Chapter 14
The sky had been the color of a bruise when she left the cottage, so Fiona took the car. Good thing too. The rain came down in earnest before she'd parked, the kind of fat Gulf downpour that turned the harbor into raging water and emptied the sidewalks in under a minute.
She ran the last few steps to Tides & Tales and ducked inside, shaking water off her hair, carefully balancing their coffee.
"You picked a fine afternoon for a book emergency," Marty said from behind the counter.
"It wasn't raining when I made the decision."
"It's Florida. It's always about to be raining."
She'd brought coffee, two of them, the cardboard cups gone soft and warm in her hands. Jan had drawn a little wave on the side of his lid, the way she did now. Fiona set his down on the counter and kept her own.
The shop was empty. Of course it was empty.
Nobody bought a book in weather like this, and most days nobody bought one in good weather either, which they both knew but neither of them talked about.
The rain drummed on the roof. Out the front window the street had gone gray and streaming, the harbor lights smeared into long gold ribbons.
"Well," Marty said. He pushed his glasses up into his hair. "Looks like you're stuck here a while."
"I can think of worse places to be stuck."
"Can you. I'll alert the chamber of commerce."
She laughed and pulled the stool around to her side of the counter, the one that had somehow become hers over the last few weeks. She wasn't a woman who had a stool anywhere. She'd had a whole townhouse and not felt like she had a stool in it.
"You should reread Welty," he began, ready to start into their daily discussions. "The early stories. You'd see what plot costs you."
"Plot doesn't cost me anything. Plot is the part where things happen."
"Things happening isn't a story. Things mattering is a story."
"Things can matter and happen. The two aren't at war, Marty. And by the way, you're a literary snob. Has anyone ever told you that?"
"A time or two. And I am a snob," he agreed, with no fight in it at all. He seemed to enjoy it being true. "It's the only luxury I can afford. Have you seen what I charge for paperbacks?"
She laughed. The conversation drifted while they were trapped by the rain and neither one of them had anywhere they needed to be.
The conversation turned again, before she really noticed. Marty looked at her. "Annette used to read me the last page first. Drove me up a wall."
Fiona went still.
He'd said her name before. Once, in the back room. She'd known not to ask questions then. She didn't now either. She just waited.
"She said she wanted to know if the ending was worth the trip," Marty went on. "Spoiled every mystery she ever picked up. On purpose." He looked down at the counter before glancing back up. "She would've loved arguing with you. She'd have taken your side, mostly, just to watch me lose."
"How long were you married?"
"Eleven years." He said it plainly. "It's been sixteen since."
She did the math. More years without her than with.
"I tell people I resigned," Marty said.
"You did resign. You told me."
"I gave you the nice, clean version." He turned the cup again. "Everybody gets that version. I resigned, I drove south, and I bought a bookshop. Sounds almost brave when I say it fast. A man making a new start." He looked up. "I didn't resign. I stopped showing up."
Fiona didn't say anything. She gave him time to continue at his own pace.
"She was sick six months," he said. "That's all.
You think you'll get years to get used to a thing like that, and you get six months.
The university was good about it, far as those things go.
Told me to take whatever time I needed." A short breath through his nose.
"So I took it. Then she was gone. And the time was still there, all this awful time, with nothing left to fill it. "
The rain pushed harder against the glass. Somewhere in the back a pipe ticked.
"I went back for one semester. Stood up in front of a room of nineteen-year-olds and talked about Faulkner.
About loss, can you believe it?" He shook his head.
"I'd written essays on it. Real ones, the kind that get you tenure.
And I was standing there reciting them like a man reading the dorm rules.
Words I'd believed my whole life and not one of them meant a thing anymore. "
"So you left."
"So I drove." He almost smiled. "I want to tell you I had a plan.
I didn't. I had a car with a full tank and a house I couldn't stand to be inside of.
So I drove south. Figured I'd stop when the road did.
" He spread his ink-stained hands. "Road ran out at the Gulf.
There was a for-sale sign in a window of this shop.
A back room nobody'd cleaned out in a decade, full of some dead man's rare books.
" He shrugged. "I bought it that week. First thing I ever did in my life without thinking it half to death first."
"That doesn't sound like you."
"It wasn't me. That was the appeal."
"And here you are."
"Here I am. Sixteen years of selling books to people who'd rather buy them online." He picked up the coffee finally and drank. "That's the part I leave out. The not-thinking. People hear it and they worry about you."
"I'm not worried about you," Fiona said.
"No." He looked at her, those warm hazel eyes steady over the rim of the cup. "You're not. That's why I told you."
The quiet settled around them. Not an awkward one. The rain filled it.
The story he'd told her sat between them. He hadn't dressed it up. He hadn't asked her to fix it or admire him for surviving it. He'd just told her the worst thing that ever happened to him. Like it was safe to tell her.
The thought came to her, with a clarity that frightened her, that she couldn't give him a lie back. Not after that. The husband-is-traveling lie was right there, loaded and easy, the way it was always easy. It had slid out of her a dozen times.
She opened her mouth and it started anyway, automatic. "My husband—"
"You have a husband?" His eyes widened and his forehead creased in confusion.
She looked directly at him. "He's not traveling," she said. "That's what I told everyone. That he's traveling. He's not. He left." She made herself say the rest of it. "My husband left me. The marriage is over."
There. Out loud. Where another person could hear it.
She'd signed the papers in February. She'd packed the boxes in February.
