Page 43 of Beachfront Pages

Fiona didn't say anything. She gave him time to continue at his own pace.

"She was sick six months," he said. "That's all. You think you'll get years to get used to a thing like that, and you get six months. The university was good about it, far as those things go. Told me to take whatever time I needed." A short breath through his nose. "So I took it. Then she was gone. And the time was still there, all this awful time, with nothing left to fill it."

The rain pushed harder against the glass. Somewhere in the back a pipe ticked.

"I went back for one semester. Stood up in front of a room of nineteen-year-olds and talked about Faulkner. About loss, can you believe it?" He shook his head. "I'd written essays on it. Real ones, the kind that get you tenure. And I was standing there reciting them like a man reading the dorm rules. Words I'd believed my whole life and not one of them meant a thing anymore."

"So you left."

"So I drove." He almost smiled. "I want to tell you I had a plan. I didn't. I had a car with a full tank and a house I couldn't stand to be inside of. So I drove south. Figured I'd stop when the road did." He spread his ink-stained hands. "Road ran out at the Gulf. There was a for-sale sign in a window of this shop. A back room nobody'd cleaned out in a decade, full of some dead man's rare books." He shrugged. "I bought it that week. First thing I ever did in my life without thinking it half to death first."

"That doesn't sound like you."

"It wasn't me. That was the appeal."

"And here you are."

"Here I am. Sixteen years of selling books to people who'd rather buy them online." He picked up the coffee finally and drank. "That's the part I leave out. The not-thinking. People hear it and they worry about you."

"I'm not worried about you," Fiona said.

"No." He looked at her, those warm hazel eyes steady over the rim of the cup. "You're not. That's why I told you."

The quiet settled around them. Not an awkward one. The rain filled it.

The story he'd told her sat between them. He hadn't dressed it up. He hadn't asked her to fix it or admire him for surviving it. He'd just told her the worst thing that ever happened to him. Like it was safe to tell her.

The thought came to her, with a clarity that frightened her, that she couldn't give him a lie back. Not after that. The husband-is-traveling lie was right there, loaded and easy, the way it was always easy. It had slid out of her a dozen times.

She opened her mouth and it started anyway, automatic. "My husband⁠—"

"You have a husband?" His eyes widened and his forehead creased in confusion.

She looked directly at him. "He's not traveling," she said. "That's what I told everyone. That he's traveling. He's not. He left." She made herself say the rest of it. "My husband left me. The marriage is over."

There. Out loud. Where another person could hear it.

She'd signed the papers in February. She'd packed the boxes in February. She'd carried the whole thing out of Georgetown and told not one living soul. Now she'd told a snobbish, but infinitely kind, bookseller in a rainstorm. And the floor did not open up. The shop went on being a shop. The rain went on falling.

What she hadn't expected was the relief. It came up through her suddenly, like the downpour outside the window.

"I'm sorry," Marty said.

That was all. He didn't say it'll get easier or any of the things a person usually said. He didn't try to set it right. He of all people knew it couldn't be set right. He said I'm sorry, he meant it.

And that, of all the stupid things, was what undid her.

Her eyes stung. She blinked, furious. She did not cry. She hadn't cried through the lawyer or the boxes or the empty half of the closet. She was certainly not going to start now over two words from a man who sold maritime histories nobody bought.

"Don't," she said, to herself more than him. "I'm fine."

"You don't have to be fine. There's nobody here but me."

Which was exactly the wrong thing to say, because it took the last of it out of her. One tear got loose and went down her cheek and she swiped at it like it had insulted her.

"This is mortifying," she said.

"It really isn't."