Chapter 9
Melissa woke with the decision already made.
That was the strangest part. She lay in the unfamiliar brightness of a morning that had arrived without her help, staring at the water stains on the ceiling of Captain’s Watch, and the thing she’d been circling for weeks was simply there. Sitting on her chest. Solid.
She was going to say yes to Cassidy.
The marketing job. The photographs. The whole terrifying proposition of being responsible for capturing actual people doing actual things.
She sat up slowly. The sheet slid off her shoulder and she pulled it back without thinking. Outside, the courtyard she and Clint had cleared yesterday was still bright and orderly in the early light, the stone pathways washed clean by rain and hosed down by their work. A single palm frond lay across the fire pit, proof that coastal storms never really finished on schedule.
Her phone was on the nightstand. She picked it up and looked at Cassidy’s number without tapping it. Cassidy was probably already awake and already working. Cassidy was a person who answered her phone on the second ring and had three follow-up questions ready before you finished your first sentence, but she didn’t need a text at dawn.
Melissa set the phone down.
She got up, pulled on a pair of soft shorts and a faded gray shirt, and padded to the kitchen. Coffee first. Anything important got easier once coffee was involved. She measured the grounds and listened to the machine hiss, aware in a detached, reporter-brain way of how her own hands were moving. Steady. Not shaking. If she was going to back out, her hands would know before the rest of her did.
Her hands were not backing out.
She carried the mug to the front window and watched the lighthouse. It stood where it always stood, chalk-white and impassive, indifferent to whether she photographed it today or not. She’d treated it as a safe harbor for months. A subject that couldn’t accuse her of anything, couldn’t write an op-ed, couldn’t stand in a hotel lobby in a borrowed cardigan and say you stole this from me.
The lighthouse was safe. The lighthouse was also the problem.
Is staying safe worth staying stuck?
Emily had said it once, on a quiet stretch of beach, and somehow it had wedged itself into the back of Melissa’s skull and never left. Winnie had her own way of saying it. Clint had said it cruder. Even the storm had been making the same argument, from a different angle, and Melissa had finally stopped being able to tell any of them apart.
She took a long pull of coffee and set the mug on the sill.
If she was going to do this, she wasn’t going to do it by text.
Heron Cottage was three doors down, a two-story cottage the color of driftwood with a rooftop deck that caught all the harbor light. Cassidy had put a hand-painted sign on the door that said CAFFEINE BEFORE CONVERSATION in a font too cheerful to fully mean it. Melissa stood on the porch and knocked before she could think about what she was doing.
Cassidy opened the door in workout leggings, a T-shirt that said PIVOT across the chest, and her hair pulled back into a knot so tight not a wisp of hair pulled loose.
“Melissa.” She blinked. “Come in. Coffee?”
“I’ve had some. I’m good.”
“Everybody says that and then accepts coffee.” Cassidy was already moving toward the kitchen. “Sit.”
The inside of Heron was tidy in a way that told Melissa the sabbatical had never really taken. Notebooks fanned across the coffee table. A laptop open on the counter. Two different calendars, one digital on a propped tablet and one paper, color-coded. A woman on a break had tried to live here and a woman running three projects from her phone had won.
She sat on the couch. Cassidy appeared with two mugs anyway and set one in front of her.
“So.” Cassidy folded onto the other end of the couch, tucked her legs under herself, and looked at Melissa with the focused attention of a person who did not waste early morning energy on small talk. “Are you here about Bryan, the festival, the website project, or something I don’t know about yet?”
“The website project. Plus the festival prep. All of it.”
Cassidy’s eyes sharpened. “All of it.”
“Yes.”
“You’re saying yes.”
“I’m saying yes.”
Cassidy set her mug down so she could use both hands. “Melissa Reeves. I have been trying not to pester you about this for two weeks. I have drafted seventeen versions of a follow-up text. My therapist would like you to know I’m very proud of my restraint.”
