Page 65 of Beachfront Pages

Fiona stood stiff for half a breath. Then she didn't. She put her face against Winnie's silver hair and held on. Winnie held back, strong and unhurried.

"There she is," Winnie said, low, just for her. "I've been waiting on her since the night you got here."

"You knew."

"I knew there was somebody worth waiting for." Winnie squeezed once and didn't let go. "Took you long enough to introduce us."

Chapter 23

The CLOSED sign hadn't moved in days. Fiona stood on the sidewalk in front of Tides & Tales and looked at it. She'd been by multiple times, but she'd quit knocking, just hoping the shop would be open. It wasn't. Not once.

But she was done with that. She'd come in the afternoon this time and she hadn't brought coffee. She'd brought herself. That was the whole point.

She lifted her hand and knocked.

Nothing. The shop windows threw the street back at her. The gulls. Her own tall shape. Inside, the rows of books sat in their dim, patient quiet, exactly the way he liked them.

"Marty." She knocked again, harder this time. "I know you're in there."

A floorboard creaked inside. Then it went still, the deliberate stillness of a man holding his breath.

"I can wait all day," she said to the door. "I write people who stake out apartments for a living. I'm very good at this."

Quiet.

"Hank Carson once sat in a parked car for nine pages waiting on a witness who never came out," she said. "Nine pages. My editor begged me to cut it. I didn't. I'm telling you this so you understand the kind of patience you're dealing with."

Another creak. The bolt turned.

The door opened halfway, and there he was. Worn button-down, sleeves shoved to the elbow. The reading glasses pushed up into his silver-streaked hair, forgotten, the way they always were. He looked like he hadn't slept the way a person should, and his hazel eyes were guarded in a way they hadn't been since the first week she'd known him.

"You're going to stand on my step and quote your own books at me," he said.

"If that's what it takes."

He didn't move out of the doorway. He didn't invite her in. Fair enough. She hadn't earned the inside of the shop.

"I owe you an apology," she said. "A real one. Not the kind where I say I'm sorry and you say it's fine and we both pretend the floor's solid again."

"I'm listening."

She took a hint of hope from that.

"I'm not going to apologize for being F. L. Maxwell," she said. "I'm proud of those books. Fifteen of them. I built that with nobody's help and I'd do it again." She made herself keep looking directly into his eyes. "But I'm sorry I let you stand in your own back room and praise one of them to my face and I said nothing. You were being generous with me. I let you do it because it was the only time in months somebody had told me my work was worth anything. I didn't want it to stop."

Marty's jaw shifted. He said nothing.

"And there's the other thing," she said. "The bigger debt. I sat in your back room and let you pull your rarest things off the shelf for me, and I took notes the whole time. The journal. The Copeland footnote. All of it." She made herself keep looking at him. "You thought we were two people loving a puzzle. I was working. That's the part I'd take back if I could."

"You were writing a book about the town." His voice was flat. "About the light. About all of us."

"I started to. A lighthouse, a family, a town that closes ranks. It lit me up like nothing had in months." She didn't look away. "But hear this part, because it's the part that matters. Whatever I turned up back there. The Copelands, Winnie's family, the thing under all of it. It isn't mine. It never was. It's Winnie's. If there's a secret out there to tell, she's the one who decides whether it's ever told, and who gets to hear it. Not me. Not for a book."

"You're sure of that."

"I told the whole circle as much, at the fire. I'm telling you too. I'll put it in writing if my word won't do." She drew a breath. "The book doesn't touch this place. Not her history, not yours, not one true thing any of you handed me. I kept the light. The way it comes around at night. I couldn't give that up. The rest of it walks off and turns into its own people, like they always do."

"You want to know why I lied," she said. "Not the husband. The bigger one. Why I came here and hid behind a fake life like it was the most natural thing in the world."