Page 33 of Beachfront Pages

The lighthouse. Fiona's research-brain picked up on that out of habit, the same way it had every time the subject of the lighthouse came up now. She handed the phone back before the feeling could turn into a question. Not tonight. Tonight she was a woman at a dinner.

"How's the book coming?" she asked instead.

"Slow. Sam writes about three drafts of every paragraph." Melissa shook her head, fond. "He says the structure tells you the story if you let it. I just take the pictures."

"You don't just take the pictures," Clint said from beside her. First thing he'd said all night. He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to.

Melissa bumped her shoulder against his.

"Save room," Cassidy announced to the table. "I made lemon bars. Nobody leaves without a lemon bar. I'm not asking."

"She's not asking," Bryan confirmed from the counter.

"It's a wonderful tyranny," Winnie said, the first thing she'd offered in a while. "I've learned to just eat the lemon bar."

Cassidy pointed a fork at her. "Winnie gets it."

The evening went on like that. The talk moved, circled, doubled back, with nobody working at it. That was the part she couldn't get over. Nobody was performing. Nobody was managing the silence so it wouldn't get awkward. They just talked.

"You set your nets too shallow," Grant said.

Bryan had finally sat down for about a minute. "I've been fishing this water since before you came back to town."

"And you set them too shallow."

"Says the man who paints."

"Sculpts."

"Same thing." Bryan grinned. "Both of you stand around looking at stuff till it's pretty."

"That is not even close to what I do."

"You stood in front of a piece of driftwood for an hour last week. Sally told me. A whole hour."

"It was a good piece of driftwood."

"It was a stick, Grant."

"It was a stick with potential."

Cassidy laughed. Emily laughed harder, and then the two of them got going about a collector who'd tried to haggle Grant down at the gallery and gotten a very polite lecture instead. Fiona didn't catch all of it. She caught the laughing. The way Cassidy put her hand on Emily's arm. The way they finished each other's sentences after only a couple of months of knowing each other.

Winnie caught Fiona's eye down the length of the table. She didn't say anything, only gave a small nod that said she was glad Fiona had come, then went back to her grouper. Fiona managed a smile back.

But something had started to climb up inside her, and she knew exactly what it was, because she'd named emotions for a living for thirty years. Envy. Plain and unflattering.

She wanted this. She wanted to be the person who knew how many paintings someone had finished. She wanted to put her hand on a friend's arm without thinking about it first. She wanted to argue about fishing nets with a man who'd still be there in the morning.

"You're wrong about the tide too," Grant was saying, somewhere far off.

"I am never wrong about the tide," Bryan said.

The words went past her like water. She'd had twenty-six years to build exactly this. She'd built fifteen novels instead.

You live more in those books than you've ever lived with me.

Drake's voice, clear as if he sat across the table.