“Just wanted you to know I won’t be here. In case something comes up on the property, Winnie has the emergency numbers for the electrician and the plumber.”
“Got it.”
He shifted his weight. She could feel him hovering at the edge of something, the way you hover at the edge of a dock before deciding whether the water’s too cold.
“The gutter over your kitchen,” he said. “I patched a spot yesterday. Should hold through the storm, but if it leaks, there’s a bucket under the sink.”
“Thank you.”
He nodded and turned to leave, then stopped on the second step.
“Melissa.”
“Yeah?”
He still wasn’t looking at her. His jaw worked once. “I’m glad you pulled the photos.”
Then he walked down the steps and across the courtyard toward Driftwood, and she leaned against the doorframe and let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.
It wasn’t forgiveness or even close to what they’d had before. But it was something. A door left unlocked, even if neither of them was ready to open it.
Chapter 24
Three days without Clint on the property, and the silence clung to her. Melissa noticed it in small ways. His truck gone from the gravel pull-off by Driftwood. No sound of a ladder or a saw carrying across the courtyard in the morning. The porch light at Driftwood staying dark, no glow leaking through the curtains the way it did when he read late.
She hadn’t realized how much of her daily rhythm was calibrated to his.
She used the time. The signed agreement with Sam sat in her inbox, confirmed and countersigned, a real professional commitment with her name attached. Her photographs alongside Sam’s historical text. Endangered Gulf Coast structures, documented before they were gone. It was meaningful work, and she’d said yes without the spiral she’d expected. It felt right.
The exhibition was harder.
She’d spent two evenings laying out the Art Walk prints on her kitchen table, shuffling the order, adjusting the sequence. Sally laughing behind the counter at Bayview General. Bryan mid-argument with Cassidy over grill placement, his hands moving faster than his words. Winnie on the porch of the keeper’s quarters, watching the water with the patience of someone who had been watching it for seventy years.
Good portraits. Honest ones. Every person in the series had been asked, had said yes, had been shown the images afterward.
And there was a gap in the sequence where Clint belonged, and she felt it every time she walked past the table.
She didn’t let herself dwell on it. The gap was the right thing. It was proof she’d chosen differently this time.
On the third morning, she woke to a sky the color of a bruise. The wind had shifted overnight. The palms along the courtyard path were bent sideways, fronds whipping, and the Gulf had gone from flat turquoise to churning gray-green. Whitecaps danced out past the sandbar. The barometric pressure had dropped enough that her sinuses ached.
A storm. Not a dangerous one. The weather app showed a tropical disturbance tracking north, expected to pass wide of the coast, but it would throw wind, rain, and dramatic light across the peninsula for hours.
Melissa stood on the porch of Captain’s Watch with her coffee going cold and felt the pull.
The lighthouse in a storm. She’d photographed it exactly once in weather like this, months ago, the night she and Clint had fought so badly she’d tasted the anger for days. She’d set up her tripod in the courtyard, and he’d come out and told her to go inside. Demanded it. Like she was a child who couldn’t assess her own safety.
She’d called his property a little kingdom. He’d said she was hiding behind her camera. Both of them had been right about the other and wrong about the delivery, and the photographs she’d taken that night, six frames grabbed in fury and wind, had been the first real work she’d made in two years.
She wanted to shoot it again. Same lighthouse, same storm. Everything else different.
She went inside and packed her bag. Tripod, two lenses, rain sleeve for the camera body, microfiber cloths, a plastic bag for the worst of it. She pulled on a windbreaker that wouldn’t keep her dry for more than twenty minutes and laced up shoes she didn’t mind ruining.
The courtyard was empty when she crossed it. Winnie’s curtains were drawn. Emily and Grant wouldn’t venture out in this. Cassidy and Bryan were probably at the Sandpiper arguing about whether to close the deck.
She set up near the seawall, where the lighthouse stood against the darkening sky with its white paint bright against the gray. The wind was strong enough that she had to brace the tripod with her body, one hand on the legs while she composed with the other. Rain came in sideways gusts. She wiped the lens, shot three frames, wiped again.
The lighthouse looked defiant. Steady in the chaos. She understood why her great images always came in weather like this. Calm days made the structure look postcard-pretty, decorative, and a thing to admire. Storms reminded you what it was actually for.
