Chapter 9
Melissa woke with the decision already made.
That was the strangest part. She lay in the unfamiliar brightness of a morning that had arrived without her help, staring at the water stains on the ceiling of Captain’s Watch, and the thing she’d been circling for weeks was simply there. Sitting on her chest. Solid.
She was going to say yes to Cassidy.
The marketing job. The photographs. The whole terrifying proposition of being responsible for capturing actual people doing actual things.
She sat up slowly. The sheet slid off her shoulder and she pulled it back without thinking.
Outside, the courtyard she and Clint had cleared yesterday was still bright and orderly in the early light, the stone pathways washed clean by rain and hosed down by their work.
A single palm frond lay across the fire pit, proof that coastal storms never really finished on schedule.
Her phone was on the nightstand. She picked it up and looked at Cassidy’s number without tapping it.
Cassidy was probably already awake and already working.
Cassidy was a person who answered her phone on the second ring and had three follow-up questions ready before you finished your first sentence, but she didn’t need a text at dawn.
Melissa set the phone down.
She got up, pulled on a pair of soft shorts and a faded gray shirt, and padded to the kitchen.
Coffee first. Anything important got easier once coffee was involved.
She measured the grounds and listened to the machine hiss, aware in a detached, reporter-brain way of how her own hands were moving.
Steady. Not shaking. If she was going to back out, her hands would know before the rest of her did.
Her hands were not backing out.
She carried the mug to the front window and watched the lighthouse.
It stood where it always stood, chalk-white and impassive, indifferent to whether she photographed it today or not.
She’d treated it as a safe harbor for months.
A subject that couldn’t accuse her of anything, couldn’t write an op-ed, couldn’t stand in a hotel lobby in a borrowed cardigan and say you stole this from me.
The lighthouse was safe. The lighthouse was also the problem.
Is staying safe worth staying stuck?
Emily had said it once, on a quiet stretch of beach, and somehow it had wedged itself into the back of Melissa’s skull and never left.
Winnie had her own way of saying it. Clint had said it cruder.
Even the storm had been making the same argument, from a different angle, and Melissa had finally stopped being able to tell any of them apart.
She took a long pull of coffee and set the mug on the sill.
If she was going to do this, she wasn’t going to do it by text.
Heron Cottage was three doors down, a two-story cottage the color of driftwood with a rooftop deck that caught all the harbor light.
Cassidy had put a hand-painted sign on the door that said CAFFEINE BEFORE CONVERSATION in a font too cheerful to fully mean it.
Melissa stood on the porch and knocked before she could think about what she was doing.
Cassidy opened the door in workout leggings, a T-shirt that said PIVOT across the chest, and her hair pulled back into a knot so tight not a wisp of hair pulled loose.
“Melissa.” She blinked. “Come in. Coffee?”
“I’ve had some. I’m good.”
“Everybody says that and then accepts coffee.” Cassidy was already moving toward the kitchen. “Sit.”
The inside of Heron was tidy in a way that told Melissa the sabbatical had never really taken.
Notebooks fanned across the coffee table.
A laptop open on the counter. Two different calendars, one digital on a propped tablet and one paper, color-coded.
A woman on a break had tried to live here and a woman running three projects from her phone had won.
She sat on the couch. Cassidy appeared with two mugs anyway and set one in front of her.
“So.” Cassidy folded onto the other end of the couch, tucked her legs under herself, and looked at Melissa with the focused attention of a person who did not waste early morning energy on small talk. “Are you here about Bryan, the festival, the website project, or something I don’t know about yet?”
“The website project. Plus the festival prep. All of it.”
Cassidy’s eyes sharpened. “All of it.”
“Yes.”
“You’re saying yes.”
“I’m saying yes.”
Cassidy set her mug down so she could use both hands. “Melissa Reeves. I have been trying not to pester you about this for two weeks. I have drafted seventeen versions of a follow-up text. My therapist would like you to know I’m very proud of my restraint.”
“Your restraint has been noted.”
“I was going to give you until the end of the month and then pretend I forgot about it and send one casual, no-pressure check-in.”
“I appreciate the plan.”
“Are you sure?” Cassidy said, and underneath the bright voice there was the question she actually wanted answered. “This isn’t me wearing you down, right? You actually want this?”
“I want to try it.” She wrapped her hands around the mug she hadn’t asked for. “That’s as much as I can honestly give you right now.”
