Chapter 7 #2
She stood in her dark kitchen and listened to the storm. Wind hammered the windows. Rain drove sideways against the glass in sheets that sounded like thrown gravel. Something heavy scraped across the porch outside, maybe the planter she kept by the door.
She felt her way to the living room and sat on the couch.
Her eyes adjusted slowly. Gray light came through the windows, enough to see the shapes of furniture and the outline of her camera bag where she’d dropped it by the door.
The wind pushed against the cottage walls in long gusts, and she could feel the building absorb each one.
Captain’s Watch was old but solid. It had stood through worse than this.
Clint was wrong. She was doing fine. She had a routine and work, even if it was just the lighthouse at dawn. She had Emily, sort of, and Winnie’s Friday gatherings, and her subscription to the photography journals she still read cover to cover every month.
She wasn’t falling apart. She was regrouping, and that was allowed, right?
Not talking to anyone.
She talked to people. She talked to Emily and she talked to Jan at Harbor Brew when she picked up coffee. She wasn’t some hermit sealed in a cave. She was just… selective. Careful about where she put her energy.
Not doing anything real.
She pulled the throw pillow onto her lap and pressed her fingers into the fabric. The truth was, she hadn’t called Cassidy back about the marketing photos. Cassidy had followed up twice, casual and friendly both times, and Melissa had let both messages sit unanswered on her phone.
She’d told herself she was busy. She wasn’t busy.
She was afraid that if she pointed a camera at Bryan’s family in the kitchen or Jan pouring coffee at the counter, she’d see the same thing she saw through every viewfinder aimed at a person.
Vulnerability people didn’t know they were showing.
And she’d take the shot because that was what she did, and someone else would pay the price.
Better to shoot buildings. Safer.
The storm shook the cottage. A gust hit so hard that the windows vibrated in their frames, and she pulled her knees up to her chest on the couch without thinking about it. Rain found a way in from the roof over the kitchen. A drip started, regular as a metronome.
She should get a bowl for that. She didn’t move.
What counted as real? Clint fixed gutters and patched roofs and cleared storm drains, and he thought that was real.
Hands-on and visible. Something you could point to at the end of the day and say I did that.
But her work was real too. A photograph could stop someone in their tracks, make them look at something they’d walked past their whole lives.
Except she wasn’t taking those photographs. She was taking pictures of the lighthouse at dawn. Every single day. The same lighthouse, the same angle, the same soft light. Nothing that would stop anyone or change anything at all.
She sat in the dark and listened to it and thought about the woman from the hurricane.
Maria LaBelle. Thirty-two years old. Shielding her four-year-old son with her body while the wind tore the world apart around them.
Melissa had taken the photo from twelve feet away.
She hadn’t called out or offered help. Just lifted the camera and pressed the shutter.
The image won three awards and upended Maria’s life. People stopped her because they recognized her face. A man had stalked her. Maria and her son had to move to a different city.
That was doing something real. It just happened to be the wrong thing.
The wind shifted again, and the rain eased for a moment before coming back harder. She pressed her forehead to her knees. Her wet hair was cold against her skin.
Clint was wrong about her. He didn’t know her history, her work, and what she’d built or what it had cost. He saw a woman with a camera and a closed door and decided she was broken because she didn’t spend her evenings at his aunt’s fire pit making small talk.
Except… he was kind of right…
She had been here for months. She’d shot the lighthouse from every angle available to her and the images were technically flawless and completely empty.
She had turned down the marketing job, Emily’s invitations, and every single opportunity to do the thing she was actually good at.
Because doing it meant pointing a camera at a person, and she couldn’t face that.
Clint didn’t know any of that. But he’d seen the result. And the result looked exactly the way he’d described it. Hiding. Not doing anything real.
The storm was moving. She could hear it shifting, the center of the noise traveling eastward, the rain settling down into a steady, slower rhythm. The window in the living room leaked gray light from the west where the clouds were already thinning.
She would need to check the porch in the morning.
Clean up whatever the wind had scattered.
There would be palm debris all over the courtyard, and Clint would be out there at first light clearing it, because that was what Clint did.
Fixed things. Made them functional, sound, and ready for the next storm.
She lifted her head and looked at her camera bag by the door. Inside it was a memory card with six frames from tonight. Images that felt alive.
She got up and found a bowl for the kitchen drip. Set it under the leak and listened to the change in pitch from splatter to plunk. She rescued her camera bag, pulled off the protective cover, and checked her camera. All good.
Then she went back to the couch, pulled the throw blanket off the armrest, and sat with her feet tucked under her while the storm moved east and the cottage settled into its small familiar sounds. The drip and the wind, lower now.
Outside, the lighthouse beam swept past her window. A slow, steady arc of light through the rain.