Chapter 26
Melissa walked into the gallery, and Grant had hung the portraits in a single line along the gallery’s west wall. She couldn’t stop staring at them.
She’d arrived early, before the doors opened, telling herself she needed to check the lighting and the print quality. All true. But the real reason was that she needed to stand in front of her own work and not run.
Sally Morris. Jan. Bryan in his kitchen with flour on his forearm.
Winnie in the keeper’s quarters with window light falling across her hands.
Emily mid-laugh, caught between brushstrokes.
The behind-the-scenes festival shots and other town images filled the opposite wall.
Cassidy was mid-phone-call with a clipboard tucked under one arm, and next to that, Sally haggling with a vendor over candle prices, one finger raised.
Every person in the photographs had said yes. Every one of them knew the image existed. She took a deep breath.
“You’re going to wear a hole in the floor.” Grant came up beside her, adjusting one of the hanging wires a fraction of an inch. He stepped back and studied the line. “They look good, Mel.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. I’ve been doing this a long time.” He glanced at her. “And I’ve never seen you this nervous.”
“I’ve never done this before. Not like this.”
He didn’t argue with that. He just squeezed her shoulder once and went to unlock the front door.
The Art Walk crowd filtered in slowly. Starlight Shores didn’t rush anything, and the Art Walk was no exception. People drifted through the gallery, moving between Grant’s regular exhibits and the temporary installations. Melissa stood near the back and watched them reach her wall.
Sally found her own portrait first.
She stopped walking. She just stood there, looking at herself in the Bayview General doorway with a box of tea in one hand and a smile that was half for the camera and half for whoever had just said something funny off-frame. Sally in her element, as she actually was, not posed.
“Oh, honey.” Sally’s voice was thick. She turned to Melissa with wet eyes and pulled her into a hug that smelled like lavender hand cream and the cinnamon candles she sold at the store. “That’s me. That’s really me.”
“It is.”
“You made me look like someone worth looking at.”
“I didn’t make you anything, Sally. I just paid attention.”
Sally held her at arm’s length and studied her face, then hugged her again and walked away wiping her cheeks with a handkerchief.
Jan was next. She stood in front of her portrait for a full minute without speaking. In the photograph, she was wiping down the espresso machine at Harbor Brew, humming, her face caught in a moment of complete unselfconsciousness. Jan looked at Melissa across the room and pointed at it.
“I want that one. For behind the counter.”
“It’s yours.”
“I’m serious. I’ll pay for it.”
“No, it’s yours, Jan.”
Jan grinned and went back to studying the photograph, arms crossed, nodding slowly like she was agreeing with herself.
Bryan found his and laughed out loud. In the photograph, he was leaning over a cutting board in the Sandpiper kitchen, knife mid-chop, his face lit by the overhead fluorescents and completely focused.
Flour dusted his forearm. A line cook behind him was blurred in motion.
Bryan punched Melissa’s shoulder like she’d told a good joke. “I look like I know what I’m doing.”
“You do know what you’re doing.”
“Yeah, but I don’t usually look it.” He pulled Cassidy over by the elbow and pointed. Cassidy tilted her head and smiled at the image, then at Melissa, and the smile was the one she gave when she was genuinely impressed and didn’t need to say so.
The evening moved. More people came. Beth Ramsey brought two other artists from the co-op and they spent twenty minutes discussing Melissa’s composition choices with a seriousness that made her feel like a professional again.
A woman she didn’t recognize told her the festival shots made her feel like she’d missed something important and wanted to make sure she came to more of the Starlight Shores festivals.
Marty Fuller asked if she’d consider letting the Beacon run one of the behind-the-scenes images.
She said yes before she could talk herself out of it.
She kept waiting for the other thing. The whisper, the sideways glance, the moment when someone recognized her name and connected it to the hurricane photograph and the woman whose life she’d wrecked. She’d rehearsed responses. She’d prepared herself to be honest and not defensive.
Nobody asked. Nobody brought it up. The people in this room didn’t see the photographer who had exploited Maria LaBelle.
They saw the woman who had spent months walking their streets, sitting in their shops, and earning the right to point a camera at them.
