Chapter 25
The fire had burned down to coals, and one by one the cottages took their people back.
Winnie watched them go from her bench. Emily and Grant first, Emily still talking, her hand looped through Grant's arm.
Then Cassidy and Bryan, carrying the empty pie plate between them.
Melissa and Clint, arguing in low voices about something, but Melissa was smiling.
Fiona and Marty went last, drifting off toward Sea Glass Cottage, holding hands.
She should go in. Her knees were telling her so. But she stayed where she was and she wasn't entirely sure why.
Except that Sam hadn't left either.
He'd helped Bryan carry the chairs back and stacked them under the eave the way they went, like he'd done it a hundred times. Like he belonged to the doing of things here. Now he came back across the courtyard with his hands in his pockets and stopped a polite distance from her bench.
"I'll walk you to your door," he said. "If you'll let me."
"It's twenty steps, Sam."
"Then it'll be a short walk."
She let him help her up, his hand warm and certain in hers. Twenty steps. She could have done them in her sleep, in the pitch dark. She had done them in the dark, more nights than she could count, the path worn so deep into her she didn't need the moon to find it.
But she didn't hurry. And neither did he.
The beam came around overhead, pale and slow, and laid itself across the courtyard stones in front of them before sliding off to sea.
"Do you remember," Sam said, "how we were? When we were young."
"I remember a great deal." She said it carefully. She'd gotten so good at careful.
"The beach. We'd walk the whole length of it and back, never noticing we'd done it.
" He looked out past the cottages toward the water she couldn't see in the dark but could always hear.
"We'd talk for hours. About nothing. About everything.
The light, your father's logbooks, what I was going to be when I grew up.
" A small laugh. "I don't think I've talked to anyone like that since. "
She hadn't either. Not since Sam. "We were young," she said. "Young people have the time for it."
"That's not it, and you know it," he said gently. "I've missed all that, Winnie. I've spent all summer trying to figure out how to say it without scaring you off, and there's no clever way I can find. So I'll just say it. I miss it."
Her heart did a thing it had no business doing at seventy. A small foolish flutter.
"You always did just say things," she told him. "I'd forgotten that about you. Forty-five years, and you still walk right up and say it."
"Somebody has to. You never would."
"No." She kept her eyes on the path. "I never would. I got very good at not saying things."
"I know you did." He matched his steps to hers, slow as they were. "I used to think that was the lighthouse making you that way. All that watching and waiting and keeping. Now I think maybe the lighthouse just gave you a place to do it."
She had no answer for that. He'd always been able to do that to her, see the truth she tried to hide.
She made herself keep walking. One step, then another. That was the trick of it, wasn't it? She kept her feet moving and didn't let herself stop to feel his words.
They reached the bottom step of the keeper's quarters before either of them said more. Sam turned and looked back the way they'd come, at the ring of cottages with their warm windows, the couples settling in behind them.
"You built all this," he said. "And look what it does.
Emily and Grant. Cassidy and Bryan. Even your nephew and Melissa.
Now there's the writer and the bookseller.
They're in love. It was plain as anything on that bench.
" He shook his head slowly. "Your cottages have a way of making people find each other. "
"They're just cottages, Sam."
"Are they?" He turned the look on her now, instead of them. "Do you think they might help us?"
And there it was. The question. The one she'd been wondering about since he got back to town. Was there an us?
The what-ifs came at her all at once, the way they did whenever she let her guard slip.
What if she'd never sent him away? What if she'd torn the letter up instead of mailing it?
What if her father had never sat her down at the big kitchen table and taken both her hands and asked her to end it.
Promises matter more than happiness, Winifred.
His face, frightened in a way she'd never seen before or since.
Forty-five years. A whole life built carefully around one moment because a frightened man asked her to, and she'd never once known exactly why he asked.
"I don't know," she finally said. "These cottages have minds of their own, you know. I had them built, but I've never once been able to tell them what to do. The right souls find their way home, and I'm as surprised as anyone when they do."
"That's not a no."
"No." She let herself smile. "It isn't."
"I'll take that as a maybe then."
"Don't get clever, Sam Copeland."
"Too late. I was always clever. You're the one who told me to go off and do something with it."
She had told him that. She'd stood right on the dock and told him he had a whole life waiting and no business spending it on a keeper's daughter who'd never leave the point. She'd meant it to sound like a kindness. She'd meant it to sound like anything but the lie it was.
"I was wrong about a great many things back then," she said.
"You were right about the clever part." He bumped her shoulder lightly with his, the way the way he used to when he's been a young man. "Wrong about the rest. But right about the clever part."
He stepped closer and took one of her hands in his, his thumb moving once over her knuckles, then over the sea glass bracelet at her wrist. "Well," he said. "I hope they decide to help us. I've missed you, Winnie."
She looked up at him. The porch light caught his face full on.
Older now. They were both of them so much older, the lines deep around his eyes, the gray gone thick where there'd once been brown.
But underneath all of it, plain as the day he'd handed her that bracelet and watched her put it on, was the young man she'd loved past all good sense.
She lifted one hand to his cheek. His skin was warm under her palm. Rougher than it used to be. She let it rest there and didn't take it back.
"I've missed you too, Sam," she said. "Very much."
He sighed deeply and covered her hand with his. The beam swept over the two of them, pale gold, and moved on out to the dark water.
Dear Reader, I hope you enjoyed Fiona and Marty’s story.
Of course, we had a bit more of Winnie and Sam.
Oh, and the lighthouse’s mysterious past. Next up is Seaside Renovations.
Someone in town is causing trouble, and Winnie hires Avery to get to the truth.
More clues to the lighthouse, more Winnie and Sam, and Avery and Brad have a bit of a love story, too.
It’s all in Seaside Renovations, book five.
As always, I truly appreciate each of you. I hope you’re enjoying this series. ~ Kay