Beachfront Bookshop

Chapter 1

Fiona Wells had gotten fifteen protagonists out of worse trouble than this. Pity she couldn't plot her own way out.

So far her grand escape plan amounted to driving south until the road ran out. She'd missed the turn for the lighthouse twice, then a third time for good measure. Some detective she'd make. Her own characters would be ashamed of her.

The GPS announced, in its calm and faintly smug way, that she had arrived.

"Did I?" Fiona said to it.

She hadn't, though. Not really. She'd just stopped driving.

The lane curved through a stand of palms and opened onto a gravel parking lot, and there it was.

The lighthouse. Taller than she'd pictured from the photos online, white and plain against a sky going gold at the edges.

Six cottages sat around a garden courtyard in a loose semicircle.

Each one was painted a soft beachy color.

Each one had a porch. Somewhere past them the Gulf threw light around like it had money to burn.

It was, she had to admit, exactly the sort of place she'd put in a book. Charming little coastal town. Heroine arrives wounded but plucky. Finds herself.

Fiona did not feel plucky. She felt fifty-four and tired, like a fraud who'd driven nine hundred miles to be one in a prettier setting.

She put the car in park and sat there staring at the lighthouse.

A woman was already coming down the path toward her. Older, small, with silver-white hair pinned up neatly. She moved carefully but not slowly, like someone who'd decided long ago exactly how much energy each step was worth.

Fiona checked the mirror and put on the face. The one she wore for the publisher's holiday parties and a hundred dinners she'd rather have skipped. Pleasant and composed. The look that said, "I'm fine."

She got out of the car.

"You found us," the woman said. "I'm Winnie. You'll be Fiona."

"I will be." Fiona shook her hand. The older woman's grip was strong, her fingers a little gnarled, and a bracelet of sea glass wrapped in silver wire slid down her wrist. "Fiona Wells. Thank you for taking me on short notice. I know it was last minute."

"Most of the good things are." Winnie tipped her head toward the row of cottages. "Yours is the fourth one down. Sea Glass."

"Okay, thank you."

"There are a lot of books inside." Winnie was already walking, so Fiona fell in beside her. "Last tenant left a whole library behind and I never had the heart to box it up. Mostly local history. Old maritime things. I figured a writer might make use of it instead of staring at the wall."

A writer. Fiona's pulse kicked. Did she know? Had someone talked, made a call, set the name F. L. Maxwell down next to the name Fiona Wells?

But how could she? As far as the reading world knew, F. L. Maxwell was a man who'd never shown his face. There was only Fiona Wells here, a line on a booking form, and the two had never once shared a sentence in public.

Then it came to her. She'd told Winnie she wanted somewhere quiet to write when she'd arranged the cottage. Of course she had. That was the whole of it. A writer. Not the writer F. L. Maxwell.

"I do plenty of staring at walls. It's most of the job."

Winnie laughed, a short warm sound. "Honest, anyway. We don't always get honest around here. We get a lot of folks who say they've come to relax and then reorganize my whole toolshed by Thursday."

"I won't touch your toolshed. You have my word."

"A woman who knows her limits. I like that." Winnie glanced sideways at her. "What is it you write?"

There it was. The question, two minutes in. Fiona had a whole drawer of answers for it, polished smooth from use.

"Fiction, mostly," she said. "Nothing you'd have heard of."

"Don't be so sure. I read everything. Slow, but everything." Winnie didn't push, though. She just nodded, like the not-pushing was a thing she'd practiced too. "Well. Sea Glass is yours as long as you need it. Month, season, however the writing goes."

"A month should do it," Fiona said.

"Mm," Winnie said, in the tone of a woman who'd heard it all before.

The gravel gave way to a stone path, and Fiona made herself notice things, because noticing was the one muscle that still worked.

A central fire pit ringed with chairs. A garden gone a little wild in the good way, all silver-green leaves and salt-tough flowers.

A bench under a gazebo with names carved into the back she couldn't read from here.

"It's quiet," Fiona said.

"It can be. Won't always be." Winnie said it cheerfully, like a warning she had no intention of softening. "Folks gather most evenings out here. You're welcome. Never required."

Never required. Fiona could have kissed her.

Sea Glass Cottage was pink—though Fiona couldn't remember ever seeing pink sea glass—with white trim and a porch that ran the full front. Winnie worked the key, pushed the door open, and stepped back to let Fiona go first.

