Chapter Three – Bailey #2
“Not hydration.” She sets the cup down, peels off the raincoat, and folds herself into the stool Daisy vacated. “So. How’s your morning not-thinking-about-my-brother going?”
I take a long drink of actual hydrating water and try for mild. “Fine.”
“Define ‘fine’.”
“Functional. No sobbing into Classic Literature. No narratively convenient power outage.”
“Yet,” she says, and bumps my knee with hers.
I could lie. I could dodge. I could make a joke about restraining orders for family members who ask invasive questions in my place of business. Instead, I blow out a breath and lean back against the shelves.
“He was kind,” I say, surprising myself with the word.
“Yeah,” Lila says softly, like that was her favorite answer, and she didn’t want to sway the judge. “He has been lately. Past couple of years, actually. It’s unnerving.”
“It’s disorienting,” I admit. “Like somebody tilted the town ten degrees and forgot to warn us.”
She tips her head. “You know you don’t owe anybody a performance. Not me. Not him. Not Mrs. Winthrop’s thirst.”
“What I owe them is hazardous to my hazard plan.”
“That’s because your hazard plan involves hiding in a lighthouse like a particularly literate sea witch.”
“Sea witches have boundaries.”
“Sea witches also steal voices.” She grins. “Don’t make me dangle your karaoke performance of ‘Jolene’ over you as blackmail.”
“That was one time.”
“It was something.” She reaches across the counter and squeezes my hand. “Dinner Saturday. You. Me. Ivy. No boys. We’re going to eat pasta, drink wine, and discuss your feelings like civilized women.”
“My feelings are feral.”
“Perfect.” Lila stands, shrugs back into her coat, then hesitates. “He asked about you, by the way. Not…bluntly. But he wanted to know if you were okay. He always…asks.”
I busily straighten an already-rectangular stack of notecards. “He could ask me.”
“He would, except for the past five years, when he comes anywhere near you, you scatter away like you’ve left your flat iron plugged in and turned on,” she says simply.
She flashes me a smile that lives somewhere between mischief and loyalty.
“Try not to redecorate the place to spell out ‘go away’ in book spines before then.”
I watch her go, the door swings shut behind her, hissing in a goodbye of its own.
The rain thickens, fogging the windows. The bay becomes a watercolor with the edges licked away.
I make a lazy loop of the shop, checking for leaks—a reflex I’ve developed the way some people develop a sixth sense for when their toddlers go quiet.
The west eave holds. The old glass in the lantern room sulks but stays intact.
At noon, I turn the sign on the main door to BACK IN FIVE and take my lunch to the covered porch. I carry Daisy’s quiche disguised as respectability, a book I’ve read twelve times, and a blanket I pretend I don’t keep out here to feel like I’m starring in the slowest indie film ever made.
The porch boards are slick, the air that tender, icy kind that smells like clean metal and far-off fireplaces. I tuck my feet under me and open the book, trying—failing—to make the words behave when my brain is still up on a roof with a boy who became a man without asking anyone’s permission.
The sound of tires on gravel pricks my skin a second before the truck appears around the curve. Not his. I feel ridiculous for knowing that, for how immediately my heart rations disappointment into manageable bites.
It’s the UPS guy. He jogs up the steps, leaves a box, tips an imaginary hat, and jogs back. The town’s choreography is muscle memory: arrive, tease, deliver, leave with gossip.
I take the box inside and flip the sign back to OPEN.
The afternoon flows: a lull, a rush, a lull.
A teen who asks for “something like The Hating Game but with more dogs.” A retired Navy man who tells me about a lighthouse in another country with a light so steady it kept him alive in a storm forty years ago.
A mother who collapses on the rug while her toddler builds a castle of board books and calls it “Quiet Time” like a benediction.
After school, the teenagers come—hoodies, backpacks, the whole noisy perfume of kids trying to find their way in life. They edge around romance like the covers might bite. They whisper-laugh and point at titles and are so broadly earnest it makes something in my chest ache in a fond, brittle way.
One of them lingers at the counter, a girl with ink-stained fingers and a nervous mouth.
