Chapter 8
Melissa stood on the porch of Captain’s Watch with her coffee mug pressed against her collarbone, surveying the courtyard.
Palm fronds littered the stone pathways.
A section of lattice from the gazebo lay flat across the fire pit.
Smaller debris was scattered everywhere, bits of branch and shingle and Spanish moss ripped loose by the wind.
But the cottages stood, and the lighthouse rose above them all, unchanged.
The storm had passed and left behind a mess but nothing broken.
She’d barely slept. The power had come back sometime in the early hours, the overhead light snapping on and startling her awake in the chair where she’d been curled up. She’d turned it off and stayed there, watching the lighthouse beam sweep its slow circle through the last of the rain.
Clint’s words had kept her company in the dark. Every one of them.
You’re hiding behind your camera, not talking to anyone, not doing anything real.
She took a sip of coffee. It was too hot and burned the roof of her mouth. Good. Something to focus on besides the tight knot inside her.
He’d been cruel. That was the easy version. She could wrap herself in it, stay angry, dismiss everything he’d said as the blunt-force opinions of a man who fixed gutters for a living and thought that qualified him to fix people too.
Except he hadn’t been wrong. Not about all of it. Maybe not about most of it.
She watched him now from the porch railing.
He’d been out there since before she woke, judging by the progress.
A wheelbarrow sat near the gazebo, already half full of broken branches.
Clint moved along the pathway with a pair of loppers, cutting through a downed limb that blocked the route between Heron Cottage and the courtyard. He worked steady and unhurried.
He hadn’t looked toward Captain’s Watch once.
Melissa went inside and poured a second mug of coffee. Black, because she’d seen him drink it that way at the sunset gatherings. She stood at the counter holding both mugs, one in each hand, and stared at the front door.
This is ridiculous. It’s a cup of coffee, not a marriage proposal.
But it wasn’t just coffee and she knew it. It was walking toward the person who had said the truest, most uncomfortable thing anyone had said to her in two years, and admitting she’d heard him. Choosing to close the distance instead of widening it.
She could stay inside. Clean up her own porch. Nod at him later across the courtyard and let the argument wedge a permanent chill between them. That would be easier. Easier was her specialty.
She pushed through the screen door before she could talk herself out of it.
The courtyard was worse up close. Wet leaves plastered the cottage walls in dark patches, and sand from the beach had collected in every seam of the stone pathway.
Clint was crouched beside the memorial bench, inspecting a crack in one of the stone pavers. He looked up when he heard her footsteps, and his expression went flat and guarded. She’d seen that look on people in disaster zones, the face they made when they expected bad news.
“Brought you coffee.” She held out the mug.
He looked at it. Then at her. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
A beat passed. He stood and took the mug. His fingers were dirty, bark dust and soil ground into the creases of his knuckles. He took a sip and didn’t say anything.
“How bad is it?” She nodded toward the courtyard.
“Not bad. Branches, mostly. Lattice came off the gazebo. One of the pavers cracked.” He gestured with the mug. “Nothing structural. We got lucky.”
“Need help?”
The question surprised him. She saw it in the way his expression changed. He’d expected the cold shoulder or a fight. Not this.
“I’ve got an extra pair of gloves in the wheelbarrow,” he said.
She found them tucked under a coil of rope. Brown leather work gloves, too big for her hands. She pulled them on anyway and picked up a fallen branch from the pathway.
They worked without talking. For the first few minutes it was awkward.
She was too aware of the space between them, where he moved, and whether he was watching her.
She kept her eyes on the ground and focused on the simple mechanics of carrying and stacking.
Branches went in the wheelbarrow. Palm fronds went in a pile near the garden shed.
Smaller debris she gathered by hand, filling a bucket with chunks of bark and scattered leaves.
After a while, the self-consciousness faded. The work settled into a rhythm. She cleared the pathway between Captain’s Watch and Sea Glass while Clint hauled the wheelbarrow to the dumpster and came back empty. They moved around each other without bumping or coordinating.
She caught herself noticing things. He tested each fence post with his hand before moving on, checking for looseness.
He paused at every cottage to scan the roofline, the windows, and the foundation.
He wasn’t just cleaning up. He was taking inventory of the whole property, cottage by cottage, making sure nothing was compromised.
He cared. That much was obvious. It had always been obvious. He cared about this place the way she used to care about a frame. Completely and obsessively, down to the details no one else would notice.
She dragged a heavy sea grape branch to the pile and wiped her forehead with the back of her glove. The sun was fully up now, burning through the post-storm haze, and the air smelled like wet earth and cut wood.
Clint wheeled another load away. When he came back, he picked up one end of the fallen lattice section and looked at her. She grabbed the other end without being asked. They carried it to the garden shed and leaned it against the wall.
“I can reattach that this afternoon,” he said. “Just needs new screws.”
“The gazebo looks okay otherwise.”
“It’s solid. I rebuilt the frame two years ago.” He said this without pride. Just a fact about a thing he’d done.
