Chapter 7
The sky over the Gulf had gone the color of a bruise. Purple-gray clouds stacked themselves along the horizon, dense and low, and the wind had shifted from its usual lazy southwest push to something with more bite in it.
Melissa stood on the path between Captain’s Watch and the lighthouse, her camera bag slung over one shoulder, and watched the clouds build. She should go inside. Any reasonable person would go inside. The weather alert on her phone had been buzzing for the last hour, and she’d silenced it twice.
But the lighthouse.
She’d photographed it hundreds of times in the soft pink of dawn, in the flat white of midday, and in the golden hour when every surface turned warm and forgiving.
She had a hard drive full of those images.
Safe images. Pretty enough to hang in a dentist’s office without making anyone feel anything at all.
Right now, the lighthouse looked different.
The darkening sky behind it turned the white tower stark and exposed, and the first gusts of wind sent the palms along the courtyard path into frantic motion.
The light hadn’t come on yet, but it would soon, and when it did, that beam cutting through storm clouds would be a shot she used to live for.
She couldn’t justify it with professional language. No project. No client. She just wanted to take the picture.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d wanted to take a picture for no reason.
She set her bag down on the courtyard bench and unzipped it.
Tripod first. She extended the legs and locked them, tested the stability against the gusting wind.
Too light. She’d need to hang her bag from the center column for ballast. She pulled out her weather cover for the camera body, a clear sleeve she hadn’t used since she’d stopped covering storms. The plastic crinkled in her hands as she unfolded it.
Her fingers were steady. That surprised her. Two years of photographing window frames and the geometric lines of buildings that couldn’t look back at her, and now her hands were steady for a storm. Her pulse had picked up, but it wasn’t exactly fear. It was closer to excitement.
She was threading the camera onto the tripod mount when she heard boots on gravel behind her.
“What are you doing?”
Clint. Of course it was Clint. The man had some kind of radar for anyone doing anything on this property that he hadn’t personally approved.
“Taking pictures.” She didn’t look up. She adjusted the tripod head, angling it toward the lighthouse tower. The first fat raindrops hit the stone path.
“Storm’s getting worse. It’s not safe.”
“I noticed the storm. That’s the point.” She snapped the weather cover over the camera body and checked the seal. “I’ve shot in worse.”
“Inside, Melissa.”
Now she looked up. Clint stood on the path with his arms crossed, and his jaw set in that particular way that meant he’d already decided how this conversation was going to end.
He wore his usual work clothes, khaki pants and a faded blue shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and his hair was already damp from the rain that was picking up speed.
“I’m not one of the shutters you need to batten down.”
“The wind’s going to hit forty miles an hour in the next twenty minutes. Maybe more.”
“I’ve covered hurricanes.” She turned back to her camera and adjusted the aperture. “Category three. Standing in storm surge up to my waist with a camera over my head. I think I can handle a Gulf squall.”
“That was then.” His voice was flat. “Not here. Not on my watch.”
The words sat between them. Not on my watch. Like she was a liability, or she was someone who needed managing.
“Your watch.” She straightened and faced him. The wind pushed her hair across her face and she shoved it back. “I’m a tenant, Clint. I pay rent. I’m not a child you need to herd indoors.”
“Then stop acting like one.”
The rain was coming harder now, fat drops that splattered on the stone path and darkened the shoulders of his shirt. Behind him, the courtyard garden was bending under the wind, the sea oats and native grasses whipping sideways.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“I heard a man who fixes gutters for a living telling a professional photographer how to assess risk. You want to explain the logic there?”
His expression shifted. His arms uncrossed and his hands went to his hips. “This isn’t about gutters.”
“No, it’s about control. You can’t stand that someone on this property is doing something you didn’t plan for. You’ve got your checklist and your little kingdom of maintenance tasks. Anyone who colors outside the lines makes you nervous.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Then what is it? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you walked out into a storm you keep telling me is dangerous, just so you could order me around.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. Or he did, but it caught somewhere between his jaw and his mouth. The rain filled the silence between them.
