“I left the Coast Guard three years ago,” Clint said. He picked up the work gloves she’d set on the bench and folded them together, one inside the other. Occupying his hands. “I tell people Winnie needed help with the property. And she did. But that’s not why I came.”
She waited.
“I came because I couldn’t trust myself to make decisions that mattered anymore.” He set the folded gloves on the bench. “Here, the decisions are small. Fix the roof, clear the path. Nobody gets hurt if I pick the wrong screw.”
He kept his eyes on the gloves instead of on her.
“That’s a little pathetic,” she said. “Both of us.”
“Yeah.” One corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Close. “It is.”
Another silence, but this one was different from the heavy quiet of the morning’s work.
“I took six frames last night,” she said. “During the storm. Right after you came out and yelled at me.”
“I didn’t yell.”
“You raised your voice significantly in an outdoor setting.”
He almost smiled again. “How’d they turn out?”
“I haven’t looked yet, just in the preview on the screen.” That was true. She’d been afraid to. Afraid they’d be as empty as everything else she’d shot in the past two years, and afraid they wouldn’t. “But they felt different. While I was shooting. The lighthouse with the storm behind it and the rain coming sideways. It felt like it used to feel.”
“Like what?”
She thought about it. “Necessary.”
Clint nodded slowly, as if that word made sense to him in some private way.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, glanced at the screen, and his whole posture changed. His shoulders squared, and the softness that had crept into the conversation vanished behind the same protective alertness she’d seen a hundred times.
“Winnie,” he said, already turning toward the pathway that led to the keeper’s quarters. “She’s got some roof damage.”
“Is she okay?”
“She says it’s minor.” His tone made it clear that Winnie’s definition of minor and his definition of minor were two different things. He was already walking. “I need to go check.”
“Go.”
He stopped at the edge of the courtyard. Turned back. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Thanks for the gloves.”
He held her gaze for half a second longer than he needed to, then headed up the path. She watched him go, his stride lengthening the way it always did when something needed fixing, his focus already narrowing to the problem ahead.
She sat down on the memorial bench. The stone was warm from the sun and still damp from the storm. She rested her hands on her knees and looked at the courtyard they’d cleaned together.
She thought about calling after him. Offering to help with Winnie’s roof. But he was already in fix-it mode, moving with the same focused energy he brought to every cracked paver and loose fence post. She knew that mode. She had her own version of it, and it looked like a camera viewfinder.
She got up and headed to her cottage. Inside, she pulled the memory card from her camera and popped it into her laptop. The images automatically loaded into her editing program. She paused.
Look at them. Whatever they are, look.
She tapped a key and the lighthouse filled the screen, white tower against a sky the color of a bruise. Rain streaked across the frame in silver lines. The beam cut through the chaos, steady and sharp. And the image was alive. It was unguarded and real. The same way her work used to be before she learned to be afraid of it.
Melissa tapped to the next frame. Then the next. Each one raw, imperfect, full of the urgency she’d felt standing in the wind with the rain soaking through her shirt.
She closed the laptop. Opened it and took another look at the images. She smiled as she shut the laptop again and went off to shower and change.
