Page 61 of Beachfront Pages

Hal's paperback still sat on the nightstand where he'd left it. Marty picked it up. He looked at the name on the cover the way he'd looked at the photograph, like it might tell him something new if he stared long enough. F. L. Maxwell. Black letters on a worn blue spine. He'd carried that name around in his mind for weeks. Complaining about it. Defending against it. And the whole time it had been sitting in his back room, cross-referencing his journals.

He set the book on the dresser and didn't pick it up again. He didn't come back downstairs all afternoon.

He heard the knock the next morning. He knew her knock. Of course he did. Two quick raps and a pause, then one more. The one she used when the shop was closed and she'd come early to see him.

"Marty?" Her voice came muffled through the door and the front glass. "I saw the sign. Are you all right?"

He sat in the chair and he didn't move.

"Marty. I know you're up there."

He looked at the door without getting up.

"Please." A pause. "I think you saw it. I think that's why you're not answering." A longer pause. "I should have told you myself. I know that. I wanted to."

He almost got up. His hand was already on the arm of the chair.

But he thought of the back room and the book she was writing about a small Gulf town. A lighthouse. Using the town.

He stayed in the chair.

After a while the knocking stopped. He heard her go down the steps, heard her footsteps fade, then nothing but the gulls and the water and the ordinary morning going on without him in it.

Chapter 21

The sign at Tides & Tales still read CLOSED. Fiona stood on the sidewalk outside the bookshop with two coffees going cold in her hands and felt like a fool for bringing them. Three days now. The shade was down over the front glass. The lights were off. A man who'd never once shut early in all the years he'd owned the place had locked the door on the whole town. To keep one person out. They both knew which person.

She set the coffees on the step. She'd done that yesterday too. Yesterday they'd still been there when she walked by later, gone tepid in the sun. The sight of them had been worse than the locked door.

"Marty." She didn't knock this time. She just said it, quietly, to the glass. "I'm not going to keep doing this."

Nothing. Of course nothing.

She'd earned the nothing. Because here was the thing she kept circling back to. She hadn't told one lie. She'd told a stack of them, each one propping up the last. The husband who traveled. The magazine pieces. F. L. Maxwell, a man, twenty years of letting the world believe it. And then she'd walked into this shop. She'd let this particular man pull his rare collection off the shelf for her like he was showing her something precious. She'd taken notes.

He had every right to hate her. If this were a book, she would have written a character who hated her.

She picked the coffees back up. No sense leaving them to go cold a third day. Some lessons even she could learn.

Emily and Cassidy were coming up the block from the gallery, heads together, and Fiona saw the exact moment they saw her.

Her whole body wanted to cross the street. To smile, to wave, to perform her way past it. Fine, just fine, lovely day. The reflex was right there, smooth as ever.

She didn't reach for it. She stood on the sidewalk and let them come.

"Fiona." Emily said it carefully, the way a person says it to someone standing too close to a ledge. "We wondered if you were okay."

"You heard."

"The whole town heard." Cassidy had never been one to soften something, and she didn't now. "It was in People, Fiona. Bryan's mother asked if it was true that F. L. Maxwell was the lady at Sea Glass Cottage."

"It's true."

"We figured." Emily shifted the strap of her bag on her shoulder. "Nobody's mad. I want you to know that. It's just strange, finding out the person you've been having sunset wine with is, you know. Famous."

"And a man," Cassidy added. "For twenty years. I read four of those books thinking you were some grumpy guy in a cabin somewhere."

A laugh came out before Fiona could stop it. It surprised all three of them.