a pie-in-the-sky move like that, which was why she hadn’t brought it up yet.

With the grocery bags dangling from her arms and hands, she opened the door from the garage and stepped into the kitchen. “Hello?”

She set the groceries on the kitchen counter and headed for the hall. “Eric?”

The house had that empty feeling, and she glanced out the sliding glass door into the backyard. The door to her shop stood open, and she smiled. Eric must have followed through on his promise to start organizing the items belonging to her great-grandmother. He’d been poking around them for several weeks but hadn’t done the heavy lifting she’d asked. Carly planned to take them to the flea market next weekend.

After putting away the groceries, she opened the sliding door and went across the deck and down the steps to the yard. The scent of freshly mown grass mingled with the roses blooming in the garden bed along the back of the deck. He’d been on a roll today. Mowing the grass was his least favorite chore, and she usually had to prod him to get it done.

The dark interior of her shop gave her pause. “Eric, are you in here?”

When he didn’t answer, she reached around the edge of the opening and found the switch. Light overhead flooded the interior, and she found things moved around. Her great-grandmother’s antique desk and chairs had been transferred to the other side of the building, and some of the boxes sat with their tops open. Eric had at least made a start on the work, but he hadn’t gotten as far as she’d hoped.

Her sisters had been pushing her to sell the items so their inheritance could be split. Even though she’d told them the items were unlikely to bring much money, they were impatient. So was Eric. He’d had his eye on a new truck and had thought their share might be enough for a down payment. Some of the sentimental items had been left to Carly alone, but the valuable, sellable antiques were for all of them.

Her hand drifted to her belly again. A new truck would have to wait with the news she had to give him. The money would need to be used for a crib and other baby paraphernalia.

“Eric, where are you?”

The place felt empty, so she went back outside and checked the cement pad behind the garage. Nothing was out of place. They had no close neighbors, so there was no one to ask if they’d spotted him. Could a buddy have picked him up?

She pulled out her phone and called him. After a few seconds, she heard the distant sound of Eric’s ringtone from inside her shop. He had to be in there.

She went back across the grass and stepped into the building. The sound of his phone came from a back corner where the majority of the boxes had been stacked. As she neared the area, she caught a whiff of an unpleasant coppery scent, and nausea rose in her throat again.

She increased her pace and was nearly running by the time she rounded the end of the boxes and looked down at the open floor space.

Eric lay on his stomach on the floor. A wound in his back had saturated the green tee he wore with a hideous red stain. “Eric—honey?” She knelt beside him and touched his arm. His skin was already cooling.

She rocked back on her heels and didn’t realize she was screaming until she felt the pain in her throat. His phone quit ringing, and she lowered her gaze.

She’d dropped her cell phone in the pool of blood beside Eric’s body.

She snatched it up and wiped the blood from it on her jeans so she could call for help.

But it was too late for her husband.

One

Nine Months Later

Beaufort, South Carolina

The scent of South Carolina salt water and marsh blew in from the water, and the breeze caressed Carly Harris’s face. There was nothing like a low-country spring morning, and she wanted to enjoy every minute of it before the day got busy. Two-month-old Noah had nursed and fallen asleep to the drone of boats out on Beaufort Bay, and she shuffled her son to her other arm. Her black cat, Pepper, gave her a disdainful stare when she jostled him with the movement. She kept the swing moving with one foot so the baby didn’t awaken.

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