And tonight, nobody in this room was looking at her like she owed them an explanation.
Don’t cry. Not here. Later.
She pressed her thumbnail into her palm and turned toward the door to get some air, and Clint was standing right there.
He’d put on a collared shirt. Navy blue, sleeves rolled to the forearms, tucked into slacks that looked like they’d been ironed. She almost laughed. He looked deeply uncomfortable and completely committed to being there, and she loved both things about him in equal measure.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” He looked past her at the wall of portraits. His eyes moved along the row, stopping at each one. Sally. Jan. Bryan. Emily. Winnie. He came back to her.
“How long have you been here?”
“A while.” He shifted his weight. “I came in the side door. Didn’t want to make a thing of it.”
“You’re wearing a collared shirt. That’s already a thing.”
“Don’t push it.”
A woman Melissa didn’t know walked up beside them and looked at the portraits, then at Melissa. “Are you the photographer?”
Clint answered before Melissa could open her mouth. “She is. She’s brilliant.”
He said it the same way he’d say the porch railing was fixed or the tide was coming in. Just a fact.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For being here. For saying that.”
“I just said the truth.” He looked at the wall again.
His jaw worked once, and she knew he was seeing the gap.
The empty space in the sequence where his portrait would have hung, between Bryan’s kitchen shot and Winnie’s photograph.
Nobody else would notice it. The spacing was clean.
Grant had adjusted for it. But Clint’s eyes went right to it, and he looked at her, and they both knew.
He didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t have to.
She reached for his hand. He took it. His fingers were rough and warm and they closed around hers.
They stood like that while the crowd moved around them. Emily caught Melissa’s eye from across the room and raised her wine glass a fraction. Winnie, seated in a chair Grant had placed near the door, nodded.
Later, when the crowd thinned, Melissa stepped outside for air. The Art Walk had spilled onto Main Street, vendors packing up, families wandering toward the waterfront. She moved closer to the harbor to catch the breeze. The air was salt-heavy and warm.
Sam Copeland was standing near the harbor railing.
He was looking toward the lighthouse, visible above the tree line, its beam beginning its slow sweep as the sky darkened. He stood very still. His camera hung at his side, untouched. The expression on his face was the same one she’d spent months learning to see in her portrait subjects.
She recognized that look. She’d photographed it dozens of times in other people’s faces and never once gotten used to it.
He turned and caught her eye. He nodded once, warmly, and gave her a small wave. Then he put his hands in his pockets and disappeared into the crowd near the wharf.
Clint came out and walked over to her. “There you are.”
“Just needed some air.”
“You ready to head home?”
“Yeah.”
They walked back along the road toward the lighthouse property.
The evening air smelled like fried fish from the Sandpiper’s outdoor grill, and somewhere behind them a guitar player was still going on the corner outside Tides and Tales.
The lighthouse came into view first, white and steady against the darkening sky.
The beam swept overhead in its slow rotation.
She’d photographed that beam a thousand times. It never looked the same way twice.
“I leave in two days,” she said. “The first research trip with Sam. Apalachicola, then over to St. Augustine.”
“I know.”
“I’ll be back in ten days.”
“I know that too.” He was quiet for a few steps. “I’ll probably fix your kitchen faucet while you’re gone. It’s been dripping.”
“My faucet is fine.”
“It drips.”
“It’s character.”
He laughed. The sound of it carried across the courtyard and faded into the rustle of the palms along the path.
They stopped at the edge of the beach where the sand met the property line. The Gulf was flat and dark, barely visible beyond the dunes. The lighthouse beam passed over them, brief and bright, and then they were standing in the dark again, and then the light came back.
Clint turned to her and kissed her. His hands settled on her waist, and she leaned into him.
He pulled back slightly and looked down at her. “I just want to tell you one more thing before you leave on your trip.”
“What’s that?”
He pushed a lock of her hair away from her face. “That I’ve fallen in love with you. Totally and completely.”
She grinned and reached up to touch his face. “That’s a good thing, Clint Lockhart, because I love you too.”
He broke into a smile and pulled her close. Overhead the lighthouse beam kept turning.