Chapter 6
Winnie woke before the light, the way she had every morning of her life, and lay still a moment listening to the lighthouse.
People thought a lighthouse was a quiet thing.
It wasn't. The old tower talked all night if a person knew how to hear it.
The tick of the lens turning. The settle of the stairs.
The wind finding the same gap in the gallery rail it had found for a hundred and forty years.
She'd learned the language of it as a girl, sitting on her father's knee.
She could still tell weather by the sound, the way some people told it by their knees.
Though her knees told her plenty too, these days.
She sat up, waited for the ache in her hip to decide how the day would go, and decided it would go fine. It always went fine. She didn't have time for it to go any other way.
The robe first. Then the slippers she kept by the bed, because the floors of the keeper's quarters held the night chill long past dawn.
She'd had Clint look at the heating twice.
Twice he'd told her it was working perfectly and the house was simply old.
Which was Clint's way of saying she was getting old, though he'd never in a hundred years say such a thing to her face.
"Working perfectly," she said to the empty room. "We'll see about that come January."
She went up first. She always went up first.
The climb wasn't what it used to be. She took the spiral slow, one hand on the sturdy rail Robert had installed when his own father got unsteady.
Every morning she thought the same thought.
Someday this climb would beat her. Not today.
She reached the lamp room with her heart going, her hip complaining, the whole gray Gulf stretched out below her.
"Morning," she told the lamp, the way she'd told it every morning of her grown life. It didn't answer. It never had. But she'd have felt foolish climbing all that way and saying nothing at all to it.
She checked the lens. She checked the gallery glass for salt.
She stood where four generations of Lockharts had stood and watched the dark go thin over the water, the line of it pinking up at the edge.
She let herself have the minute. Just the minute.
Then she went back down to put the kettle on, because a person could only stand at the top of the world so long before the world wanted breakfast.
She got dressed and headed to the kitchen. Coffee, strong and black. The only way to have it.
She carried her cup to the big wooden table and sat where the early light came through.
This was her favorite hour, the one before anyone needed anything from her.
Across the courtyard the cottages were still dark.
Six little houses that had been built one at a time when Winnie had convinced her father that rental income would help offset the cost of running the lighthouse.
And look what those cottages had ended up creating.
Emily and Grant in Starfish, painting, squabbling, in love.
Cassidy at the Sandpiper most nights now, of all the unlikely things.
Melissa and Clint, her own gruff nephew finally letting somebody close.
A whole found family gathered around a fire pit.
And her in the middle of it, handing out soup and advice, never once taking any advice herself.
Not that anyone noticed. Not that she'd let them.
"Lonely old woman with six houses full of other people's happiness," she said to the window, and smiled, because it was true and because it didn't sting the way it once had.
Her gaze settled on the fourth cottage. Sea Glass. It was still dark, and the curtains were drawn the way they were always drawn now.
Fiona.
There was a woman with a wall up if Winnie had ever seen one, and Winnie had seen her share.
She'd watched Fiona at the fire pit, that first Friday, perched on the edge of the seat like she might need to bolt.
Watched her give those smooth, careful answers that answered nothing.
Nothing folks would know. My husband's traveling.
Watched the way her eyes slid sideways every time one of the couples touched.
Just a flicker in her eyes, there and gone, the way a person looks away from a bright light.
Winnie knew that flicker. She'd had it herself, a long time ago, at other people's weddings, in church pews, every time the world reminded her of the thing she'd given up. She'd learned to look away fast so nobody caught her wanting.
"Traveling husband," she said to her coffee. "Mm."
She didn't believe it. She wasn't sure why. Something in how easy it came out, maybe, like a line the woman had practiced. People told the truth clumsily. They tripped on it. The lies were what came out smooth.
She'd know. She'd told a few smooth ones in her time.
A knock at the side door, two quick raps and then the door already opening. Which meant Sally. Sally had never in sixty years waited to be let in anywhere.