“Do you…have anything about leaving,” she blurts, “but also staying? Because I have a scholarship for spring, and my grandma needs a ride to dialysis, and the guidance counselor keeps saying ‘there’s always Uber,’ like Uber is a person we all trust with our grandmas, and—”
I reach under the counter where I keep items for grief and pull out two essay collections and one novel that grabbed my throat when I was twenty and didn’t let go. “Yes,” I say. “I have exactly that.”
She breathes out like she’s been holding air for days. “Thank you.”
“Keep the novel,” I add, when she goes to count out crumpled dollar bills. “Bring it back when you’re finished. Or don’t. Let it have time to sink in. Either way.”
Her smile is a whole weather system. “Okay.”
The door closes behind her, and the shop and I collectively sigh. I slide my palms over the counter and let the warm, exhausted hum of usefulness flood me. This is the part that never leaves: the way a book can step in for you when your mouth can’t make sense.
The bell dings. A gust of cold air rides in with a man I don’t recognize—mid-thirties, storm jacket, and a clipped way of speech that says business.
He browses like he’s timing himself. Buys two biographies and a postcard for his mother.
Leaves with a nod that feels like appreciation’s introverted cousin.
When the door shuts, I notice the envelope he knocked loose from the flier display. The cream one with the embossed edge.
I pick it up on reflex—and freeze when I see the scrawl on the back I missed before. Not —A friend. Just a postscript, ink pressed a little harder into the paper like the writer argued with themselves before letting it exist.
P.S. The lantern glass can be set in place with rope and patience. Ask Sawyer. Or ask me, if you can stand it. — C
I don’t realize I’m smiling until it hurts my cheeks.
“I cannot stand it,” I inform the espresso machine, and the espresso machine—traitor, conspirator—sighs like a woman who knows better and does it anyway.
The rest of the afternoon becomes an exercise in avoiding my own hands.
Do not text. Do not call. Do not climb to the lantern room and tie a rope to your sanity.
I alphabetize like a penance. I vacuum. I wipe down the children’s corner and find a glitter sticker on my elbow because fate respects no boundaries.
At four, the door flies open, and the weather invades with purpose. Crew’s younger brother, Holt, staggers in wearing a poncho he clearly stole from a roadside stand. He’s carrying a box of T-shirts with a logo that makes my soul leave my body.
BACKBONE & BUTTER BARS, the shirts announce in big block letters, with a cartoon lighthouse that looks feral and a pan of Daisy’s famous bars drawn like an Olympic torch.
“No,” I say, before he speaks.
“Yes,” he says, already unpacking. “For the Harvest Bash. Fundraiser. I have fifty of ’em. We’ll be millionaires by Thanksgiving.”
“I refuse to sell merch that implies Daisy’s baked goods are structural.”
Daisy pops through the side door like Beetlejuice at the mention of dessert. “Excuse you, those are my butter bars. Bailey’s department is paper cuts and passive-aggressive bookmarks.”
“Team effort,” Holt says. “We’re a brand now.”
“You’re a menace,” I tell him, then ruin my own moral stance by laughing until I’m folded against the counter while Daisy tries to wrangle him and fails because Holt, like the weather, cannot be wrangled. He can only be endured.
They leave me three shirts “for display.” I hide them behind the checkout plant. Even the plant looks offended.
By the time the drizzle thins out, I’ve almost—almost—won my battle with impulse. Which is when the bell rings and the universe decides compromise is simply adorable.
Sawyer—tall, easy-boned, hat shoved back like the sky isn’t enormous—leans in and taps the brim. “Heard your lantern glass is sulking.”
“Crew’s just being dramatic,” I say, and catch myself—God help me—checking the sidewalk beyond him for a taller, broader shadow.
“Wright came by asking about glass replacement,” Sawyer continues. “Said I should stop here first with a glove lecture.”
“A glove lecture?”
“You’ll want ’em. You do it wrong, you bleed.”
“Good to know,” I say faintly, taking the gloves. He glances around the store, eyes snagging on the window where the pigeon has returned to do his little judgment dance.
“Nice bird,” Sawyer deadpans.
“He’s part of the board,” I say. “Votes on acquisitions.”