And there it was. The walls were lined with books.

Floor to ceiling on two sides, shelves crammed and double-stacked, the spines faded to the colors of things left in the sun.

A worn armchair sat in the corner by a window with a little table beside it.

A reading lamp. A writer's nook, somebody would call it in a listing.

The kind of corner Fiona invented for fictional women who had their lives together.

"Oh," she said.

"Told you." Winnie sounded pleased. "Kitchen's small but it works. Linens in the chest. Wi-Fi password's taped inside the cupboard, though I'll warn you it sulks when it storms."

"Noted. I'll be gentle with it."

"You do that." Winnie set the key on the counter. "I'll let you settle. You've had a long drive."

"I'm fine. Just road-tired."

Winnie looked at her a beat longer than the words warranted. Her green eyes didn't miss much, Fiona suspected. It was the kind of attention she gave her own characters, and she did not love being on this end of it.

"There's soup in your fridge," Winnie said finally. "I always leave some for new arrivals. You should eat it." She moved to the door. "Sunset's the best part. Don't sleep through your first one."

She let herself out, and the door clicked. The cottage went very, very quiet.

Fiona stood in the middle of it and breathed.

Alone. Finally, blessedly alone, where no one knew her, where no one would ask how Drake was or whether they'd both be at the Hendersons' in the spring. Here she was just a woman who'd rented a cottage. A writer on retreat. That was the story, and it was even mostly true.

She'd only left out the part where there was no marriage to come home to.

The car held more than she remembered packing.

Fiona made three trips, then stood over the open suitcases on the bedroom floor and ran out of reasons to keep moving.

She hung the linen blazers in the closet, because blazers wrinkled and she had standards even now.

The rest she left. Folded jeans and a few sweaters stayed stacked in the case.

The second suitcase she didn't open at all.

"It's a writing retreat," she told the empty room. Saying things out loud helped sometimes. "You write the book. You go home. The end."

Except unpacking was a commitment. Unpacking meant she intended to stay, to settle in, and live here. She wasn't living here. She was waiting here. There was a difference, even if she couldn't have explained it to a single soul, which was fine, because there wasn't a single soul to explain it to.

Home. Now there was a word that had lost its footing lately.

She carried her laptop to the nook, sat in the worn chair, and opened it on the little table.

The cursor blinked at her from the manuscript she was four months late delivering.

F. L. Maxwell's sixteenth. Her detective, Hank Carson, was standing in a rain-soaked alley exactly where she'd abandoned him in February, waiting for Fiona to tell him what she'd found on the body.

Fiona had no idea what she'd found. She wasn't sure she cared, which was a new and unwelcome feeling about a woman whose books had paid her mortgage for fifteen years.

She typed a sentence. Read it. Deleted it.

She typed it again, slightly worse.

"Come on," she muttered. "He's a corpse in an alley. You've done a hundred corpses in a hundred alleys. Just pick one."

But the cursor only blinked, and the trouble with writing a murder was that it asked her to believe the truth mattered.

That if she looked hard enough at the evidence, the lies fell away and something solid stood underneath.

Fiona had built a whole career on that promise.

Fifteen books of it. Then she'd spent six months proving, in her own life, that a person could look right at the truth every single day and simply decline to say it out loud.

She'd signed the divorce papers in a lawyer's office with good coffee and a nicer view. She'd told no one. Not her agent, Rachel. Not her editor. Not one friend, because the friends had mostly been Drake's first, or theirs together, and "theirs" had turned out to be a fiction too.

The cursor blinked.

"You're being dramatic," she informed it.

The cursor, wisely, said nothing.

Her phone lit up on the table and buzzed against the wood, and her whole body went tight before she even saw the name.

Rachel.

She let out a long sigh. Her agent had the timing of a woman who'd built a career on knowing exactly when a writer was hiding. Fiona looked at the photo that came up with the call. Rachel mid-laugh at some conference dinner. The guilt and the dread braided together inside her.

She let it ring. One. Two. Three. She watched it the way she'd watch a pot she had no intention of stirring.

It went to voicemail. A moment later the little message banner slid down, and because Fiona was a coward but a curious one, she tapped it and held the phone to her ear.

"Fiona, it's me, obviously." Rachel's voice, bright and fast. "I know you're in your cave.

