Chapter 11
"Sit anywhere you like," Bryan called from behind the counter. "We don't do assigned seats. House rule."
Fiona stood in the doorway of the Sandpiper.
She was instantly surrounded by the smell of butter, fried food, and baking bread.
Two ceiling fans turned slowly overhead, pushing the heat around without ever quite moving it.
Vintage photos of fishing boats covered the walls, the boats bobbing in a harbor a hundred years younger.
She almost hadn't come. She'd stood at her own door twenty minutes ago with her hand on the knob, telling herself she'd show her face and leave early. She could do an hour. Anybody could do an hour.
"Fiona." Cassidy waved her over from a long table near the windows. She'd pushed two tables together, lined up the chairs, set out napkins in a way that looked effortless but absolutely was not. "We saved you a spot. Come sit by Emily."
So much for slipping in unnoticed.
"It smells incredible in here," Fiona said, because it did, and because it was easier than admitting she'd thought about turning around in the parking lot.
"That's the grouper." Bryan came around the counter with a platter held high. Broad-shouldered, sun-bleached hair, hands that looked like they'd hauled a lot of nets. "Caught it this morning. You want a beer? We've got the Seaside Wheat, brewed right here in town."
"Just water for me."
"Water." He shook his head like she'd ordered something tragic. "City people."
"She's barely city anymore," Cassidy said. "She's been here three weeks. That's practically a local."
Three weeks? How did that happen? Had it really been that long?
She sat down by Emily and the food came out in waves.
Grouper and hush puppies. A slaw Cassidy swore was Bryan's grandmother's recipe.
Bryan cooked and carried and never once sat, which seemed to be how he liked it.
Winnie took the chair at the end of the table, the way a person does when the seat has always been theirs.
Fiona ate and watched.
She couldn't help it. It was the thing she did, the thing she'd always done, the reason Drake said she was never fully in the room. She watched people the way other people breathed.
"So the show's the second Friday," Emily was saying. She had paint under one fingernail she hadn't quite scrubbed out. "Grant's giving me the whole back wall. Eight pieces. I haven't shown eight pieces at once since Chicago."
"You'll fill it," Grant said.
"I might not fill it."
"You'll fill it." He said it without looking up from his plate, easy and certain, like a fact about the tide. "You've already got six. The other two will paint themselves."
Emily made a face at him, but she was smiling. "He's very calm about my deadlines."
"One of us has to be."
"You should come, Fiona," Emily said. "The opening. There's wine. Grant pretends to not like wine, but he drinks it."
"I like wine," Grant said.
"He sips it like a tea taster. It's the most pretentious thing about him, and he has a lot of competition."
Fiona laughed, and it surprised her. A real laugh.
But under the laugh was a small ache of it all. The way Grant knew Emily's work. The way he'd counted her paintings without being asked.
Drake had never once counted her chapters.
She picked up her water and took a sip.
"Melissa, did you bring them?" Cassidy leaned across the table. "She said she'd bring them."
"I brought them." Melissa wiped her hands and pulled out her phone. "Sam and I drove up the coast Tuesday. There's an old cannery about to fall into the water. I wanted it before it goes."
She passed the phone down the table. Fiona took it when it came to her.
The photo stopped her. A ruined building, all gray board and broken glass, shot at the hour when the light goes long and forgiving. The thing should have looked like a wreck. It looked like a held breath instead.
"Melissa, this is gorgeous," Fiona said, and meant it.
"That's the one for the cover, I think. Sam wants the lighthouse on the cover. I keep telling him the cannery's stronger."
The lighthouse. Fiona's research-brain picked up on that out of habit, the same way it had every time the subject of the lighthouse came up now. She handed the phone back before the feeling could turn into a question. Not tonight. Tonight she was a woman at a dinner.
"How's the book coming?" she asked instead.
"Slow. Sam writes about three drafts of every paragraph." Melissa shook her head, fond. "He says the structure tells you the story if you let it. I just take the pictures."
