Page 48 of Beachfront Pages

"Now a stranger says one name at my own fire, and the whole thing comes loose." Winnie shook her head. "I'm too old to be unsettled this easy, Sally. I keep waiting to feel settled, and it keeps not coming."

Sally was quiet a moment. Then she pushed off the shelving, came down the aisle, and started restacking the soup cans Winnie had already stacked. That was her way of keeping her hands busy while she said something difficult.

"Then maybe it's time you found out," she said.

"Sally."

"I mean it. You've got the man himself at your own table, eating your soup. He's been chasing the same ghost his whole life. You told me that yourself." She set a can down with a small definite click. "Between the two of you, you've got both halves of it. Maybe it's time to stop guarding that room and open the door."

"I'm not sure I'm ready for that."

"Ready." Sally said the word like it tasted off. "Listen to yourself. Ready."

"It's no small thing, opening that door. There's no closing it after." Winnie paused. "Anyway, I've kept it this long. Where's the harm in keeping it a while more? Until I've thought it through. Until I'm sure."

"Sure of what?"

"I don't know. Sure I can stand whatever's behind it."

Sally turned and looked at her. Full on, the way she rarely did. A lifetime of years lived inside that look. The two of them at seven, hiding behind the feed store. Later, burying parents. And now this. Two old women among the soup cans, with the morning getting on.

"Honey," Sally said. "You're seventy. When exactly were you planning to be ready?"

Winnie almost smiled. "That's… accurate."

"It's the truth." Sally crossed to her, took the cup out of Winnie's hands, and set it on the shelf. Then she held both of Winnie's hands in both of hers, gnarled fingers and all, and made nothing of the holding. "You've spent your whole life keeping that light for everybody else. Keeping promises. Keeping secrets. Keeping that poor man at arm's length because somebody told you to before I was even old enough to talk sense into you."

"Sally."

"I watched you do it. I stood right here and watched you choose the lighthouse over your own heart. I never said a word, because it wasn't mine to say." Her grip tightened, just for a second. "I'm saying it now. You don't have forty-five more years to get ready in. Neither does he."

Winnie looked down at their hands. At the bracelet on her wrist. The sea glass had gone soft and cloudy with the years, the silver wire wound around each piece by Sam's own two hands the summer she was twenty-four. Promises kept. She'd told that lie to so many people for so long that she'd half come to believe it.

Maybe it had never been a promise kept at all. Maybe it had only ever been a door she was too afraid to open.

"You're a hard woman," she said.

"I'm a good friend. You confuse the two." Sally let go and stepped back, and her face cracked into the grin Winnie had loved since they were girls. "Now. Are you going to help me finish these crackers, or stand there spilling your feelings all over my clean floor?"

"The floor isn't clean."

"It was, before you brought your mood in here." Sally nudged a box toward her with one foot. "Go on. Crackers won't shelve themselves, and goodness knows you need something to do with those hands besides worry that bracelet."

Winnie laughed for real this time. It loosened something high inside her that had been wound tight since Fiona said the name Copeland at the fire. She bent for the next box of saltines and fitted it into the row, labels out. Beside her Sally hummed something tuneless.

A man called good morning from the doorway, wanting bait and the marine forecast. Sally went to see to him. Winnie stayed a moment with her hand resting on the cool tin of a soup can, looking out the front glass to where a gull crossed the road toward the water. She watched it until it was gone from the frame of the window. Then she reached for another box and went back to work.

Chapter 16

Fiona opened the door to Tides & Tales, and her heart did a small, ridiculous flutter.

She stopped on the mat and frowned at herself. A flutter. Like a teenager. She was too old for that. She'd walked into this shop a dozen times now, and somewhere along the way her body had started doing things without asking permission.

It was just the books. She liked the smell of the place, old paper and dust and the faint salt that got into everything in this town. That was all.

It was not just the books.

Marty looked up from the counter, reading glasses shoved up into his hair where he'd forget about them soon enough. "There she is," he said. "I was starting to think you'd defected to the chain store up the highway."