I respect the cave. But I need ten minutes, because there is a very large and very exciting thing happening that I cannot do over text.

And you do not want to hear about this one secondhand, trust me.

So call me. From the cave. Bring coffee. I love you. Bye."

The message ended.

Fiona set the phone down very gently, like it might go off again if she startled it.

A very large and very exciting thing. In the old life, that sentence would have lit her up. Maybe a new deal. New money. Maybe the foreign rights they'd chased for years. Rachel didn't get breathless over small news.

But every exciting professional thing came with a price now.

The price was being a person who could receive good news.

Who could say yes, plan a future, pick up the phone and sound like F.

L. Maxwell, bestselling author, instead of a woman in a borrowed chair in a borrowed cottage wondering how her life had gotten to this point.

She'd call tomorrow. She'd be rested tomorrow. She'd be better tomorrow.

She'd been telling herself that for months.

"Tomorrow," she said anyway, out loud. She closed the laptop on poor Hank Carson and his unsolved body.

The soup, it turned out, was very good.

Fiona ate it standing at the counter, straight from the pot, which Drake would have hated, which was reason enough to enjoy it. Then she rinsed the bowl she hadn't even used, out of some reflex of guilt, and she stood at the window and watched the light start to fade.

The Gulf was doing something showy. The whole western sky had gone the deep apricot that came only over water.

The lighthouse threw a long blue shadow across the garden.

Out past the dune line the sea had turned to hammered metal.

It was beautiful. Fiona had described a hundred sunsets and rarely stopped to watch one.

She took her glass of wine out to the porch.

The boards were warm under her bare feet.

She hadn't noticed taking her shoes off, but there they were by the door, and here she was, barefoot on a stranger's porch like she belonged.

The air was thick and salt-soft, and it smelled green.

Down the row a screen door banged, and voices drifted up, a man and a woman, easy with each other.

"Evening," someone called.

Fiona turned. A woman had paused at the foot of the steps, a sweater knotted over her shoulders, a glass of her own in hand. A friendly face. Open in a way Fiona had learned to be wary of.

"You're the new one. Sea Glass." The woman smiled. "I'm Emily. Starfish, down on the end. Welcome."

"Fiona. Thank you."

"We're all gathering at the fire pit if you want to come down. Nothing fancy. Wine and whatever Cassidy baked." Emily lifted her glass an inch. "First night's the hardest. Easier with people."

"That's kind of you." Fiona kept her voice warm and her feet exactly where they were. "I think I'm just going to turn in early. Long drive."

"Of course." Emily tipped her head toward the cottage. "Winnie put you in the book cottage. You a reader, or a writer?"

"A little of both," Fiona said. "Mostly tired."

"Fair enough. We've got a writer or two around here in town. Or people who say they write. You'll fit right in, if you want to." Emily smiled. "And if you don't, that's allowed too. Nobody keeps score."

"I appreciate that more than you know."

"Mm. I had a first night here once." Emily said it lightly, but she held Fiona's eyes a second too long, the way people did when they recognized something. "It does get easier. That's all."

"That's what everyone keeps telling me."

"Then maybe it's true." Emily didn't push, bless her, bless all of them and their not-pushing. "We're not going anywhere. Whenever you're ready."

"Maybe tomorrow," Fiona said, which was the lie she was telling everyone these days.

Emily lifted a hand and headed down the path. Her voice folded back into the others. Fiona was alone again with the rail, the wine, and the darkening sky.

She leaned on the rail and watched the sun lower itself toward the water with the slow ceremony of something that had done this a billion times and still meant it. A pelican coasted by, prehistoric and unbothered. The light kept changing. Apricot to rose to a bruised violet at the far edge.

Quiet. That was all she'd come for. Quiet, and a deadline she might still meet if she could stop feeling things at the keyboard. She didn't need the gatherings and didn't need the soup. Didn't need a warm-eyed landlady who saw too much, or a neighbor with an easy smile and an open chair waiting.

She was good at being alone. She'd had practice. She'd been alone inside a marriage for years before she'd been alone outside of one, and at least this way the arithmetic was honest.

The last sliver of sun touched the water and slipped under, and the whole sky exhaled into dusk. Behind her the lighthouse beam swung on, brushing across the garden and out over the Gulf, slow and steady.

She just needed quiet. She just needed to write. She'd be fine.

She would.

Wouldn't she?