“I used to come out here at three in the morning.” Emily tucked her knees up in an echo of Melissa’s posture. “When I first moved into Starfish. I’d sit right about here and stare at the water and try to figure out whether I was recovering or just postponing the inevitable.”
“What was the inevitable?”
“Admitting I might never paint again.”
Melissa glanced at her. Emily’s gaze was fixed on the horizon, calm and steady. No drama in the statement. Just the flat honesty of someone describing a place they’d already been and returned from.
“You seem to be painting just fine now.”
“Now, sure. But for almost two years before I got here, I couldn’t. My hand would just stop…” Emily took a sip of her coffee. “I’d pick up a brush, and it was like my body refused to cooperate with what my brain was asking it to do.” She shrugged. “I told myself it was about the scandal. About what Julian Holloway did to me. And part of it was. But the bigger part was just fear.”
“Fear of what?”
“Everything. Fear that maybe Julian was right and I was a fraud. That if I tried and failed, I’d have to accept that. Or if I tried and succeeded, I’d have to rejoin the world, and that meant people could hurt me again.” Emily shrugged. “Turns out hiding felt a lot like safety… until it didn’t.”
“My situation is different.”
“Is it?” Emily’s voice was gentle but direct. “You’re a talented photographer. I looked up your work. You’ve won awards. And now you photograph the lighthouse.”
She didn’t want to explain it all. The embarrassment. The accusations. How she’d taken down her social media accounts because of the comments. So she just said, “Pretty much.”
“You’re on a beautiful beach at dawn with a camera you won’t open.” Emily turned her coffee mug between her palms. “You know what that looks like from the outside.”
The Gulf stretched out in front of them, endless and indifferent. The sun had crested the rooftops behind them now, and the water caught the light in a thousand shifting fragments. It would have made a beautiful photograph. Any of her old editors would have killed for it.
She didn’t move.
Finally, she said, “I need a change. I need to be a different person.”
“So who are you now?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem.”
Emily nodded slowly. She pulled her flip-flops off and dug her toes into the sand, watching the grains shift and settle. “When I first got here, Winnie told me something. She said that locking a door doesn’t make you safe. It just makes you alone.”
“Winnie says a lot of things.”
“She’s annoyingly right about most of them.”
A reluctant smile tugged at Melissa’s mouth. She fought it and won, but barely.
“At some point, you have to decide.” Emily turned to look at her straight on. Her brown eyes were kind but unflinching. “If you aren’t moving, you’re just… waiting.”
She took another sip of coffee and watched the pelican circle back for another dive. It hit the water hard and came up empty this time. Shook itself off. Rose into the air again and kept hunting anyway.
“I should get back.” Emily stood and brushed the sand from her shorts. “I’ve got a commission piece I’m fighting with. The ocean keeps looking smug in it, and I can’t figure out why.”
“Oceans are inherently smug.”
Emily laughed. A laugh that sounded like it came easily to her now, though Melissa suspected it hadn’t always. “Keep the mug. Winnie collects them like seashells. She’s got about a hundred.”
“Emily.” Melissa looked up at her. The morning sun was directly behind Emily’s head, blurring her features into a warm silhouette. “Thanks for the coffee.”
For more than the coffee. But she wasn’t ready to say that part out loud.
Emily seemed to hear it anyway. She gave a small nod and picked her way back up the path.
Melissa sat alone after that, but not for long. The sand warmed beneath her. Somewhere up the path, the faint clang of metal on metal meant Clint was already working on something. Fixing something. Keeping the world in order, one bolt at a time.
