Chapter 23
The CLOSED sign hadn't moved in days. Fiona stood on the sidewalk in front of Tides & Tales and looked at it. She'd been by multiple times, but she'd quit knocking, just hoping the shop would be open. It wasn't. Not once.
But she was done with that. She'd come in the afternoon this time and she hadn't brought coffee. She'd brought herself. That was the whole point.
She lifted her hand and knocked.
Nothing. The shop windows threw the street back at her. The gulls. Her own tall shape. Inside, the rows of books sat in their dim, patient quiet, exactly the way he liked them.
"Marty." She knocked again, harder this time. "I know you're in there."
A floorboard creaked inside. Then it went still, the deliberate stillness of a man holding his breath.
"I can wait all day," she said to the door. "I write people who stake out apartments for a living. I'm very good at this."
Quiet.
"Hank Carson once sat in a parked car for nine pages waiting on a witness who never came out," she said. "Nine pages. My editor begged me to cut it. I didn't. I'm telling you this so you understand the kind of patience you're dealing with."
Another creak. The bolt turned.
The door opened halfway, and there he was.
Worn button-down, sleeves shoved to the elbow.
The reading glasses pushed up into his silver-streaked hair, forgotten, the way they always were.
He looked like he hadn't slept the way a person should, and his hazel eyes were guarded in a way they hadn't been since the first week she'd known him.
"You're going to stand on my step and quote your own books at me," he said.
"If that's what it takes."
He didn't move out of the doorway. He didn't invite her in. Fair enough. She hadn't earned the inside of the shop.
"I owe you an apology," she said. "A real one. Not the kind where I say I'm sorry and you say it's fine and we both pretend the floor's solid again."
"I'm listening."
She took a hint of hope from that.
"I'm not going to apologize for being F.
L. Maxwell," she said. "I'm proud of those books.
Fifteen of them. I built that with nobody's help and I'd do it again.
" She made herself keep looking directly into his eyes.
"But I'm sorry I let you stand in your own back room and praise one of them to my face and I said nothing.
You were being generous with me. I let you do it because it was the only time in months somebody had told me my work was worth anything. I didn't want it to stop."
Marty's jaw shifted. He said nothing.
"And there's the other thing," she said.
"The bigger debt. I sat in your back room and let you pull your rarest things off the shelf for me, and I took notes the whole time.
The journal. The Copeland footnote. All of it.
" She made herself keep looking at him. "You thought we were two people loving a puzzle.
I was working. That's the part I'd take back if I could. "
"You were writing a book about the town." His voice was flat. "About the light. About all of us."
"I started to. A lighthouse, a family, a town that closes ranks.
It lit me up like nothing had in months.
" She didn't look away. "But hear this part, because it's the part that matters.
Whatever I turned up back there. The Copelands, Winnie's family, the thing under all of it.
It isn't mine. It never was. It's Winnie's.
If there's a secret out there to tell, she's the one who decides whether it's ever told, and who gets to hear it. Not me. Not for a book."
"You're sure of that."
"I told the whole circle as much, at the fire.
I'm telling you too. I'll put it in writing if my word won't do.
" She drew a breath. "The book doesn't touch this place.
Not her history, not yours, not one true thing any of you handed me.
I kept the light. The way it comes around at night.
I couldn't give that up. The rest of it walks off and turns into its own people, like they always do. "
"You want to know why I lied," she said. "Not the husband. The bigger one. Why I came here and hid behind a fake life like it was the most natural thing in the world."
"I've wondered."
"Because I was afraid F. L. Maxwell was the only part of me worth keeping.
" There. She'd said it out loud, to him, and the sky hadn't fallen.
"Drake decided I wasn't enough. Too far inside my own head.
And I more than half believed him. So the books were all I had left to point to.
If you dismissed my books, the way you dismissed all nonliterary books, there'd be nothing left of me. Drake would be right. I'd be… nothing."
