Chapter 21
The sign at Tides & Tales still read CLOSED.
Fiona stood on the sidewalk outside the bookshop with two coffees going cold in her hands and felt like a fool for bringing them.
Three days now. The shade was down over the front glass.
The lights were off. A man who'd never once shut early in all the years he'd owned the place had locked the door on the whole town.
To keep one person out. They both knew which person.
She set the coffees on the step. She'd done that yesterday too. Yesterday they'd still been there when she walked by later, gone tepid in the sun. The sight of them had been worse than the locked door.
"Marty." She didn't knock this time. She just said it, quietly, to the glass. "I'm not going to keep doing this."
Nothing. Of course nothing.
She'd earned the nothing. Because here was the thing she kept circling back to.
She hadn't told one lie. She'd told a stack of them, each one propping up the last. The husband who traveled.
The magazine pieces. F. L. Maxwell, a man, twenty years of letting the world believe it.
And then she'd walked into this shop. She'd let this particular man pull his rare collection off the shelf for her like he was showing her something precious. She'd taken notes.
He had every right to hate her. If this were a book, she would have written a character who hated her.
She picked the coffees back up. No sense leaving them to go cold a third day. Some lessons even she could learn.
Emily and Cassidy were coming up the block from the gallery, heads together, and Fiona saw the exact moment they saw her.
Her whole body wanted to cross the street. To smile, to wave, to perform her way past it. Fine, just fine, lovely day. The reflex was right there, smooth as ever.
She didn't reach for it. She stood on the sidewalk and let them come.
"Fiona." Emily said it carefully, the way a person says it to someone standing too close to a ledge. "We wondered if you were okay."
"You heard."
"The whole town heard." Cassidy had never been one to soften something, and she didn't now. "It was in People, Fiona. Bryan's mother asked if it was true that F. L. Maxwell was the lady at Sea Glass Cottage."
"It's true."
"We figured." Emily shifted the strap of her bag on her shoulder. "Nobody's mad. I want you to know that. It's just strange, finding out the person you've been having sunset wine with is, you know. Famous."
"And a man," Cassidy added. "For twenty years. I read four of those books thinking you were some grumpy guy in a cabin somewhere."
A laugh came out before Fiona could stop it. It surprised all three of them.
"Most people did," she said. "That was the idea."
Cassidy studied her, arms crossed, but not unkind. "Why, though? That's the part I don't get. You're sitting on this whole secret," she waved a hand, "and you let everybody feed you banana bread and feel sorry for the lonely lady whose husband's always traveling."
There it was. Laid out plain by a woman who organized festivals and didn't have the patience for subterfuge.
"Well, the lonely lady was the truth," Fiona said.
Neither of them had an answer for that.
"Well," Emily said finally. "I still want you at the next gathering. If you want to come. Strange and famous and all. And bring Marty?"
There it was. A question, not an invitation.
"Marty won't be there."
She'd meant it to come out easy, lightly. It didn't come out that way. Cassidy and Emily traded a look, the exact kind of look that Fiona had spent her whole life standing on the wrong side of.
"He'll come around," Emily said.
"He won't. And he shouldn't." Fiona made herself say the next part, because she was done dressing things up. "I used him, Em. His shop, his books, his town. I was building a series out of all of it and I never said a word. He found out from a publicity blast. He should be angry."
"That's an awfully tidy way to let yourself off the hook," Cassidy said.
Fiona blinked. "What?"
"You're so busy agreeing he should hate you that you don't have to do the hard thing, which is go fix it." Cassidy shrugged. "Just saying. I plan things for a living. Fix things that get mixed up. If you want to fix it, fix it."
She thought about that all the way back to the lighthouse.
And the strange thing was that the worst had now happened.
The thing she'd spent her entire adult life trying to prevent.
People knew. All of them. They knew about Drake.
They knew about the divorce. They knew there'd never been a traveling husband at all.
They knew the famous F. L. Maxwell was a fifty-four-year-old woman who'd been lying since before some of them were grown.
She was standing in the wreckage of it.
But she was still standing.
That was the part she hadn't expected. She'd always assumed being known completely would finish her. Drake had taught her that. The closer she let a person get, the more clearly they'd see she wasn't enough. So she'd kept everyone at coffee-and-pleasantries distance and called it privacy.
But Emily had asked her to the gathering anyway. Cassidy had stood on the sidewalk and told her the truth to her face and it hadn't been a verdict. It had been a gentle shove wrapped up in kindness.
Nobody had looked at the real Fiona Wells and turned away.
Nobody but Drake. And she was beginning to suspect the problem there had always been Drake.
Winnie was in the courtyard when Fiona got to the lighthouse. She was deadheading some flowers along the path with a pair of kitchen scissors. The sea glass bracelet caught the light at her wrist.
She didn't ask if Fiona was all right. She didn't bring up Maxwell, or Marty, or the headlines. She just looked up, and nodded.
"He'll keep the shop closed a while," Winnie said to the flowers. "Marty grieves quietly. Always has. You can't hurry a man out of something he's decided to feel."
"I know."
"Mm." Snip. A spent bloom dropped to the path. "You'll want to be ready, though. For when he opens it again. People like Marty don't ask twice."
Fiona stood there staring at the flowers. Winnie hadn't asked a single question, and somehow she'd answered the only one that mattered.
"Winnie." Fiona's voice cracked. "I lied to you. The first night. The husband, the—all of it. You fed me and you left your porch light on and I lied to your face."
Winnie straightened, one hand at the small of her back. She looked at her a long moment with those steady green eyes. Eyes that had been reading the weather off this coast for seventy years.
"I know that, dear." A faint smile. "I've known for weeks. Saw the ring mark on your hand. Saw the pain in your eyes you tried so hard to hide." She turned back to the flowers. "I was wondering when you'd get tired of carrying the lie."
And that was all. No absolution, no lecture. Just a woman who'd seen the bare ring-line on Fiona's hand and never once made her explain it.
"Winnie?" The woman looked up. "Thank you."
Winnie just smiled and nodded. "Sometimes, we all need a little time to process what life throws at us."