He turned and walked toward Driftwood Cottage. She watched him go while his shoulders hunched against the rain and his stride went stiff, and she hated that her hands were shaking now when they’d been perfectly steady five minutes ago.
She took the picture. One frame. The lighthouse against the churning sky with the beam just starting to cut through the gloom. The wind bending everything around it while the tower held. She looked at the preview screen. It was good. It was the best thing she’d shot in two years. It had urgency in it, something her dawn photos had never come close to.
She took four more. Each one better than the last. The rain was soaking through her shirt and her hair was plastered to her neck and she didn’t care. The wind threw salt spray up from the waves, and she tasted it on her lips as she adjusted the shutter speed. She braced against each gust, leaned into the tripod, and worked fast between bursts. Her hands knew what to do. They always had.
For five minutes she was a photographer again. The real one, not the careful, contained version who shot buildings. She was the one who used to chase storms because they cut through everything and showed you exactly what was there.
Then a gust nearly knocked the tripod over, and reality asserted itself. She broke down the equipment quickly and ran for Captain’s Watch with the bag clutched against her chest.
The door fought her. The wind had changed direction again, pressing against the cottage front, and she had to throw her shoulder into it. Inside, the quiet was sudden and complete. She stood in her entryway, dripping onto the wood floor, breathing hard, and listened to the storm close in around the cottage.
Maybe I’d trust your judgment if you showed any.
She peeled off her wet shirt and dropped it on the bathroom floor. She changed into dry clothes and toweled her hair. The whole time, his words kept circling.
Hiding behind that camera, not talking to anyone, not doing anything real.
“You don’t know me,” she said to the empty cottage. But the words sounded thin.
She went to the kitchen and put the kettle on, more for something to do with her hands than because she wanted tea. The lights flickered once, twice, and then went out. The kettle was electric. Of course.
She stood in her dark kitchen and listened to the storm. Wind hammered the windows. Rain drove sideways against the glass in sheets that sounded like thrown gravel. Something heavy scraped across the porch outside, maybe the planter she kept by the door.
She felt her way to the living room and sat on the couch. Her eyes adjusted slowly. Gray light came through the windows, enough to see the shapes of furniture and the outline of her camera bag where she’d dropped it by the door. The wind pushed against the cottage walls in long gusts, and she could feel the building absorb each one. Captain’s Watch was old but solid. It had stood through worse than this.
Clint was wrong. She was doing fine. She had a routine and work, even if it was just the lighthouse at dawn. She had Emily, sort of, and Winnie’s Friday gatherings, and her subscription to the photography journals she still read cover to cover every month.
She wasn’t falling apart. She was regrouping, and that was allowed, right?
Not talking to anyone.
She talked to people. She talked to Emily and she talked to Jan at Harbor Brew when she picked up coffee. She wasn’t some hermit sealed in a cave. She was just… selective. Careful about where she put her energy.
Not doing anything real.
She pulled the throw pillow onto her lap and pressed her fingers into the fabric. The truth was, she hadn’t called Cassidy back about the marketing photos. Cassidy had followed up twice, casual and friendly both times, and Melissa had let both messages sit unanswered on her phone.
She’d told herself she was busy. She wasn’t busy. She was afraid that if she pointed a camera at Bryan’s family in the kitchen or Jan pouring coffee at the counter, she’d see the same thing she saw through every viewfinder aimed at a person. Vulnerability people didn’t know they were showing. And she’d take the shot because that was what she did, and someone else would pay the price.
Better to shoot buildings. Safer.
The storm shook the cottage. A gust hit so hard that the windows vibrated in their frames, and she pulled her knees up to her chest on the couch without thinking about it. Rain found a way in from the roof over the kitchen. A drip started, regular as a metronome.
She should get a bowl for that. She didn’t move.
What counted as real? Clint fixed gutters and patched roofs and cleared storm drains, and he thought that was real. Hands-on and visible. Something you could point to at the end of the day and say I did that. But her work was real too. A photograph could stop someone in their tracks, make them look at something they’d walked past their whole lives.
Except she wasn’t taking those photographs. She was taking pictures of the lighthouse at dawn. Every single day. The same lighthouse, the same angle, the same soft light. Nothing that would stop anyone or change anything at all.
She sat in the dark and listened to it and thought about the woman from the hurricane. Maria LaBelle. Thirty-two years old. Shielding her four-year-old son with her body while the wind tore the world apart around them. Melissa had taken the photo from twelve feet away. She hadn’t called out or offered help. Just lifted the camera and pressed the shutter.
The image won three awards and upended Maria’s life. People stopped her because they recognized her face. A man had stalked her. Maria and her son had to move to a different city.
That was doing something real. It just happened to be the wrong thing.
The wind shifted again, and the rain eased for a moment before coming back harder. She pressed her forehead to her knees. Her wet hair was cold against her skin.
Clint was wrong about her. He didn’t know her history, her work, and what she’d built or what it had cost. He saw a woman with a camera and a closed door and decided she was broken because she didn’t spend her evenings at his aunt’s fire pit making small talk.
