Page 51 of Beachfront Pages

"Marty? You here?" A voice called out.

They both went still. Marty closed his eyes for a second, like a man counting to ten.

"You back there?" A man's voice, cheerful, getting closer. "Door was open."

"Hal," Marty said, under his breath, and stood. "We're in the back."

Fiona stepped away from the table and busied her hands with her notebook. Her face was warm. Her pulse was a mess. She had absolutely been about to let the man kiss her in a closet full of old books and papers, and a small, traitorous part of her wanted to lock the front door and pretend the shop was closed.

Hal came through the curtain, a big sunburned man in a fishing shirt, and stopped when he saw her. "Oh. Didn't know you had company."

"Hal, this is Fiona," Marty said. "She's renting out at the lighthouse. Fiona, Hal. He keeps me honest about what people actually want to read."

"Somebody's got to." Hal stuck out a hand and she shook it. "You the writer? Sally mentioned. Says you keep to yourself."

"Sally mentions a lot of things," Fiona said.

"That she does." Hal turned to Marty, clearly here on a mission. "Listen. I'm out. I finished the Maxwells. All of them, the last one too, took me three days. So now I got nothing and Donna says I'm unbearable when I got nothing to read. What's next? Give me a whole series. Something I can sink into for a month."

"I can do that." Marty crossed to the front, already thinking, already in his element. "Depends what you're in the mood for. Do you want another detective, or do you want to try something different?"

"Detective. Don't get fancy on me." Hal followed him out through the curtain, then stuck his head back through. "Hey, did you ever read the one I left you? The first Maxwell. Or's it still holding up your coffee mug?"

Fiona's hand stopped on her notebook.

"I read it," Marty said, from the front of the shop.

"And?"

There was a pause. Fiona found herself standing very still in the back room, the pamphlet forgotten in her hand, waiting on an answer like it was a verdict.

"It was good," Marty said. "Genuinely. I expected to hate it and I didn't. The plotting's tight. And the detective's lonely in a way the author actually understands. It's a real book."

Hal said something pleased and triumphant that Fiona didn't catch, because her ears were ringing a little.

She came out of the back room slowly. Marty was at the shelf, sliding out a fat paperback for Hal. He glanced over at her like nothing had happened. Like he hadn't just said the kindest thing anyone had said about her work in years, with no idea he'd said it to her face.

"You read a Maxwell book," she said.

He shrugged, faintly sheepish. "Don't tell anyone. I've got a reputation to protect."

A real book. The detective's lonely in a way the author understands. She had written that loneliness at her own kitchen table in the dead middle of the night, married and aching and unable to say it out loud. She'd poured it into Hank because Hank was the only one she could tell. And Marty Fuller, who'd called her detective functional and forgettable the day they met, had read it. He'd felt it and called it real.

She didn't know what to do with that. She honestly didn't. She stood there holding a water-stained pamphlet about a lighthouse and honestly didn't know what to think.

The door opened again. A young couple in matching sunglasses came in, the man holding a phone up the way tourists did, the woman already drifting toward the postcards by the window.

"Excuse me," the woman called. "Do you have, like, a local map? A cute one?"

Marty caught Fiona's eye over Hal's shoulder, an apology and a question in it both. Stay, the look said. Don't go.

But she couldn't stay. Her face was still warm. She needed air, a long walk, and to be anywhere that wasn't a small room with Marty Fuller until she'd figured out what her own heart was doing.

"I should get back," she said. "The lighthouse won't research itself."

"Fiona—"

"Tomorrow," she said. It was the word she'd been saying to everyone for months, Rachel and herself and the empty page. But this time she found she meant it. "I'll come tomorrow."