Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
The sectional was more comfortable than Jen had expected, which was good, since she'd been sleeping on it for over a week now. Tom's surprise arrival had bumped her from Meredith's room, and nobody had figured out a better arrangement since.
She lay there in the dim room, staring at the ceiling, listening to the house. Nothing stirred. Even the ocean seemed quieter at this hour, the waves a distant murmur rather than their usual insistence. The sliding doors reflected the interior back at her, the beach beyond them still invisible.
She'd finished it.
She kept waiting for that to feel different.
Last night, sometime after eleven, she'd typed the last sentence of the Clementine Fields draft.
Not a triumphant final line, not some perfectly crafted resolution that wrapped everything up in a bow.
Just Clementine standing in the doorway of her bookshop, watching the rain fall on Brambleton's cobblestones, knowing that some mysteries stayed solved and some didn't, and that was the nature of things.
Jen had sat there in the dark afterward, laptop still open, the cursor blinking at the end of the document. She'd waited for relief. For celebration. For something to mark the moment.
What she'd felt instead was emptiness. The kind that came when something you'd been gripping finally slipped away. Not lost, just finished. And your hands were free.
She sat up slowly. The floor was cool under her feet. She found her phone wedged between the cushions and checked the time: 5:47. Early. But her brain was already running, and she knew sleep wasn't coming back.
She pulled on a cardigan over her tank top and padded to the kitchen, moving quietly so she wouldn't wake anyone. Slid a pod into the Keurig and waited while it hissed and sputtered through its cycle. She leaned against the counter, watching the coffee fill her mug.
Three hundred and twelve pages. Six murders, one nosy protagonist, and a resolution that her editor would probably love. She'd send it today. Or tomorrow. Whenever she worked up the nerve to let it go.
The fantasy romance was still there too, sitting in a separate folder on her desktop, growing every time she looked away from the mystery.
Over sixty pages now. She'd given her heroine a ruined kingdom to rebuild and a grief she couldn't outrun, and at some point the story had stopped feeling like an escape and started feeling like a confession.
It wasn't what she was supposed to be writing. It also wouldn't leave her alone.
When the Keurig finished, she took her mug out to the deck off the living room, settling into one of the chairs facing the ocean.
The sun was already up, low and bright over the water. The beach was empty except for a man with a metal detector working his way along the tide line, headphones on, lost in whatever signals the sand was sending him.
Jen wrapped both hands around her mug and watched the light shift and settle.
The sliding door opened behind her.
"You're up early." Meredith appeared with her own mug, hair still mussed from sleep, wearing the oversized Penn State shirt she'd stolen from Tom years ago.
"Couldn't sleep."
Meredith sank into the chair beside her. Neither of them said anything. The man with the detector had moved farther down the beach, a small figure against the morning light.
"You finished the book," Meredith said. Not a question.
"How did you know?"
"You're up before six, you're not writing, and you haven't checked your phone once." She held her mug closer. "Last night?"
"Around eleven."
"Why didn't you say something?"
"Everyone was already in bed. And—" Jen took a sip of coffee. "It didn't feel like a celebration moment. It felt like a holding-my-breath moment."
"What are you holding your breath for?"
"That's just it—I don't know." She laughed, but it came out strange. "I was so focused on finishing, I never thought about what happens after. Now it's done, and I have no idea what comes next."
Meredith paused. "Isn't that what comes next? The not-knowing?"
"You're very philosophical for six in the morning."
"I'm working on it." Meredith lifted her mug.
They sat together as the light strengthened. A jogger appeared, running along the hard sand near the water.
"I've been writing something else," Jen said. "On the side. Not Clementine."
Meredith turned to look at her.
"Fantasy romance. Completely off-brand. My editor would have a stroke." Jen stared into her mug. "But I can't stop. The heroine's angry in a way Clementine never gets to be, and I think that's why I keep going back to it."
"Is it good?"
"I'm not sure. It feels different. Like the words are coming from somewhere I haven't accessed in a while.
" She watched the jogger disappear past the jetty.
"There's this guy I met at the coffee shop.
Clint. He's a musician, plays guitar. We've been talking about the creative stuff, the blocks, the doubt, all of it.
