Cassidy closed the notebook for real. “I really am glad, Melissa.”
“Don’t.” Melissa lifted a hand. “Don’t make this a moment. If you make this a moment, I’ll leave.”
“Fair.” Cassidy picked up her mug. “But I’m glad.”
Melissa stood. She set her own untouched mug on the coffee table, the coffee still steaming, a coaster already underneath it because Cassidy was Cassidy.
“I’ll come by in a few days,” Melissa said. “Or I won’t. You’ll hear from me.”
“I’ll hear from you.”
“Don’t text me in the meantime.”
“I’m not going to text you in the meantime.” Cassidy crossed her heart with two fingers. “Believe it or don’t.”
Melissa did believe her, a little, which was a new feeling.
On the porch Cassidy stopped her with one hand on the doorframe. “One more thing. And then I’ll shut up.”
“Okay.”
“Whatever the first shot is. When you get it. I don’t need to see it. You don’t have to show me anything until you’re ready. That part’s yours.”
Melissa looked at her for a second. She nodded.
She walked back to Captain’s Watch slowly, taking the long way around the courtyard instead of the direct path. The sun was higher. The palm frond on the fire pit had been cleared at some point, probably by Clint, though she hadn’t seen him out. The lighthouse kept doing what the lighthouse did.
She stopped at the memorial bench where she and Clint had stood the morning before, and she set a hand on the warm stone of the back rest. William. Henry. Robert Lockhart. Three names she had walked past a thousand times without really looking. She looked now. The letters were worn but sharp where someone had recently cleaned the moss out of the engraving.
Clint probably.
She went inside and ate a sandwich standing up at the counter. Then she picked up her camera bag and her keys, and she walked into town.
Harbor Brew had the good afternoon light. It slanted through the front windows and made the wood floor look honey-colored. Melissa sat at a two-top near the window with her camera bag on the chair opposite her and her coffee cooling in front of her and her hands flat on the table where she could see them.
She had told herself she was going to sit here and do nothing else. No shooting or asking anyone for permission to shoot later. The camera was along for company and for nothing more.
She had repeated that promise to herself three times on the walk over and once more when she pushed the door open and heard the bell above it. The bag had come along anyway, because her compromise with her own cowardice was that the camera got to be in the room.
Jan was behind the counter, wiping down the espresso machine with the thorough, absent motion of somebody who had done it ten thousand times. She was humming something. Melissa couldn’t hear the tune over the steam wand, but she could see Jan’s shoulders keeping time with it.
That was one.
Jan’s sleeve kept riding up and she kept pushing it back down with the inside of her wrist so she wouldn’t get coffee on it. Little practiced flick. Up, flick, down. Up, flick, down. Melissa’s fingers twitched on the table.
She didn’t lift the camera.
She just watched.
The door opened and Sally Morris came in, the Bayview General Store’s straw tote over her shoulder, her silver hair in its usual low braid. She waved at Jan without stopping and slid into the corner booth where a younger woman was already waiting with a stack of papers. The younger woman was pointing at something on the top page. Sally was frowning. Melissa recognized the frown. She’d seen it on Sally at the sunset gatherings, aimed at anyone who tried to offer help with the food she hadn’t asked for help with.
“I am telling you, it’s two hundred for the small, and that’s what I’ve always paid,” Sally said, loud enough to carry.
“I know, but the vendor’s saying?—”
“The vendor can say a lot of things. I don’t care what the vendor is saying. If I pay two-fifty for a small candle, I lose money on every single one. I’ve been doing this for nineteen years.”
Candle inventory. Melissa almost smiled.
