At First Sight (jeremy Marsh & Lexie Darnell, #2)

The novel opens with a prologue set in February 2005. Jeremy Marsh, a 42-year-old magazine writer, sits alone on a foggy night reflecting on the events that brought him to this point. He recalls traveling to Boone Creek, North Carolina, five years earlier to investigate mysterious ghostly lights in a cemetery for Scientific American and falling in love with Lexie Darnell, a small-town librarian orphaned as a child.

The story shifts to February 2000. Jeremy is packing up his Upper West Side apartment to move to Boone Creek, where he and Lexie plan to marry. His best friend, Alvin Bernstein, a heavily tattooed cameraman, argues that Jeremy is rushing into marriage with a woman he barely knows. Jeremy reveals that Lexie is pregnant with a girl and asks Alvin to serve as best man. The pregnancy carries special weight: A fertility doctor once told Jeremy he was essentially unable to father a child, a diagnosis that ended his first marriage to Maria.

After proposing at the Empire State Building on Valentine's Day and introducing Lexie to his family in Queens, Jeremy and Lexie drive south. Lexie insists Jeremy cannot live with her before the wedding, as small-town custom forbids cohabitation, so he stays at Greenleaf Cottages, a decrepit motel run by Jed, a nonspeaking taxidermist who decorates every room with mounted animals.

Jeremy struggles to adapt. Boone Creek lacks the restaurants, theaters, and energy of New York, and he has made no friends. More troubling, he cannot write. Every attempt produces only sentences he immediately deletes. He has enough prewritten columns to last through July, but his freelance income has dried up while expenses mount: a sedan, renovations on a house they purchase overlooking Boone Creek, and baby supplies.

Meanwhile, they negotiate wedding logistics. Mayor Gherkin, a talkative local politician, agrees to help obtain a permit for the ceremony at Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, where Lexie's parents married, in exchange for Jeremy recruiting a grand marshal for the town's summer festival. Doris, Lexie's grandmother and the owner of the local restaurant, gives Jeremy her journal of baby-sex predictions, all of which have proven accurate, and suggests he might write about it. Jeremy declines, torn between his skepticism and not wanting to offend family.

Tensions surface. One afternoon, Jeremy finds Lexie sitting on a boardwalk bench holding hands with Rodney, a local deputy sheriff who once had a crush on Lexie. When Jeremy asks about her day, Lexie says she spent it at the library. The lie gnaws at him. Then he finds an anonymous e-mail: "HOW DO YOU KNOW THE BABY IS YOURS?" The question forces him to recall the fertility doctor's diagnosis, and doubt takes root.

When Rachel, Doris's waitress and Lexie's childhood friend, vanishes without explanation, Lexie cancels dinner plans with Jeremy, claiming she is staying with Doris. Suspicious, Jeremy drives to Doris's house and finds Lexie's car is not there; it is parked in Rodney's driveway. A fierce argument erupts. Lexie explains that Rachel believes Rodney still has feelings for Lexie, creating tension in Rachel and Rodney's relationship, and that Lexie feels caught in the middle. She apologizes for not being forthcoming. That night, Jeremy finds a second anonymous e-mail directing him to read Doris's journal.

He spends the next week studying the journal and discovers an entry using Lexie's initials, indicating she was pregnant years earlier by a man named Trevor Newland, the person she once referred to as Mr. Renaissance. No birth is recorded, indicating a miscarriage. Jeremy feels betrayed by another hidden truth. On the morning they close on the house, he confronts Lexie, and their worst argument erupts. She accuses him of taking out his writing frustrations on her; he accuses her of controlling every decision and hiding things. He walks away, borrows Doris's car, and flies to New York for his bachelor party.

During the bachelor party weekend, Jeremy's father notices his distress and tells him Lexie is "one of a kind," revealing that she has been writing weekly letters to Jeremy's mother and sisters-in-law, a gesture Jeremy knew nothing about. Later, at a bar, Alvin pressures Jeremy not to marry Lexie and accidentally reveals knowledge of Lexie's prior pregnancy, information Jeremy never shared. The pieces fall together: Rachel visited Alvin in New York during her unexplained absence and told him about Lexie's past. Alvin, who learned from Maria about Jeremy's fertility issues, sent the anonymous e-mails to make Jeremy doubt the baby's paternity. Jeremy throws his drink in Alvin's face and tells him he never wants to see him again.

Jeremy flies home early. Both he and Lexie apologize. Doris has told Lexie bluntly that she bore responsibility for hiding things and that trust must be the foundation of their marriage. Jeremy reveals everything about the e-mails and their source. Rachel visits to apologize, explaining she shared information innocently while venting to Alvin and had no idea he would weaponize it. Lexie forgives her. Mayor Gherkin replaces Alvin as best man.

On a beautiful May day, they marry on the beach near Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. Jed, revealed to be an ordained minister, officiates with surprising eloquence. Jeremy's five brothers and their wives attend, having been secretly invited by Lexie. After the ceremony, Jeremy walks alone along the beach, encounters wild horses on the dunes, and turns back to see Lexie and his mother embracing. He considers it the most wonderful day of his life.

The newlyweds settle into married life. Jeremy still cannot write. At a routine sonogram around six months, the technician discovers an amniotic band, a strand of fibrous material from the amniotic sac floating in the fluid. The doctor explains that if the band attaches to the baby, it could cause congenital abnormalities; if it reaches the umbilical cord, they could lose the baby. There is nothing to do but monitor with serial ultrasounds and wait.

Their life divides into anxious two-week increments between appointments. They name the baby Claire, after Lexie's mother. Jeremy decorates the nursery, briefly restoring their joy. When Lexie offers to move to New York if that will help him write, her selflessness triggers a breakthrough: Jeremy realizes he genuinely wants to stay in Boone Creek, and the insight unlocks his creativity. He writes his first column in months. At the final ultrasound before delivery, the band has not attached.

Lexie goes into labor early one morning. After hours at the hospital, she delivers, and Claire is born healthy. The pediatrician confirms the amniotic band never attached. Moments later, a long, steady beep sounds from Lexie's monitor. The doctor leaps up, a nurse shouts a code, and Jeremy is pulled from the room. Lexie has had an amniotic fluid embolism, an extremely rare event in which amniotic fluid enters a uterine vessel and travels to the heart. Lexie does not survive.

In shock, Jeremy initially refuses to see Claire. Doris, devastated but resolute, insists Lexie would want him to hold his child and walks him to the nursery. When Jeremy takes Claire into his arms and sees her features echoing Lexie's, he is overwhelmed by the certainty that loving this child is the reason he was placed on earth.

The epilogue returns to February 2005. Jeremy is raising four-year-old Claire alone in Boone Creek. She has been having severe night terrors for a month, waking screaming several times a night. He has not dated since Lexie's death. He wrote a book about Doris's journal after a controlled experiment confirmed her perfect accuracy, and it became a best-seller. On a foggy night, remembering how Lexie's own childhood nightmares ended when Doris brought her to see the cemetery's ghostly lights, Jeremy wakes Claire and drives her to the cemetery. The lights appear, and Claire watches transfixed. When she asks if the lights are her mother, Jeremy holds her tight and says yes, certain that Lexie is with them and that Claire's nightmares will end tonight, just as her mother's once did.