Page 40 of Beachfront Pages

Rachel exhaled. "What is going on with you? And please don't say nothing. The Fiona I know would've signed this in an hour and made me buy her dinner to celebrate."

For one wild second she almost told her. All of it. The papers signed in February while she nodded along to a server reciting the specials. Drake's new someone, the present one, the one who was there. The half a townhouse she'd packed into boxes alone, the secret she'd carried out of Georgetown without telling a single living soul. It was all crowding up into her throat, and Rachel would have been kind about it, Rachel was always kind.

"I'm just tired," Fiona said. "The retreat's been good. Quiet. I needed quiet."

"You sound far away."

"I'm in Florida. I am far away."

Rachel laughed, but it was a worried laugh. "Okay. Funny. You're still funny. That's something." Then, softer, the question Fiona had braced for the whole call. "And the book? Tell me about the book. Tell me Hank's out of that alley."

Fiona closed her eyes.

Hank Carson was exactly where she'd left him in February. Crouched over a body in the rain, pen hovering, a brilliant detective frozen mid-thought because the woman who'd invented him had run dry. Six months of one stalled scene. Six months of opening the file and closing it again.

"It's coming," Fiona said.

"Coming like coming, or coming like the last three times you told me coming?"

"It's coming, Rachel."

"Because they'll want pages. The whole deal is built on completing another Maxwell, then announcing four more books in a new series, under your real name. That's the pitch, that's the number we just celebrated." A pause. "I'm not nagging. I'm protecting you. I just need to know you've got something to put in their hands when they ask."

"I've got plenty to put in their hands," Fiona said. And it wasn't even a lie. That was the strangest part.

"Good." Relief flooded Rachel's voice, because she trusted Fiona, because Fiona had never once given her a reason not to. "Send me a chapter when you can. Even a rough one. Something I can wave at them so they feel loved."

"I will."

"And say yes soon. Please. For me. This is the thing we worked for."

"I know it is," Fiona said. "I'll call you."

"Tomorrow?"

"Soon."

They hung up. Fiona stood at the window with the phone warm in her hand and listened to the quiet rush back in. Clint had vanished into the lighthouse. The porch light burned over at the keeper's quarters, patient, lit for no one in particular.

She turned around and looked at the desk.

Two things sat on it. On the left, her laptop, lid up, the cursor blinking in the same paragraph it had blinked in for six months. She didn't have to walk over to know how it read. Hank crouched beside the body, rain sheeting off the brim of his hat, and.

And nothing. And nothing for half a year.

On the right was the other thing. The stack.

She hadn't meant for it to become a stack. It had started as one page, the night she'd read about the lighthouse in Marty's out-of-print history and her hand had started moving on its own. Then it was a notebook. Then the notebook plus loose pages plus the back of a Harbor Brew receipt plus the legal pad Winnie had loaned her for a grocery list. Now it was a real stack, a good three inches of it, fanned across the right side of the desk like it had every right to be there.

Fiona sat down and pulled it toward her.

"All right," she said to the empty room. "Let's see what you've been doing instead."

The top page was the lighthouse. First lit 1885, the great-grandfather who'd helped build it and kept the first light. Below that, in her own cramped shorthand, the questions. Why does a linguist write about a lighthouse? Why 1954? Why does a keeper's family come to own the light at all? She'd underlined that last one twice.

"Because somebody wanted them to have it," she murmured, reading her own note. "Question is who. Question is why."

The next page was the Lockharts. A rough family tree, four generations deep, half of it guesswork, and pinned in the corner her own clumsy copy of the 1911 photograph, the child who'd moved during the long exposure circled and starred. She had a whole paragraph on that child. She had no business with a whole paragraph on that child.