Chapter 23
The courtyard smelled like charcoal and garlic, and Melissa almost turned around twice before she made it to the fire pit.
She could hear them from the pathway. Cassidy’s laugh and Bryan arguing about something over the clink of bottles. Normal Friday sounds. The sounds of people whose lives hadn’t cracked down the middle days ago.
Melissa smoothed her shirt and kept walking.
Emily spotted her first. “Hey, you made it.” No pity in her voice. Just warmth, and the slight over-brightness of someone trying not to make a big deal out of something that was clearly a big deal.
“Wouldn’t miss it.” Melissa sat in the empty chair next to Emily and accepted the glass of wine Cassidy poured without asking before heading over to the grill.
She scanned the circle before she could stop herself. Bryan at the grill, tongs in hand, already losing an argument with Cassidy about cook times. Grant and Emily side by side. Winnie in her usual spot near the fire pit, hands wrapped around a mug.
No Clint.
She let out a long breath. She wanted to be brave enough to face him. She just wasn’t sure she was.
“Festival prep is officially ahead of schedule,” Cassidy announced, walking over and raising her glass. “For the first time in the history of this town, probably.”
“Don’t jinx it,” Bryan called out from the grill.
“I’m not jinxing it. I’m celebrating competent project management.”
“She’s jinxing it,” Bryan told Grant.
The banter loosened something in her shoulders. She’d missed this. Days of hiding in Captain’s Watch, editing photos she couldn’t look at without her chest going tight, and eating crackers because cooking felt like too much effort. Days of the same thought taunting her. I did it again.
She took a long sip of wine and focused on the fire.
The gate creaked. Clint came through carrying a bag of ice in each hand, and Melissa’s grip tightened on her glass.
He looked the same. Work boots, faded shirt, the set of his jaw that meant he was bracing for something. He dropped the ice into the cooler without ceremony.
“About time,” Bryan said. “We’re dying of thirst over here.”
“You’re holding a beer.”
“It’s warm.”
Clint grabbed a bottle from the cooler and sat way across the circle from Melissa. He nodded once in her direction, the kind of nod you’d give a neighbor you recognized but didn’t know well.
It hurt worse than silence would have.
The evening crept forward. Cassidy walked through festival updates with the enthusiasm of someone born to organize large-scale events, which she was.
Bryan’s shrimp came off the grill and everyone agreed it was his best batch, which they said every week.
Emily mentioned a new commission from a collector in Sarasota who’d seen her work through Grant’s gallery website.
Melissa listened and responded in the right places and felt the distance between herself and all of it like a pane of glass.
Winnie caught her eye from across the fire. One look, steady and clear. You’re here. That’s enough for now.
Melissa breathed.
“I have some news, actually.” She said it before she could talk herself out of it. The group turned toward her. “Sam Copeland offered me a collaboration. A book of photographs documenting endangered Gulf Coast structures. His historical text, my images. University press.”
The reaction was immediate and genuine. Cassidy leaned forward. “Melissa, that’s incredible.”
“It really is,” Emily said. “When did this happen?”
“A bit ago. I’ve been sitting with it.” She glanced at Winnie, who gave a small nod.
“Sam’s work is excellent,” Grant said. “That’s a serious credit. You should be proud.”
“I’m considering it.” She was past considering it. She was going to say yes. But tonight the announcement felt less like sharing good news and more like reminding herself that she still had forward motion, even if everything between her and Clint had stalled.
She didn’t look at him. She didn’t need to. She could feel his stillness across the fire. He said nothing. But he didn’t leave.
The evening wound down the way it always did.
Cassidy and Bryan left first, Bryan carrying leftover shrimp in a foil-wrapped plate and Cassidy already on her phone checking something about vendor permits.
Emily and Grant followed, Emily squeezing Melissa’s shoulder on the way out.
Winnie collected her mug and kissed Melissa’s cheek without a word, then headed out with Sally toward the keeper’s quarters.
And then it was just the dirty plates, the dying fire, and the echo of all the Friday nights she’d spent out here learning how to be part of something instead of watching it from behind glass.
She started stacking plates. The rhythm was automatic now. Scrape, stack, carry to the bin. She’d done this enough times that her hands knew the work without her brain’s permission.
She heard footsteps on the stone path. Clint appeared with a trash bag and began collecting bottles from around the chairs. They worked in parallel, the way they had a dozen times before. Close enough to talk. Neither of them talking.
The silence was different from the early days. Back then, silence between them had been hostile, two people refusing to engage. This was just a silence filled with all that was wedged between them.
She wiped down the table by the grill. He tied off the trash bag and set it by the gate. She expected him to leave. She was already rehearsing the walk back to Captain’s Watch alone, the dark cottage, and the laptop she wouldn’t open.
“Grant told me you deleted the photos.”