“You want to stand out here because it makes you feel something,” he said finally. “I get it. But that’s not a reason to risk getting hit by a flying branch.”
“You don’t know why I’m out here.”
“Sure I do.” He took a step closer. Rain ran down his face and he didn’t wipe it away.
“Same reason you sit on that beach every morning for an hour and don’t take a single picture.
Same reason you spent last week photographing a drainage grate like it was the Sistine Chapel.
You’re looking for something to make you feel alive, and you keep picking the things that can’t. ”
“That’s not fair.”
“You’ve been here for months, Melissa. Hiding behind that camera, not talking to anyone, not doing anything real.” He was almost shouting now, but it wasn’t anger. It was frustration, raw and graceless. “Maybe I’d trust your judgment if you showed any.”
The rain hit her face. She blinked it away and stared at him and felt the words rip through her. Quick and clean, gone before she could grab them.
“You don’t get to talk to me like that.”
“Somebody has to.”
“No.” She shook her head. “No, they don’t. You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know what I’ve done or what I’m dealing with or why I’m here. You just see a woman with a camera who isn’t performing her life the way you think she should, and it bugs you. That’s your problem, Clint. Not mine.”
“I know more than you think.”
“Then you should know better than to stand in the rain lecturing me about it.”
They stared at each other. The wind gusted hard enough to rattle the tripod, and she reached down to steady it without breaking eye contact.
Rain streamed off both of them. The palm fronds above the courtyard were horizontal now, and somewhere down by the water, something metal banged rhythmically against something else.
Clint’s jaw worked. He looked at the tripod, at her camera, at the sky, and back at her.
“Get your equipment inside. Please.” The please was an afterthought, tacked on like a spare part he’d found in his pocket.
“I’ll come in when I’m ready.”
“The storm’s not going to wait for you to be ready.”
“Then it’ll be just like everything else.”
She didn’t know where that came from. It slipped out before she could stop it, and it hung in the air between them, more honest than anything she’d said to anyone in months.
Clint heard it. She could tell by the way his expression shifted, the hard line of his mouth softening for just a second before he caught it and put it back.
“Ten minutes,” he said. “Then I’m coming back out to drag you and your tripod inside myself.”
He turned and walked toward Driftwood Cottage. She watched him go while his shoulders hunched against the rain and his stride went stiff, and she hated that her hands were shaking now when they’d been perfectly steady five minutes ago.
She took the picture. One frame. The lighthouse against the churning sky with the beam just starting to cut through the gloom.
The wind bending everything around it while the tower held.
She looked at the preview screen. It was good.
It was the best thing she’d shot in two years.
It had urgency in it, something her dawn photos had never come close to.
She took four more. Each one better than the last. The rain was soaking through her shirt and her hair was plastered to her neck and she didn’t care.
The wind threw salt spray up from the waves, and she tasted it on her lips as she adjusted the shutter speed.
She braced against each gust, leaned into the tripod, and worked fast between bursts.
Her hands knew what to do. They always had.
For five minutes she was a photographer again. The real one, not the careful, contained version who shot buildings. She was the one who used to chase storms because they cut through everything and showed you exactly what was there.
Then a gust nearly knocked the tripod over, and reality asserted itself. She broke down the equipment quickly and ran for Captain’s Watch with the bag clutched against her chest.
The door fought her. The wind had changed direction again, pressing against the cottage front, and she had to throw her shoulder into it.
Inside, the quiet was sudden and complete.
She stood in her entryway, dripping onto the wood floor, breathing hard, and listened to the storm close in around the cottage.
Maybe I’d trust your judgment if you showed any.
She peeled off her wet shirt and dropped it on the bathroom floor. She changed into dry clothes and toweled her hair. The whole time, his words kept circling.
Hiding behind that camera, not talking to anyone, not doing anything real.
“You don’t know me,” she said to the empty cottage. But the words sounded thin.
She went to the kitchen and put the kettle on, more for something to do with her hands than because she wanted tea. The lights flickered once, twice, and then went out. The kettle was electric. Of course.