“Smart.” Sawyer tugs his cap. “Call if you need a hand. Or two. Because, Bailey, it’s okay to ask for help, you know?”
When he’s gone, the gloves sit on my counter like a dare.
I stare at them until the angle of the light shifts and turns the fibers gold.
“Fine,” I tell the empty shop and the meddling sky and the part of me that’s been teaching herself to do things without permission since she was ten. “Tonight.”
I lock the door when the sign says I should. I count the drawer. I turn the lamps low. And then I climb.
The spiral stairs are a hymn I know by heart. Step, breath, hand to rail. The lantern room waits at the top with the same patience it has for a hundred years of weather and more than enough secrets. The glass is cold and clouded, the crack a white seam like an old scar.
I set down some duct tape and rope, strip off my sweater, roll my sleeves to my elbows like a battlefield nurse, and test each pane with careful fingers. Gloves and patience.
“Ask Sawyer,” the note had said. “Or ask me, if you can stand it.”
I tie the first anchor knot by memory—the one my grandfather taught me on the dock until my fingers bled and I cursed. The rope settles heavy against my palm, and the old glass looks at me like, That’s not going to hold very long.
Halfway through the second tie, my phone buzzes on the floorboards, screen lighting the room with a square of blue.
Crew: Don’t start without me.
A beat. Then another.
Crew: Fine. Start without me. But leave me something to fix. It’s a man’s fragile ego at stake.
I stare at the screen, every muscle in me trying not to move fast enough to be called a decision.
Me: Bring your own gloves.
A dot. Then two. Then nothing.
I tie the last knot on the rope to secure the glass from moving anymore, with my mouth curved into something I don’t name. The lighthouse breathes like a steady chest. The rope hums against my hands like a word I’m about to learn fully.
Down below, on the boardwalk, a truck door shuts.
I don’t go down to meet him. I keep my hands on the old glass, shoulders squared, breath even.
I let the footsteps come up to me—spiral, spiral, nearer—and when his shadow finally spills into the lantern room, I’m ready enough to pretend I have always been.
“Gloves,” he says, holding them up in triumph, then takes in the knotwork and whistles low. “Not bad, Book Girl.”
“Don’t sound so shocked,” I say, but softer than I mean to. “I can tie more than metaphors.”
He steps closer, the room shrinking to fit us both, salt air threading between our words. “Show me what you did,” he says, and it’s not an order. It’s an invitation. “I’ll follow your lead.”
I do. He does. Our fingers learn the same language.
We do not kiss. We do not fall. We do not do anything that will ruin this, yet I walk down the stairs later feeling ruined in the best, oldest sense of the word. Changed by weather I invited on purpose.
At the bottom, in the shop, under the lamp that always turns everything gold, he finds the cream envelope I didn’t tuck far enough and slides it back to me without comment, his mouth tipping like a secret he won’t use against me.
“Harvest Bash this weekend,” he says lightly, as if his pulse isn’t banging in his throat in sync with mine. “They roped me into a pie auction. I’m terrible at pie.”
“Don’t bid on anything that your brother baked,” I advise, pocketing the envelope like a talisman. “It’s mostly hubris and possibly fireworks.”
“I’ll save my wallet, then,” he says, then takes a deep breath. “You going?”
“I live in a lighthouse,” I say. “They can’t hold an event without me approving the lighting.”
He laughs. The laugh lodges under my breastbone. “See you there, Bailey.”
“See you,” I say, and it is not a vow, but it might be a map.
He goes. The bell hushes shut, the room inhales, and the pigeon, for once, looks satisfied.
I flip the porch light on and stand in it a second too long, like a moth who’s tired of pretending she isn’t drawn to heat. The bay slicks itself with stars. Somewhere far out on the water, a buoy clangs, and the sound threads the silence like a needle through cotton.
I touch the knot-burn on my palm—small, stinging, real—and decide I can live with a little heat.
I lock up, climb to bed, and fall asleep to the sense that the lighthouse doesn’t creak anymore. It settles. Houses remember the hands that tend them. Today, the house has ours.
And that’s either the best or the most dangerous thing I have done in years.