"Fiona—"
"Let me get it out." She pressed on. "Years ago a literary journal reviewed one of the Carson books.
I still don't know why they bothered. The reviewer called it competent but disposable.
Two words I'd take back if I could pick only two.
Competent but disposable. I carried that around for a decade. "
She watched it reach him. Something moved behind his eyes.
"The first day I walked into this shop," she said, "you looked at what I write like it was tracked in on the bottom of a shoe.
And it went straight to the same place that review went.
Same spot. It stung." She lifted one shoulder.
"So that's the apology. I lied to you because I'd already decided you'd confirm the worst thing I believe about myself.
I never gave you the chance to be better than that. That part's on me."
The harbor breeze moved between them. Somewhere down the block a screen door banged.
Marty looked at her for a long time. Long enough that she started to think he wouldn't answer at all. He'd say something polite, shut the door, and she'd have her answer in the click of the bolt.
Then he stepped back and opened the door the rest of the way.
"Come in," he said. "I'm not going to do this on the sidewalk where Sally can watch from the register."
The shop smelled the way it always did. He didn't turn on the lamps. He just stood among his shelves, ink-stained hands shoved in his pockets. For a moment he looked less like a man who'd been hiding from her than a man working up the nerve to say something to her.
"I have a confession of my own," he said.
"And it is?"
"I've read five of them. The Maxwells." He said it the way another man might admit to a debt. "Five of your books. Since you've been here."
Fiona went very still.
"I told myself it was reconnaissance," he said.
"Know your opponent. You'd been needling me about Hank Carson for weeks, so when Hal gave me the first book, I read it.
To prove my point. Find the lazy plotting and the cardboard people I was so sure were in there.
" He pulled the glasses out of his hair, looked at them like he didn't know how they'd gotten in his hand, and set them on the counter.
"I finished it in two nights. Then I drove to the next town over so nobody here would see me buy the second one. "
"Marty."
"I couldn't stop." He almost laughed, and there was no comfort in it.
"Three in two weeks. The fourth I read twice.
They're good, Fiona. They're genuinely good.
The detective is lonely in a way I recognized.
You never once say so. You just let him sit in a parked car for nine pages until the reader feels it in their own chest. I kept waiting for you to be a hack.
You never had the decency to be a hack."
She didn't know what to do with her hands. She'd written a hundred scenes where a man told a woman something she'd waited her whole life to hear. She'd never once written the part after. The woman just standing there, undone, with no clever line ready.
"That should have made you happy," she said. "I don't understand why you look like it ruined your week."
"Because of what it meant." He turned away, ran a hand along the spines of a shelf, the way she'd seen him do when he was thinking.
"For thirty years I've sorted books into the ones that matter and the ones that don't. That's not a small thing for me.
That's how I've sorted the whole world. Serious and unserious.
Worthy and not. I built a life out of standing on the right side of that line. "
"And my little mysteries put a crack in the line."
"Your mysteries—which are not little, by the way—put a fist through it.
" He faced her again. "If I was wrong about that, then I had to ask what else I'd built to keep from feeling anything.
After Annette died, I told myself I was choosing the serious life.
The real one. I sold the house, I bought a failing shop, I stocked the books I respect and let the shop lose money, and I called all of it integrity.
" His mouth twisted. "Standing here reading your fifth book in the dark with the shop closed, I wondered if it was ever integrity at all.
Or if it was just a version of what you were doing.
Hiding. Dressing it up so well that even I couldn't see it. "
She stood there for a moment, letting his words sink in. "We're both hiding," Fiona said quietly.
"We were. And now we've both been caught. Exposed." He shook his head slowly. "A publicity department caught you. I caught myself. I'm not sure which is sadder."
"Yours. Definitely yours." She let the corner of her mouth lift. "At least mine came with a record advance."
And he laughed. A real one, surprised out of him, the laugh lines crinkling around his eyes. It cracked something open in the room, and the guarded look finally went out of his eyes.