She stopped wiping. Her hand went still on the table.
She turned around. He stood by the cooler, arms at his sides. His face in the firelight was hard to read, but his voice had been even. Not angry, just direct.
“I did.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.” She set the rag down and faced him fully. “They were the best work I’ve ever done. And I deleted them because they weren’t mine to keep.”
The words came out steady. She’d practiced them in the days since the apology on his porch, turning them over until they were smooth and true. She meant every one.
He looked at her. The fire crackled between them, sending up a scatter of sparks. She made herself hold his gaze, even though everything in her wanted to drop it. She owed him at least that much.
Something in his expression shifted. His jaw loosened, and his shoulders dropped a fraction. He was still guarded, but he was listening.
“I’m leaving next weekend,” he said. “Sean’s bachelor party.” Clint picked up the trash bag again, holding it like he needed something to do with his hands. “I’ll be gone three days.”
He wasn’t inviting her into anything. But he was telling her where he’d be.
“I’ll be here when you get back,” she said.
He nodded. Then he walked to the gate, trash bag over his shoulder, and the courtyard was empty.
She finished cleaning up alone. Carried the stack of plates to the keeper’s quarters porch, left them where Winnie would find them in the morning. Walked the stone path back to Captain’s Watch with her hands in her pockets and the lighthouse beam sweeping overhead.
Inside, she sat on the edge of her bed. Her camera sat on the nightstand where it had been for days, untouched.
She picked it up. Turned it over in her hands. It felt familiar. She set it back down and clicked off the light.
The next few days were the worst kind of limbo.
Melissa saw Clint constantly because the property was small and he never stopped working.
Tuesday morning he was replacing a hinge on the gazebo gate when she crossed the courtyard with her camera bag.
She slowed. He looked up. They both opened their mouths at the same time and both closed them again.
“Morning,” she managed.
“Morning.” He went back to the hinge.
She kept walking. The whole interaction lasted four seconds and she replayed it for an hour.
Wednesday she was reviewing Sam’s manuscript notes at the kitchen table when she heard the ladder go up against the side of Captain’s Watch.
She froze. The gutter directly above her window rattled, and she could hear Clint’s boots on the rungs, the scrape of debris being cleared.
He was six feet away from her, separated by a wall and a window and everything they weren’t saying.
She got up and opened the front door. He was at the top of the ladder with a handful of wet leaves.
“Hey,” she said. “Do you want water? Or coffee?”
He looked down at her. His expression wasn’t cold. It wasn’t warm either. It was the face of someone doing careful math in his head.
“I’m good. Thanks.”
She nodded and went back inside. Through the window she could hear him working his way along the gutter, steady and methodical. She stared at her laptop screen without reading a single word until he moved the ladder to Sea Glass Cottage and the sound faded.
That evening she was sitting on the memorial bench with a book she wasn’t reading when he crossed the courtyard carrying a bag of mulch to the garden beds. He slowed as he passed her. Didn’t stop. But he slowed.
“Supposed to rain later this week,” he said without breaking stride. “Big system coming up from the south.”
“I heard.”
He walked on. She watched him kneel by the garden bed and start spreading mulch around the base of the coontie palms. His shoulders were tight. He worked faster than usual, hands digging into the bag with more force than mulch required.
She wanted to go over. To kneel beside him and help the way she’d helped after the last storm, working in parallel until the silence stopped being hostile and started being something else. But that ease had been earned over weeks of careful proximity, and she’d burned it in a single email to Grant.
She couldn’t rebuild it by showing up. She could only leave the space open and let him decide when to step into it again. She went inside and made dinner for one and ate it standing at the counter.
Thursday morning he knocked on her door at seven-fifteen. She opened it expecting a maintenance question—a leaking pipe, or a window he needed to access.
“I’m leaving tomorrow for Sean’s thing,” he said. He stood on her porch with his hands in his pockets, looking somewhere past her left shoulder. “Three days. Friday to Sunday.”
“Okay.”
“Just wanted you to know I won’t be here. In case something comes up on the property, Winnie has the emergency numbers for the electrician and the plumber.”
“Got it.”
He shifted his weight. She could feel him hovering at the edge of something, the way you hover at the edge of a dock before deciding whether the water’s too cold.
“The gutter over your kitchen,” he said. “I patched a spot yesterday. Should hold through the storm, but if it leaks, there’s a bucket under the sink.”
“Thank you.”
He nodded and turned to leave, then stopped on the second step.
“Melissa.”
“Yeah?”
He still wasn’t looking at her. His jaw worked once. “I’m glad you pulled the photos.”
Then he walked down the steps and across the courtyard toward Driftwood, and she leaned against the doorframe and let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.
It wasn’t forgiveness or even close to what they’d had before. But it was something. A door left unlocked, even if neither of them was ready to open it.