Clint caught himself whistling halfway through the second verse of an old Jimmy Buffett song and stopped, wrench frozen against the spigot housing. He didn’t whistle. Hadn’t in years. The last time he remembered doing it was aboard the Neptune, tightening deck fittings before a patrol, Sean two feet away making fun of his pitch.
He finished the repair in silence, wiped his hands on his jeans, and moved to the next item on his list. Gazebo railing, south side. One of the balusters had worked loose after the last storm, and he’d been meaning to get to it all week. He had his routine. Every morning he’d check the cottages, walk the grounds, and fix what needed fixing. Three years of the same circuit and the same clipboard, finding quiet satisfaction in problems solved with his hands.
But this morning the list felt less like a duty and more like a reason to be outside.
He wouldn’t call it excitement. But he’d been out of bed before the alarm, and his pace on the morning walk had picked up, and now the whistling. Something had loosened over the past week.
He knew what had changed. He just wasn’t ready to look directly at it.
From the gazebo he could see the courtyard, the stone pathways, and the fire pit with its ring of mismatched chairs. Captain’s Watch sat at the far edge of his sightline, its shutters open for the first time in months. Melissa had started leaving them that way. Small thing. He noticed it every morning.
She was different now. Not a different person, but the same person with the volume turned back up. At the Friday gatherings she talked instead of hovering at the edges. Her camera went into town like it belonged in her hand instead of weighing her down. She’d started a portrait series, and people actually sat for her, which meant they trusted her, which meant she’d earned it.
What he couldn’t quite explain was the part where she’d started including him. Not in the portraits. Not yet. But when she photographed the lighthouse grounds, he’d sometimes glance up from a repair and find her lens pointed in his direction. The first time it happened, he’d turned away fast, jaw tight. The second time, she’d called out, “Hold still, you’re in my light,” and he’d stood there like an idiot with a paintbrush in his hand while she took three frames.
He hadn’t hated it.
That was the part that unsettled him. He should have minded. He was a private person who had chosen a private life for good reasons. But Melissa behind a camera was Melissa at her most honest, and he didn’t mind being on that side of the lens.
Don’t make it into more than it is. He tightened the baluster and tested it with his palm. Solid.
He moved on to replacing a section of lattice on the back side of Sea Glass Cottage, cutting new strips from a sheet of cedar he’d picked up in town. The saw made a clean, satisfying sound. He heard her footsteps on the shell path before he saw her.
“Cassidy wants the grounds photographed for the festival brochure,” Melissa said. She had her camera bag over one shoulder and a water bottle in her free hand. Her hair was pulled back, and she’d traded her usual dark clothes for a pale blue shirt that made her look less like a war correspondent and more like someone who lived in a beach town. “I figured I’d start with the cottages and work out toward the water.”
“Okay.” He lined up the next cut.
“You don’t have to move or anything. I’ll work around you.”
“Wasn’t planning on moving.”
“Good. Because you’d wreck my composition.”
She almost smiled. He saw it start and stop, a flicker at the corner of her mouth that disappeared before it fully arrived. Then she lifted the camera and walked toward Starfish Cottage, and he went back to the lattice.
For the next hour they worked in parallel. She circled the courtyard, shooting the garden, the pathways, and the memorial bench with its worn inscription. He finished the lattice, moved on to tightening the hinges on the gazebo gate, then recaulked the window frame on Compass Rose that had been weeping moisture for a week. They didn’t talk much. They didn’t need to. The sound of her shutter mixed with the rhythm of his work, and the afternoon took on an easy, unhurried quality that surprised him.
She came back around when he was packing up his tools.
“Can I see?” He nodded toward the camera.
She hesitated, then tilted the screen toward him. She scrolled through a dozen images. The courtyard looked the way it felt when the light hit right. Warm, real, a place where people actually lived. She’d caught the fire pit chairs at an angle that made them look like they were waiting for someone to sit down, and there was a shot of the memorial bench where the afternoon sun lit up the engraving so clean he could almost read it.
“These are good,” he said.
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not surprised. Just saying it.”
She lowered the camera and looked at him directly. “How long have you been here? At the lighthouse.”
“Three years.” He bent to close his toolbox.
“Before that?”
He straightened up. The question wasn’t aggressive. She’d left plenty of room for him to change the subject, and he could tell she wouldn’t ask twice.
“Coast Guard. Twenty years.” He picked up the toolbox. “Made some bad choices near the end. Needed a reset. Winnie offered me work, and I took it.”