"It's just me," Sally called, which it always was. She came in on a gust of warm morning and the smell of cinnamon, a basket over one arm and a dish towel over the basket. "Don't get up. Lord, you're already up. Why are you always already up?"
"Because the lighthouse doesn't run itself."
"The lighthouse hasn't needed running since they put the automatic in." Sally set the basket on the table and pulled back the towel like a magician at the good part. "Cinnamon rolls. I made a double batch for the store and the second pan was just sitting there judging me, so."
"So you brought them to me to judge instead."
"You're kinder than the store shelf." Sally was already getting down a second cup, moving through Winnie's kitchen the way she moved through her own, because the line between the two had blurred decades ago. "These are still warm. Have one before you say something about how you shouldn't."
Winnie took a bite. It was very good, and she told Sally so, and Sally looked pleased the way she always looked pleased when somebody let her feed them. That was Sally's whole heart, right there in a cinnamon roll. Feed the people, fix the people, love the people whether they asked for it or not.
"All right," Winnie said, wiping some icing from her fingers. "You've got that look. Out with it."
"What look?"
"The look you get when you've been carrying news up from town and it's gone heavy."
Sally sighed and sat. She wrapped both hands around her cup. "George Morton's back."
Winnie set down her coffee. "Is he."
"Saw his car outside the old Alexander place yesterday.
That shop that's been shut up, what, a year now?
More?" Sally shook her head. "He's made an offer on it.
Don't ask me how I know, you know how I know, everybody knows everything in this town before the ink's dry.
And Winnie, the number." She leaned in. "Way over.
Way, way over what that sad little building is worth. "
"Of course he did." Winnie heard the tiredness in her own voice and didn't bother to hide it. Not from Sally. "He's not buying the building."
"That's what I said."
"He's buying a doorway. One owner says yes to a number that good, and the next one starts to wonder why they're holding out.
And the next. That's how it goes." She'd watched it go that way in other towns, towns that used to have a working waterfront and now had a row of identical shops selling the same seashell soap, the whole strip punctuated by high-rise resorts. "He gets a handhold. Then he pulls."
"You always say that. The handhold."
"Because it's always true." Winnie turned her cup slowly on the table. "He'll come for the lighthouse too. He thinks I'm the hardest knot, so he'll save me for when the rest of the rope's already frayed. Though, he did make me a laughable offer when he first came to town."
"Don't talk like you're a knot to be untied."
"I'm seventy years old, Sally. To a man like George Morton I'm a complication that'll resolve itself if he's patient.
" She said it plainly, because it was true, and there was no use pretending the math of it.
"But I've been resolving myself to that fact for a long time.
He'll have to be more patient than that. "
Sally reached over and squeezed her wrist, quick and fierce. "The town's not selling. Not the real ones."
"Some of them will. People get tired. People get old, or sick, or their kids want them up north." Winnie patted Sally's hand and drew her own back. "We'll keep an eye on it. That's all we can do. Keep an eye and make sure folks know what a yes really costs before they say it."
"Mayor West won't make a peep, you know. She loves a tax dollar."
"Linda loves the idea of a tax dollar. She doesn't think past it." Winnie reached for a second cinnamon roll she'd absolutely told herself she would not have. "We'll mind the mayor too."
"And the historical committee? They'll back you on the old Alexander place?"
"Half of them. The other half think a fresh coat of paint downtown is worth more than the truth of the place." Winnie shrugged. "I've outlasted worse halves than that."
"You've outlasted everybody," Sally said fondly, then grinned. "That's the trouble with you."
Sally let it sit a beat, the way she did when she had a second thing and wasn't sure she should say it. Winnie waited. She was good at waiting.
"There's something else," Sally said. "And I don't want you making a face."
"I never make a face."
"You make the worst faces of anyone I know." Sally took a sip of coffee, then slowly put the cup back down. "Sam was in the store yesterday."
The name went through Winnie like the first cold step into the Gulf in December. She kept her hands very still on the table.
"Was he," she said.