Page 71 of Beachfront Pages

"On remembering this." She leaned her head against his shoulder. "So I can put it down right, someday. Not the real you. Some version. A man who names his shelves."

"I don't name my shelves."

"You will by the time I'm done with you."

Out past the cottages the beam came around again. Past her cottage that waited with the lamp on, and Hank Carson stopped mid-stride on his way to the corner, ready for her in the morning. Morning could keep. This moment was perfect. And Cassidy was already starting another story.

Chapter 25

The fire had burned down to coals, and one by one the cottages took their people back. Winnie watched them go from her bench. Emily and Grant first, Emily still talking, her hand looped through Grant's arm. Then Cassidy and Bryan, carrying the empty pie plate between them. Melissa and Clint, arguing in low voices about something, but Melissa was smiling. Fiona and Marty went last, drifting off toward Sea Glass Cottage, holding hands.

She should go in. Her knees were telling her so. But she stayed where she was and she wasn't entirely sure why.

Except that Sam hadn't left either.

He'd helped Bryan carry the chairs back and stacked them under the eave the way they went, like he'd done it a hundred times. Like he belonged to the doing of things here. Now he came back across the courtyard with his hands in his pockets and stopped a polite distance from her bench.

"I'll walk you to your door," he said. "If you'll let me."

"It's twenty steps, Sam."

"Then it'll be a short walk."

She let him help her up, his hand warm and certain in hers. Twenty steps. She could have done them in her sleep, in the pitch dark. She had done them in the dark, more nights than she could count, the path worn so deep into her she didn't need the moon to find it.

But she didn't hurry. And neither did he.

The beam came around overhead, pale and slow, and laid itself across the courtyard stones in front of them before sliding off to sea.

"Do you remember," Sam said, "how we were? When we were young."

"I remember a great deal." She said it carefully. She'd gotten so good at careful.

"The beach. We'd walk the whole length of it and back, never noticing we'd done it." He looked out past the cottages toward the water she couldn't see in the dark but could always hear. "We'd talk for hours. About nothing. About everything. The light, your father's logbooks, what I was going to be when I grew up." A small laugh. "I don't think I've talked to anyone like that since."

She hadn't either. Not since Sam. "We were young," she said. "Young people have the time for it."

"That's not it, and you know it," he said gently. "I've missed all that, Winnie. I've spent all summer trying to figure out how to say it without scaring you off, and there's no clever way I can find. So I'll just say it. I miss it."

Her heart did a thing it had no business doing at seventy. A small foolish flutter.

"You always did just say things," she told him. "I'd forgotten that about you. Forty-five years, and you still walk right up and say it."

"Somebody has to. You never would."

"No." She kept her eyes on the path. "I never would. I got very good at not saying things."

"I know you did." He matched his steps to hers, slow as they were. "I used to think that was the lighthouse making you that way. All that watching and waiting and keeping. Now I think maybe the lighthouse just gave you a place to do it."

She had no answer for that. He'd always been able to do that to her, see the truth she tried to hide.

She made herself keep walking. One step, then another. That was the trick of it, wasn't it? She kept her feet moving and didn't let herself stop to feel his words.

They reached the bottom step of the keeper's quarters before either of them said more. Sam turned and looked back the way they'd come, at the ring of cottages with their warm windows, the couples settling in behind them.

"You built all this," he said. "And look what it does. Emily and Grant. Cassidy and Bryan. Even your nephew and Melissa. Now there's the writer and the bookseller. They're in love. It was plain as anything on that bench." He shook his head slowly. "Your cottages have a way of making people find each other."

"They're just cottages, Sam."