They kept working. The courtyard slowly emerged from under the debris, the stone pathways reappearing, the fire pit cleared.
She raked sand off the pavers while Clint bundled the last of the branches with twine.
The bucket she’d filled sat by the garden shed, and the wheelbarrow was parked beside it, empty now.
When there was nothing left to pick up, they stood near the memorial bench in the cleaned courtyard. Melissa peeled off the work gloves and flexed her fingers. Her palms were red and damp.
Clint wiped his forehead with his forearm. He looked at the courtyard, then at her, then away. He shifted his weight.
“I shouldn’t have said what I said.” The words came out rough, like he’d rehearsed them but they still didn’t sit right in his mouth. “Last night. During the storm. It wasn’t my place.”
She’d prepared for this moment without knowing she was preparing. All morning, while they worked in silence, some part of her had been turning his words over, testing them against her life here. The lighthouse at dawn and the locked-down portfolio. The polite distance she kept from everyone.
“You weren’t completely wrong,” she said.
He looked at her. The guarded expression cracked open just enough for her to see real surprise underneath.
“I am hiding.” She cleared her throat. “I’m just… I don’t know how to stop.”
She waited for him to push. To offer advice or some blunt assessment of what she should do about it. Everyone else had. Emily, gently. Winnie, sideways. Even Cassidy, once, over drinks.
He didn’t rush in. He stood there with his dirty hands at his sides and looked at her for a few moments. “I get that,” he said.
She felt the knot inside her loosen. Just a fraction, just enough that she could take a full breath for the first time all morning.
“For years now, I’ve been introducing myself to people as someone who photographs architecture. Like that’s who I actually am.”
“Is it?”
“No.” She almost laughed. “It’s who I’m pretending to be because the real version did something she can’t take back.”
He was quiet for a moment. A mockingbird started up somewhere in the sea grape hedge.
“I left the Coast Guard three years ago,” Clint said. He picked up the work gloves she’d set on the bench and folded them together, one inside the other. Occupying his hands. “I tell people Winnie needed help with the property. And she did. But that’s not why I came.”
She waited.
“I came because I couldn’t trust myself to make decisions that mattered anymore.” He set the folded gloves on the bench. “Here, the decisions are small. Fix the roof, clear the path. Nobody gets hurt if I pick the wrong screw.”
He kept his eyes on the gloves instead of on her.
“That’s a little pathetic,” she said. “Both of us.”
“Yeah.” One corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Close. “It is.”
Another silence, but this one was different from the heavy quiet of the morning’s work.
“I took six frames last night,” she said. “During the storm. Right after you came out and yelled at me.”
“I didn’t yell.”
“You raised your voice significantly in an outdoor setting.”
He almost smiled again. “How’d they turn out?”
“I haven’t looked yet, just in the preview on the screen.
” That was true. She’d been afraid to. Afraid they’d be as empty as everything else she’d shot in the past two years, and afraid they wouldn’t.
“But they felt different. While I was shooting. The lighthouse with the storm behind it and the rain coming sideways. It felt like it used to feel.”
“Like what?”
She thought about it. “Necessary.”
Clint nodded slowly, as if that word made sense to him in some private way.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, glanced at the screen, and his whole posture changed. His shoulders squared, and the softness that had crept into the conversation vanished behind the same protective alertness she’d seen a hundred times.
“Winnie,” he said, already turning toward the pathway that led to the keeper’s quarters. “She’s got some roof damage.”
“Is she okay?”
“She says it’s minor.” His tone made it clear that Winnie’s definition of minor and his definition of minor were two different things. He was already walking. “I need to go check.”
“Go.”
He stopped at the edge of the courtyard. Turned back. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Thanks for the gloves.”
He held her gaze for half a second longer than he needed to, then headed up the path. She watched him go, his stride lengthening the way it always did when something needed fixing, his focus already narrowing to the problem ahead.
She sat down on the memorial bench. The stone was warm from the sun and still damp from the storm. She rested her hands on her knees and looked at the courtyard they’d cleaned together.
She thought about calling after him. Offering to help with Winnie’s roof. But he was already in fix-it mode, moving with the same focused energy he brought to every cracked paver and loose fence post. She knew that mode. She had her own version of it, and it looked like a camera viewfinder.
She got up and headed to her cottage. Inside, she pulled the memory card from her camera and popped it into her laptop. The images automatically loaded into her editing program. She paused.
Look at them. Whatever they are, look.
She tapped a key and the lighthouse filled the screen, white tower against a sky the color of a bruise.
Rain streaked across the frame in silver lines.
The beam cut through the chaos, steady and sharp.
And the image was alive. It was unguarded and real.
The same way her work used to be before she learned to be afraid of it.
Melissa tapped to the next frame. Then the next. Each one raw, imperfect, full of the urgency she’d felt standing in the wind with the rain soaking through her shirt.
She closed the laptop. Opened it and took another look at the images. She smiled as she shut the laptop again and went off to shower and change.