"You don't just take the pictures," Clint said from beside her. First thing he'd said all night. He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to.
Melissa bumped her shoulder against his.
"Save room," Cassidy announced to the table. "I made lemon bars. Nobody leaves without a lemon bar. I'm not asking."
"She's not asking," Bryan confirmed from the counter.
"It's a wonderful tyranny," Winnie said, the first thing she'd offered in a while. "I've learned to just eat the lemon bar."
Cassidy pointed a fork at her. "Winnie gets it."
The evening went on like that. The talk moved, circled, doubled back, with nobody working at it. That was the part she couldn't get over. Nobody was performing. Nobody was managing the silence so it wouldn't get awkward. They just talked.
"You set your nets too shallow," Grant said.
Bryan had finally sat down for about a minute. "I've been fishing this water since before you came back to town."
"And you set them too shallow."
"Says the man who paints."
"Sculpts."
"Same thing." Bryan grinned. "Both of you stand around looking at stuff till it's pretty."
"That is not even close to what I do."
"You stood in front of a piece of driftwood for an hour last week. Sally told me. A whole hour."
"It was a good piece of driftwood."
"It was a stick, Grant."
"It was a stick with potential."
Cassidy laughed. Emily laughed harder, and then the two of them got going about a collector who'd tried to haggle Grant down at the gallery and gotten a very polite lecture instead.
Fiona didn't catch all of it. She caught the laughing.
The way Cassidy put her hand on Emily's arm.
The way they finished each other's sentences after only a couple of months of knowing each other.
Winnie caught Fiona's eye down the length of the table. She didn't say anything, only gave a small nod that said she was glad Fiona had come, then went back to her grouper. Fiona managed a smile back.
But something had started to climb up inside her, and she knew exactly what it was, because she'd named emotions for a living for thirty years. Envy. Plain and unflattering.
She wanted this. She wanted to be the person who knew how many paintings someone had finished. She wanted to put her hand on a friend's arm without thinking about it first. She wanted to argue about fishing nets with a man who'd still be there in the morning.
"You're wrong about the tide too," Grant was saying, somewhere far off.
"I am never wrong about the tide," Bryan said.
The words went past her like water. She'd had twenty-six years to build exactly this. She'd built fifteen novels instead.
You live more in those books than you've ever lived with me.
Drake's voice, clear as if he sat across the table.
You're too closed off, Fiona. Too wrapped up in worlds that aren't real.
"That's a smile," Melissa announced, delighted, pointing at Clint. "Everybody saw it. I have witnesses."
Fiona heard it, but just barely, lost in her own thoughts.
She'd argued with Drake at the time. She'd stood in their kitchen in Georgetown and told him it wasn't fair, that the work mattered, that he'd loved that about her once.
And maybe he had. But here was the proof, spread out across two pushed-together tables.
Here were people who'd figured out the thing she'd failed at.
They'd let each other in. They'd made the warm, easy, honest thing she'd never once managed in her own marriage.
She looked at all of them, and suddenly she knew the truth. Drake had found someone present. She'd never been present a day in her life.
"Fiona?" Cassidy was looking at her. "You okay? You went somewhere."
Three sets of eyes turned her way. Then four.
"Sorry." Fiona made the smile happen. She was good at the smile. "I think the heat's catching up with me. I've got a bit of a headache coming on."
"Oh, no." Cassidy was already half out of her chair. "Let me get you something. Bryan keeps the good aspirin behind the counter."
"No, please, sit. It's nothing. I just—" She reached for the word she always reached for. "I should head back before it gets worse. I'm fine. Honestly."
Honestly. The word she used most when it wasn't true.
"I'll walk you," Winnie said.
"You will not. You stay and finish your dinner." Fiona was up now, her chair scraping the floor too loud. "It's a short walk and I've done it in the dark a dozen times. Please."
Winnie studied her. Her eyes didn't miss much. Fiona had figured that out the first day. For a second she thought the older woman would push.
