“Don’t push it.”
A woman Melissa didn’t know walked up beside them and looked at the portraits, then at Melissa. “Are you the photographer?”
Clint answered before Melissa could open her mouth. “She is. She’s brilliant.”
He said it the same way he’d say the porch railing was fixed or the tide was coming in. Just a fact.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For being here. For saying that.”
“I just said the truth.” He looked at the wall again. His jaw worked once, and she knew he was seeing the gap. The empty space in the sequence where his portrait would have hung, between Bryan’s kitchen shot and Winnie’s photograph. Nobody else would notice it. The spacing was clean. Grant had adjusted for it. But Clint’s eyes went right to it, and he looked at her, and they both knew.
He didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t have to.
She reached for his hand. He took it. His fingers were rough and warm and they closed around hers.
They stood like that while the crowd moved around them. Emily caught Melissa’s eye from across the room and raised her wine glass a fraction. Winnie, seated in a chair Grant had placed near the door, nodded.
Later, when the crowd thinned, Melissa stepped outside for air. The Art Walk had spilled onto Main Street, vendors packing up, families wandering toward the waterfront. She moved closer to the harbor to catch the breeze. The air was salt-heavy and warm.
Sam Copeland was standing near the harbor railing.
He was looking toward the lighthouse, visible above the tree line, its beam beginning its slow sweep as the sky darkened. He stood very still. His camera hung at his side, untouched. The expression on his face was the same one she’d spent months learning to see in her portrait subjects.
She recognized that look. She’d photographed it dozens of times in other people’s faces and never once gotten used to it.
He turned and caught her eye. He nodded once, warmly, and gave her a small wave. Then he put his hands in his pockets and disappeared into the crowd near the wharf.
Clint came out and walked over to her. “There you are.”
“Just needed some air.”
“You ready to head home?”
“Yeah.”
They walked back along the road toward the lighthouse property. The evening air smelled like fried fish from the Sandpiper’s outdoor grill, and somewhere behind them a guitar player was still going on the corner outside Tides and Tales. The lighthouse came into view first, white and steady against the darkening sky. The beam swept overhead in its slow rotation. She’d photographed that beam a thousand times. It never looked the same way twice.
“I leave in two days,” she said. “The first research trip with Sam. Apalachicola, then over to St. Augustine.”
“I know.”
“I’ll be back in ten days.”
“I know that too.” He was quiet for a few steps. “I’ll probably fix your kitchen faucet while you’re gone. It’s been dripping.”
“My faucet is fine.”
“It drips.”
“It’s character.”
He laughed. The sound of it carried across the courtyard and faded into the rustle of the palms along the path.
They stopped at the edge of the beach where the sand met the property line. The Gulf was flat and dark, barely visible beyond the dunes. The lighthouse beam passed over them, brief and bright, and then they were standing in the dark again, and then the light came back.