"You're impossible," he said.
"You read five of my books in a town this size and drove to another county to do it. We're both impossible." She softened. "I'm glad you read them. I'm glad somebody whose whole life is books thinks they're good. You don't know what that means, coming from you."
"I think I do, actually." He looked at her steadily. "That's rather the point of everything I just said."
The light through the front windows had gone from gold to rose while they talked. Outside, the street had emptied toward supper. Fiona realized she'd said the thing she came to say. He'd said the thing she never let herself hope for. Now there was the small terrifying matter of what came next.
"I should let you close up," she said, which was foolish, because the shop had been closed for four days.
"It's already closed." He almost smiled. "Walk you home?"
They took the beach. It was the long way, and neither of them mentioned that.
The sand had gone cool the way it did once the sun let off, and the Gulf lay flat and pink to the west. Fiona carried her sandals in one hand. Marty walked beside her, matching her pace without being asked, and they didn't talk much. They didn't need to.
"Can I ask you something?" she finally said, "now that we're being honest to a fault."
"You'll ask anyway."
"I have a problem in book sixteen. Carson's stranded over the body in the alley. I've been stuck on it since February." She watched the water. "How would you end it?"
"I have no idea. I'm a critic, not a writer. We're the ones who tell you it's wrong after you've done the hard part." He glanced sideways. "Why February?"
"Because that's when Drake left." She shrugged. "The book died the same week the marriage did. I've been telling myself those were two separate disasters. They weren't."
He walked a bit further, then stopped. "Annette wrote in the margins of everything," he said.
"Her books. My books. Grocery lists, if a thought struck her.
After she died I couldn't open a book for two years without finding her handwriting in it.
So I stopped opening them. The shop is full of clean copies nobody's marked.
" He kept his eyes on the sand. "Your books were the first ones in a long time I wanted to argue with.
I'd catch myself reaching for a pencil to tell you why you were wrong about Carson.
That's the closest thing to alive I've felt since. "
"You can argue with me in person now," Fiona said. "I'm right here. It's much harder to win against the actual author."
"I noticed. You quote yourself."
"Only when I'm nervous." She bumped his shoulder with hers. "I'm a little nervous."
"So am I," he said. "I think that's allowed too."
The cottages came up out of the dusk, the lighthouse standing pale against the darkening sky, the keeper's quarters glowing yellow where Winnie was no doubt pretending not to watch. Fiona led him up the path to Sea Glass Cottage and stopped at the bottom of her own porch steps.
"This is me," she said.
"I know. And this is me."
"You alphabetize by author. Like an animal." She grinned at him.
"There is no other way."
"There are dozens of other ways." She climbed the first two steps so they were nearly level, and turned to face him. The teasing ran out of her all at once. What was left was just the two of them in the blue evening, close, the heat of the day finally lifting off the water.
"I'm not good at this part," she said. "I write it well. I'm terrible at doing it."
"I haven't done it in sixteen years," Marty said. "I think we're allowed to be terrible together."
The lighthouse beam swung out across the water, came around, and passed over them both, a slow sweep of light and then dusk again.
In the moment it touched his face she saw him decide.
He lifted one hand and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, his ink-stained fingers careful, like she was an old book he was afraid of creasing.
Then he kissed her.
It was the kiss of a man who'd spent years being careful and had finally found one thing he didn't want to be careful about.
His hand came to rest against her jaw. Fiona's sandals dropped to the porch step.
She rose into it, both hands curled into the worn cotton of his shirt.
For the first time in longer than she could measure, she was just here. Present. Held. Wanted. The actual her.
When they came apart, he rested his forehead against hers.
"Competent," she murmured and she could feel him not quite laughing.
"Don't."
"Fairly competent." Her mouth spread into a smile.
"Fiona." He kissed her again, briefly, to stop her, and she felt his smile against her mouth.
Then they stood there and she held on to the front of his shirt and she had no intention of letting go.