"All right," Winnie said. "Drink some water when you get in. The heat takes it out of you."
"I will. Thank you. Bryan, the grouper was the best thing I've had in months. I mean that."
"Come back when your head's right and I'll feed you again," Bryan said. "And drink a beer next time, for the love of Pete."
"Maybe next time."
She got herself to the door on the smile, the headache, and the long practice of leaving rooms gracefully.
Emily told her to come by the gallery before the show.
Melissa said she'd send the cannery photo if she wanted it.
Somebody said good night. She said it back to all of them at once and pushed out into the dark.
Once outside, she took a deep breath. The night air was thick and warm off the water. Behind her, through the screen, the laughing started up again almost before the door shut.
It didn't even pause for her leaving.
That was good, she told herself. That was the whole point. They didn't need her there to keep going. Nobody had to manage her exit. She'd done a clean job of it.
So why did her eyes sting the whole walk home?
"Stop it," she said, to nobody, halfway down the path.
A lone gull calling in the distance was her only answer.
Sea Glass Cottage was dark when she let herself in, and she left it that way. No lamp by the door. No kitchen light. Not the little lamp at the writing nook, where her laptop sat closed over a detective who'd been standing in a rain-soaked alley since February.
She kicked off her sandals by the mat, walked through the dark to the couch, and sat down. She should drink water. Winnie had told her to. She didn't move.
The headache wasn't real. That was the trouble with a lie that came easy. It left her alone in the dark with the actual ache, and the actual ache didn't take aspirin.
"Pull yourself together," she said to the empty room.
Her voice sounded strange in the dark. She'd gotten in the habit of talking to this cottage the way Marty talked to his shop, she suspected. Two lonely people narrating their own quiet.
She thought of Emily's eight paintings and Grant counting them.
She thought of Bryan, who never sat down because feeding people was how he loved them.
She thought of how she'd had a husband for twenty-six years and couldn't, right this second, name one thing she'd done that matched the certainty in Grant's voice when he told Emily she'd fill that wall.
She'd written Drake into a book once. The fourth Hank Carson. She'd given a character his way of going quiet when he was angry, his habit of straightening things that were already straight. She'd thought it was a kind of love letter, putting him in there.
When he read it, he'd said, "So that's what I am to you. Material."
Maybe he'd been right about that too.
Then she caught herself.
"When did you turn into this?" she said to the dark.
Because that was the real question. Somewhere in the last six months she'd become a woman who sat alone in borrowed rooms feeling sorry for herself because other people had managed to be happy.
She'd written fifteen detectives with more spine than that.
Hank Carson wouldn't have lasted five minutes on this couch.
The thought almost made her smile. Almost.
Her phone buzzed in her bag.
She dug it out. The screen was too bright in the dark, and she squinted at it. A text from Emily.
Get home okay? You looked a little wrecked. The grouper does that to people. Come see the paintings whenever. No pressure. xo
Fiona stared at it longer than a one-line text deserved.
Home safe, she typed back. Thank you for tonight. I'd love to see them.
She almost added, I'm not actually fine. Her thumb hovered over it.
She deleted it and sent the safe version instead.
"Coward," she told the room.
The phone stayed lit in her hand, and her thumb found the voicemail before she'd thought it through. Rachel's name, three days old. She pressed play and let it run in the dark.
"Hi, it's me, calling again, which you know, because this is the part where I pretend I'm not worried.
" Rachel's voice filled the dark cottage, brisk but tinged with fondness, and a thousand miles away.
"Call me back. The offer's still on the table and it's a good one, Fiona.
They want you. The real you. I keep telling them they have no idea what they're asking for.
" A pause. "Just tell me you're okay. That's all I need. One word."
The message ended. The beam came around again. Silver, then gone.
She pulled her knees up onto the couch, the way she hadn't done since she was a girl, and wrapped her arms around them. A few feet away her phone went dark on the couch. Across the courtyard, somebody's porch light came on.
She looked at it for a long time and didn't get up.