He thinks I should keep going with the fantasy. "
"A guy at a coffee shop." Meredith's eyebrows rose. "And you're just mentioning this now?"
"It's not like that. He's just—he gets it. The thing where you're supposed to be making one thing but you can't stop making something else." She set her mug on the arm of the chair. "He invited me to his show. Thursday night at the Hard Rock."
"Are you going to go?" Meredith asked.
"Maybe." Jen shrugged.
Meredith smiled, but it was knowing rather than teasing. "You know you're going."
"I really don't."
She looked out at the water instead of at Meredith. The man with the detector was heading back the other way now, sweeping in slow arcs.
"It's been a long time since I let myself want something without knowing how it would turn out," Jen said finally. "The book, the fantasy, all of it. I've spent so long writing the safe thing, saying the safe thing, staying in my lane."
"And now?" Meredith watched her.
"Now the book is done. And I'm still here. And maybe it's time to stop waiting for certainty before I do anything."
The morning unfolded in the usual chaos.
By nine, the house was awake and loud. Coffee mugs accumulated in the sink.
Someone was hunting for sunscreen. Someone else was arguing about whose turn it was to make the Wawa run.
The teenagers had emerged in stages, Max first with his hair standing up in three directions, then Lily still half-asleep and looking for her phone.
"Has anyone seen my phone?" Lily asked, for the third time.
"You're holding it," Max said.
Lily looked at her hand. She was, in fact, holding her phone. "I hate you."
"Love you too."
Sophie and Brittany came down together, already dressed, talking about the beach club and free smoothies. Ethan wandered through, looking more relaxed than he had in days, and actually said good morning to Lori before grabbing a banana and heading for the deck.
"Mark the calendar," Carrie murmured.
"Don't jinx it," Lori said, but she was smiling.
Jen had showered and changed by then, restless in a way that coffee hadn't fixed. She needed to move. Needed to be somewhere that wasn't the house, a place to think without the comfortable noise of eleven people living on top of each other.
"I'm going for a walk," she announced to whoever was listening. "Might be a while."
Carrie looked up from the fruit she was cutting. "You okay?"
"Better than okay. Just need some air."
She headed out before the questions started.
The promenade was already busy with the morning crowd: families hauling wagons toward the beach, couples on bikes, a group of older women power-walking in matching visors.
Jen walked against the flow, heading south toward Landis, past the ice cream shops that hadn't opened yet and the surf rental places setting out their boards.
She didn't have a destination. That was the point.
The streets off the promenade were quieter, residential blocks mixed with the occasional shop. She passed a yoga studio with a class in progress, bodies visible through the window, moving in unison, then a florist arranging buckets outside. Birds of paradise, sunflowers, purple hydrangeas.
Wax & Water sat on Pleasure Avenue near 40th, tucked between a surf shop and a place that sold nothing but wind chimes. She'd walked past it at least a dozen times since they'd arrived but had never gone in. The kind of place you noticed without entering, if you noticed record stores at all.
Today, she pushed open the door.
Inside, it smelled like dust and vinyl and something faintly sweet.
Aged wood, maybe, or incense from a decade ago that had never quite faded.
The shop was smaller than it looked from outside, narrow and deep.
Bins of records ran along both walls, and stacks of CDs and cassettes took up the back corner.
Concert posters covered every available surface, layered on top of each other, dates from the '80s and '90s and some so faded you couldn't read them anymore.
Behind the counter, an older man with bleached-blond hair and thick black-framed glasses sorted through a box of vinyl without looking up.
Old tattoos on his forearms, a Ramones shirt that had seen better decades.
Jen moved to the nearest bin and started browsing.
She hadn't bought a record in years. But the ritual appealed. The tactile satisfaction of flipping through album covers, seeing artwork that had been designed to be held in your hands rather than scrolled past on a screen.
The bins were organized by some personal logic she couldn't decode. She moved through rock, then jazz, then what seemed to be entirely live albums from bands she'd never heard of.
She was near the back, pulling out a Beastie Boys album she hadn't listened to since college, when she heard footsteps on stairs. A door half-hidden behind some crates swung open, and Clint emerged from what looked like a basement, a stack of records tucked under his arm.
He stopped when he saw her.