CHAPTER ONE #2
"It is," Marin said, and handed him his change, and did not entirely know what to make of him.
He left with the same unhurried confidence he'd arrived with, pausing at the door to greet someone else, and someone else after that, moving down Wharf Street like weather.
Across the street, through the propped door, Marin caught sight of a woman in an apron standing in the window of a squat little diner with a hand-painted sign — RUTH'S — watching Vance's progress down the sidewalk with an expression that had nothing warm in it at all.
When she noticed Marin looking, she didn't smile, exactly, but she gave a short nod, the kind exchanged between people who might, eventually, be allies.
Marin was still turning that over when the bell over the door rang again — that bright, questioning note — and an older man came in alone, moving carefully, the way people do when their knees have started keeping their own counsel.
He wore a cardigan despite the September warmth and carried a canvas tote bag, soft at the corners, the kind libraries used to give away.
"You'll be Josephine's niece," he said, not quite a question. His eyes were pale blue and very direct. "I'm glad someone in this family had the sense to keep the lights on."
"Marin," she said, offering her hand. "Marin Ashworth."
"Walter Kessler." His grip was firmer than his knees suggested it would be.
"I was in here most Tuesdays for twenty years.
Your aunt kept a chair for me by the local history shelf and threatened to charge rent if I fell asleep in it twice in one month.
" He looked around the shop, and something moved across his face that was almost tender.
"It smells the same. That's — that matters more than you'd think. "
"I'm glad," Marin said, and meant it.
He bought a paperback mystery he probably didn't need — she suspected, correctly, that he owned three copies already — and a coffee, and settled into the chair by the local history shelf like he'd never left it, and Marin thought, watching him, that this was exactly the kind of quiet, ordinary morning she had come back to Cormorant Cove to have.
? ? ?
She closed the shop at six, later than she'd planned, mostly because a small cluster of regulars had settled into the café chairs and shown no particular interest in leaving, and by the time she'd swept the last of the day's crumbs and locked the till, she was tired in the specific, satisfied way she hadn't been tired in almost a year.
Her phone buzzed as she was climbing the narrow stairs to the apartment above the shop, the one Aunt Jo had lived in for three decades and which still smelled, faintly and stubbornly, of her aunt's lavender soap no matter how many windows Marin opened.
How'd the big reopening go? Colin's text read, followed a moment later by a second: Thinking about you today.
She sat down on the top step, phone in hand, and felt the good, loose feeling of the day tighten by several degrees.
It wasn't that she didn't want to hear from him, exactly.
It was that she still hadn't decided what she wanted him to be to her — an ex-fiancé, an old friend, a mistake she'd made peace with, a door she'd left unlatched out of habit rather than intention.
It went well, she typed back, and then, because she'd never been able to help herself, thank you for thinking of me.
The reply came fast, the way his replies always came fast when he wanted something, which she'd learned, slowly and expensively, was not the same thing as wanting her. I've been thinking about a lot of things. Maybe I could come up sometime. See the place. See you.
She looked at the words for a long moment, thumb hovering, and thought about the version of herself who would have said yes immediately, gratefully, the way she'd said yes to almost everything Colin had ever proposed for the better part of six years, right up until the evening he'd sat her down at their kitchen table and explained, in the calm, reasonable voice he used for difficult conversations, that he wasn't ready, as though readiness were a train schedule he'd simply misjudged rather than a decision he'd made about her.
Let's not, for now, she typed finally. I'm still figuring out what this place needs from me. I don't think I have room for anything else right now.
It was, she realized, setting the phone face-down on the step beside her, the truest thing she'd said to him in over a year — not an accusation, not quite a closed door, just an honest accounting of where she actually was.
Below her, through the floorboards, she could hear Dewey knocking something off a shelf with the particular, unbothered confidence of a cat who considered the whole building his personal property, and somewhere beyond that, faint and steady, the sound of the harbor going about its evening business, indifferent to any of it.
She did not reply to Colin's next three texts that night, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she slept better for it.
She had no way of knowing, then, standing at her window a little later and looking down at the darkened, quiet stretch of Wharf Street, that it would be one of the last ordinary nights before everything in Cormorant Cove came apart at its careful seams — or that Walter Kessler, two doors down in his own small house, was at that very moment sitting up late over his ledger, circling a date in pencil, trying to decide who in this town he could still trust with what he'd found.