“All of them.” She set the rag down and faced him fully. “They were the best work I’ve ever done. And I deleted them because they weren’t mine to keep.”
The words came out steady. She’d practiced them in the days since the apology on his porch, turning them over until they were smooth and true. She meant every one.
He looked at her. The fire crackled between them, sending up a scatter of sparks. She made herself hold his gaze, even though everything in her wanted to drop it. She owed him at least that much.
Something in his expression shifted. His jaw loosened, and his shoulders dropped a fraction. He was still guarded, but he was listening.
“I’m leaving next weekend,” he said. “Sean’s bachelor party.” Clint picked up the trash bag again, holding it like he needed something to do with his hands. “I’ll be gone three days.”
He wasn’t inviting her into anything. But he was telling her where he’d be.
“I’ll be here when you get back,” she said.
He nodded. Then he walked to the gate, trash bag over his shoulder, and the courtyard was empty.
She finished cleaning up alone. Carried the stack of plates to the keeper’s quarters porch, left them where Winnie would find them in the morning. Walked the stone path back to Captain’s Watch with her hands in her pockets and the lighthouse beam sweeping overhead.
Inside, she sat on the edge of her bed. Her camera sat on the nightstand where it had been for days, untouched.
She picked it up. Turned it over in her hands. It felt familiar. She set it back down and clicked off the light.
The next few days were the worst kind of limbo.
Melissa saw Clint constantly because the property was small and he never stopped working. Tuesday morning he was replacing a hinge on the gazebo gate when she crossed the courtyard with her camera bag. She slowed. He looked up. They both opened their mouths at the same time and both closed them again.
“Morning,” she managed.
“Morning.” He went back to the hinge.
She kept walking. The whole interaction lasted four seconds and she replayed it for an hour.
Wednesday she was reviewing Sam’s manuscript notes at the kitchen table when she heard the ladder go up against the side of Captain’s Watch. She froze. The gutter directly above her window rattled, and she could hear Clint’s boots on the rungs, the scrape of debris being cleared. He was six feet away from her, separated by a wall and a window and everything they weren’t saying. She got up and opened the front door. He was at the top of the ladder with a handful of wet leaves.
“Hey,” she said. “Do you want water? Or coffee?”
He looked down at her. His expression wasn’t cold. It wasn’t warm either. It was the face of someone doing careful math in his head.
“I’m good. Thanks.”
She nodded and went back inside. Through the window she could hear him working his way along the gutter, steady and methodical. She stared at her laptop screen without reading a single word until he moved the ladder to Sea Glass Cottage and the sound faded.
That evening she was sitting on the memorial bench with a book she wasn’t reading when he crossed the courtyard carrying a bag of mulch to the garden beds. He slowed as he passed her. Didn’t stop. But he slowed.
“Supposed to rain later this week,” he said without breaking stride. “Big system coming up from the south.”
“I heard.”
He walked on. She watched him kneel by the garden bed and start spreading mulch around the base of the coontie palms. His shoulders were tight. He worked faster than usual, hands digging into the bag with more force than mulch required.
She wanted to go over. To kneel beside him and help the way she’d helped after the last storm, working in parallel until the silence stopped being hostile and started being something else. But that ease had been earned over weeks of careful proximity, and she’d burned it in a single email to Grant.
She couldn’t rebuild it by showing up. She could only leave the space open and let him decide when to step into it again. She went inside and made dinner for one and ate it standing at the counter.
Thursday morning he knocked on her door at seven-fifteen. She opened it expecting a maintenance question—a leaking pipe, or a window he needed to access.
“I’m leaving tomorrow for Sean’s thing,” he said. He stood on her porch with his hands in his pockets, looking somewhere past her left shoulder. “Three days. Friday to Sunday.”
“Okay.”
