Except… he was kind of right…
She had been here for months. She’d shot the lighthouse from every angle available to her and the images were technically flawless and completely empty. She had turned down the marketing job, Emily’s invitations, and every single opportunity to do the thing she was actually good at. Because doing it meant pointing a camera at a person, and she couldn’t face that.
Clint didn’t know any of that. But he’d seen the result. And the result looked exactly the way he’d described it. Hiding. Not doing anything real.
The storm was moving. She could hear it shifting, the center of the noise traveling eastward, the rain settling down into a steady, slower rhythm. The window in the living room leaked gray light from the west where the clouds were already thinning.
She would need to check the porch in the morning. Clean up whatever the wind had scattered. There would be palm debris all over the courtyard, and Clint would be out there at first light clearing it, because that was what Clint did. Fixed things. Made them functional, sound, and ready for the next storm.
She lifted her head and looked at her camera bag by the door. Inside it was a memory card with six frames from tonight. Images that felt alive.
She got up and found a bowl for the kitchen drip. Set it under the leak and listened to the change in pitch from splatter to plunk. She rescued her camera bag, pulled off the protective cover, and checked her camera. All good.
Then she went back to the couch, pulled the throw blanket off the armrest, and sat with her feet tucked under her while the storm moved east and the cottage settled into its small familiar sounds. The drip and the wind, lower now.
Outside, the lighthouse beam swept past her window. A slow, steady arc of light through the rain.
Chapter 8
Melissa stood on the porch of Captain’s Watch with her coffee mug pressed against her collarbone, surveying the courtyard. Palm fronds littered the stone pathways. A section of lattice from the gazebo lay flat across the fire pit. Smaller debris was scattered everywhere, bits of branch and shingle and Spanish moss ripped loose by the wind. But the cottages stood, and the lighthouse rose above them all, unchanged. The storm had passed and left behind a mess but nothing broken.
She’d barely slept. The power had come back sometime in the early hours, the overhead light snapping on and startling her awake in the chair where she’d been curled up. She’d turned it off and stayed there, watching the lighthouse beam sweep its slow circle through the last of the rain.
Clint’s words had kept her company in the dark. Every one of them.
You’re hiding behind your camera, not talking to anyone, not doing anything real.
She took a sip of coffee. It was too hot and burned the roof of her mouth. Good. Something to focus on besides the tight knot inside her.
He’d been cruel. That was the easy version. She could wrap herself in it, stay angry, dismiss everything he’d said as the blunt-force opinions of a man who fixed gutters for a living and thought that qualified him to fix people too.
Except he hadn’t been wrong. Not about all of it. Maybe not about most of it.
She watched him now from the porch railing. He’d been out there since before she woke, judging by the progress. A wheelbarrow sat near the gazebo, already half full of broken branches. Clint moved along the pathway with a pair of loppers, cutting through a downed limb that blocked the route between Heron Cottage and the courtyard. He worked steady and unhurried.
He hadn’t looked toward Captain’s Watch once.
Melissa went inside and poured a second mug of coffee. Black, because she’d seen him drink it that way at the sunset gatherings. She stood at the counter holding both mugs, one in each hand, and stared at the front door.
This is ridiculous. It’s a cup of coffee, not a marriage proposal.
But it wasn’t just coffee and she knew it. It was walking toward the person who had said the truest, most uncomfortable thing anyone had said to her in two years, and admitting she’d heard him. Choosing to close the distance instead of widening it.
She could stay inside. Clean up her own porch. Nod at him later across the courtyard and let the argument wedge a permanent chill between them. That would be easier. Easier was her specialty.
She pushed through the screen door before she could talk herself out of it.
The courtyard was worse up close. Wet leaves plastered the cottage walls in dark patches, and sand from the beach had collected in every seam of the stone pathway.
Clint was crouched beside the memorial bench, inspecting a crack in one of the stone pavers. He looked up when he heard her footsteps, and his expression went flat and guarded. She’d seen that look on people in disaster zones, the face they made when they expected bad news.
“Brought you coffee.” She held out the mug.
He looked at it. Then at her. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
A beat passed. He stood and took the mug. His fingers were dirty, bark dust and soil ground into the creases of his knuckles. He took a sip and didn’t say anything.