Cassidy nodded once. “I’ll take it.”
“There’s a condition.”
“Of course there is.” She did not sound annoyed. She sounded like she’d been waiting for it.
“I work at my own pace. No deadlines. Not real ones. If we agree on a shot list for the website and I need three weeks to get one image instead of three days, you don’t push me.
If a festival event happens and I can’t lift the camera that day, I don’t lift the camera that day.
No pressure for perfect shots. Nothing on a schedule. ”
Cassidy didn’t answer immediately. She sipped her coffee. She looked at the palm fronds moving outside her window.
“Okay,” she said.
“Just like that.”
“Just like that.” Cassidy put the mug down. “Melissa, I ran myself into a wall hard enough that they sent me down here for two months with instructions not to think.” She stopped. Picked at the edge of her notebook. “I know what you’re asking for. You won’t get pushed. Not by me.”
Melissa looked at her. “Thank you.”
Cassidy opened her notebook. “Don’t thank me yet, because now I’m going to get excited about this out loud, and I need you to tell me if I’m being too much.”
“Go ahead.”
Cassidy flipped a page and started talking the way people talked when they’d been saving up ideas.
The town website first. The photo library Linda West had been asking for since before Cassidy had ever set foot in Starlight Shores.
Signature shots of Main Street in different weather, the harbor at three different tides, the Sandpiper’s deck packed at sunset, Tides & Tales with the window display lit from inside.
Not polished, not tourist-brochure, nothing that looked like it had been flown in from Tampa. Real. The town in its actual body.
Then the festival. Cassidy was already running prep shots through her head, setup photos for the Beacon, portraits of this year’s committee for the program, a working photo library the festival could reuse next year and the year after, build up an archive so every incoming chair wasn’t starting from scratch.
Behind-the-scenes. Community faces. Hands.
“Hands?” Melissa said.
“Oh, I have a thing about hands.” Cassidy waved her own, noticed she was doing it, kept going. “People trust a photograph of hands. You see somebody’s face and you’re judging. You see somebody’s hands doing real work and you’re on their side. If you want, forget I said that.”
“I don’t hate it.”
“You don’t hate it.” Cassidy wrote something down. “Progress.”
“Cassidy. Pace.”
“Yes. Pace. Sorry.” She closed the notebook on her finger to keep her place.
“Here’s what I’m actually proposing. You give me one shot a month for the website, minimum, to keep Linda from panicking.
Anything else is gravy. For the festival, we build a shot list together, and you pick which ones you’ll do and which ones I hire out.
You don’t have to shoot a single face you don’t want to shoot.
If all you do in August is photograph the banner hardware, that’s what you do. I’ll work around you.”
“You’re making it very hard to argue with you.”
“I’ve had training.”
Melissa let out a small breath. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
Cassidy closed the notebook for real. “I really am glad, Melissa.”
“Don’t.” Melissa lifted a hand. “Don’t make this a moment. If you make this a moment, I’ll leave.”
“Fair.” Cassidy picked up her mug. “But I’m glad.”
Melissa stood. She set her own untouched mug on the coffee table, the coffee still steaming, a coaster already underneath it because Cassidy was Cassidy.
“I’ll come by in a few days,” Melissa said. “Or I won’t. You’ll hear from me.”
“I’ll hear from you.”
“Don’t text me in the meantime.”
“I’m not going to text you in the meantime.” Cassidy crossed her heart with two fingers. “Believe it or don’t.”
Melissa did believe her, a little, which was a new feeling.
On the porch Cassidy stopped her with one hand on the doorframe. “One more thing. And then I’ll shut up.”
“Okay.”
“Whatever the first shot is. When you get it. I don’t need to see it. You don’t have to show me anything until you’re ready. That part’s yours.”
Melissa looked at her for a second. She nodded.
She walked back to Captain’s Watch slowly, taking the long way around the courtyard instead of the direct path. The sun was higher. The palm frond on the fire pit had been cleared at some point, probably by Clint, though she hadn’t seen him out. The lighthouse kept doing what the lighthouse did.
She stopped at the memorial bench where she and Clint had stood the morning before, and she set a hand on the warm stone of the back rest. William.
Henry. Robert Lockhart. Three names she had walked past a thousand times without really looking.
She looked now. The letters were worn but sharp where someone had recently cleaned the moss out of the engraving.
Clint probably.