She'd carried the whole thing out of Georgetown and told not one living soul.
Now she'd told a snobbish, but infinitely kind, bookseller in a rainstorm.
And the floor did not open up. The shop went on being a shop. The rain went on falling.
What she hadn't expected was the relief. It came up through her suddenly, like the downpour outside the window.
"I'm sorry," Marty said.
That was all. He didn't say it'll get easier or any of the things a person usually said. He didn't try to set it right. He of all people knew it couldn't be set right. He said I'm sorry, he meant it.
And that, of all the stupid things, was what undid her.
Her eyes stung. She blinked, furious. She did not cry. She hadn't cried through the lawyer or the boxes or the empty half of the closet. She was certainly not going to start now over two words from a man who sold maritime histories nobody bought.
"Don't," she said, to herself more than him. "I'm fine."
"You don't have to be fine. There's nobody here but me."
Which was exactly the wrong thing to say, because it took the last of it out of her. One tear got loose and went down her cheek and she swiped at it like it had insulted her.
"This is mortifying," she said.
"It really isn't."
"I came here for a book."
"You came here for the company. You've been coming for the company for weeks." He said it gently. "I'm not complaining."
She laughed, almost. Another tear dropped. She pressed the back of her wrist hard against her face.
Marty reached under the counter. He came up with a box of tissues, the cheap kind, half-crushed, the box he probably kept down there for dusty book sneezes. He set it next to her elbow. "There."
Fiona pulled a tissue out and dried her eyes. The tears kept coming and she grabbed another tissue. He stood there patiently, not staring, just being there for her.
"Okay," she finally said.
"Okay." He nodded.
"I'm not going to do that again."
"You might. I'll keep the tissues handy."
"You're not going to ask me about it?"
"Not unless you want me to." He leaned a hip against the counter. "People asked me a lot of questions, that first year. Kind ones. Every single one made it worse. So no. I'm not going to ask you anything."
She turned the cup in her hands and looked at him, grateful that he was here. That he wasn't pushing or questioning. "Drake used to say I lived more in my head than in the room," she said. "He wasn't entirely wrong."
"Living in your head's not a crime. I built a whole shop out of mine." Marty shrugged and his lips curved into a small smile.
She looked at him, but didn't tell him the rest. She didn't say it was finalized, signed, done.
She didn't say Drake had found someone present, someone who was there, the way he'd said she never was.
She didn't tell him she'd been performing the word fine so long she'd half started to believe her own show.
That would keep. But the one truth was out now. She'd said it out loud. She felt brave, which was ridiculous, wasn't it? She felt like she could face reality now.
Their conversation drifted again. To simpler topics. Emily's show coming up at the gallery. The fact that Bryan had actually put a new item on the menu at the Sandpiper.
The rain thinned while they talked. By the time the worst of it had moved off down the coast, the street outside was shining with the first rays of sun breaking through.
"It's letting up," she said.
"It is." He didn't tell her to stay. He didn't tell her to go.
She stood. "Marty."
"Mm."
She wanted to thank him and couldn't think how to do it without making it a bigger thing than he'd let it be. So she just said, "Thank you for the tissues."
His laugh lines deepened. "Anytime, Fiona."
The rain had washed the porch clean by the time she got back to Sea Glass Cottage. Fiona had barely stepped inside and dropped her things when her phone lit up on the desk.
Rachel. She picked it up.
"Well," Rachel said. "On the second ring. That's progress."
She smiled. "I guess it is."
"Things going okay?" A nice, friendly lead-in to something.
"They are. Surprisingly so."
"Great. That's great. But…" A short pause and Fiona could picture Rachel trying hard to choose the right words. "I need an answer. There's no more time left. The publisher's asking again. I can't keep telling them soon. And I need something to give them, Fiona."
And there it was. The decision she had to make. She crossed to the window. The Gulf had gone calm and silver, the storm pushed off down the coast.
"I have something," she said.
"You have the Maxwell book?"
"Not that." She breathed. "The new series. I have it."
Quiet on the line. Then carefully, "Tell me."
"A lighthouse. On the coast of Florida." The words rushed out.
"Run by the same family for generations.
There's a mystery wrapped around it. A small town.
The kind where everybody's in everybody's business and they'd all show up at your door with a casserole anyway.
" She stopped. "The mysteries live there. Book after book. That's the series."
"Fiona."
"Tell them that. All of it."
"You're sure?"
"I have notes. Character sketches. The first three books, near enough to outline." Which was true. The stack of it stood three inches deep on the desk behind her, alive in a way the Maxwell book hadn't been in months. "Tell them I'm ready."
She heard Rachel let out a breath, the one she only let out when a deal was real. "Okay. Okay. I'll send the contract over today. You read it, you sign it, we're off and running."
She paused for only a moment. "Send it."
It came through by the time she opened her laptop. She sat at the little desk with the lighthouse standing white out the window and read every line of it. The advance. The signings. Her own name on the cover, after a whole career spent hiding behind a man who'd never existed.
But somehow, telling Marty that Drake had left her. That partial truth out in the open had made her feel brave. Nudged her to move on.
It was new and it was scary. She signed it anyway.
She set the pen down and let herself feel it. Not fear, for once. Something closer to hope. She'd built a whole new thing out of a town that still had no idea who she was.
Then her eye slid to the other stack. The dead one. Hank Carson, frozen over a body in a rain-soaked alley, waiting since February for her to tell him what happened next.
She still owed them that book.
One problem at a time.