Page 66 of Beachfront Pages

"I've wondered."

"Because I was afraid F. L. Maxwell was the only part of me worth keeping." There. She'd said it out loud, to him, and the sky hadn't fallen. "Drake decided I wasn't enough. Too far inside my own head. And I more than half believed him. So the books were all I had left to point to. If you dismissed my books, the way you dismissed all nonliterary books, there'd be nothing left of me. Drake would be right. I'd be… nothing."

"Fiona—"

"Let me get it out." She pressed on. "Years ago a literary journal reviewed one of the Carson books. I still don't know why they bothered. The reviewer called it competent but disposable. Two words I'd take back if I could pick only two. Competent but disposable. I carried that around for a decade."

She watched it reach him. Something moved behind his eyes.

"The first day I walked into this shop," she said, "you looked at what I write like it was tracked in on the bottom of a shoe. And it went straight to the same place that review went. Same spot. It stung." She lifted one shoulder. "So that's the apology. I lied to you because I'd already decided you'd confirm the worst thing I believe about myself. I never gave you the chance to be better than that. That part's on me."

The harbor breeze moved between them. Somewhere down the block a screen door banged.

Marty looked at her for a long time. Long enough that she started to think he wouldn't answer at all. He'd say something polite, shut the door, and she'd have her answer in the click of the bolt.

Then he stepped back and opened the door the rest of the way.

"Come in," he said. "I'm not going to do this on the sidewalk where Sally can watch from the register."

The shop smelled the way it always did. He didn't turn on the lamps. He just stood among his shelves, ink-stained hands shoved in his pockets. For a moment he looked less like a man who'd been hiding from her than a man working up the nerve to say something to her.

"I have a confession of my own," he said.

"And it is?"

"I've read five of them. The Maxwells." He said it the way another man might admit to a debt. "Five of your books. Since you've been here."

Fiona went very still.

"I told myself it was reconnaissance," he said. "Know your opponent. You'd been needling me about Hank Carson for weeks, so when Hal gave me the first book, I read it. To prove my point. Find the lazy plotting and the cardboard people I was so sure were in there." He pulled the glasses out of his hair, looked at them like he didn't know how they'd gotten in his hand, and set them on the counter. "I finished it in two nights. Then I drove to the next town over so nobody here would see me buy the second one."

"Marty."

"I couldn't stop." He almost laughed, and there was no comfort in it. "Three in two weeks. The fourth I read twice. They're good, Fiona. They're genuinely good. The detective is lonely in a way I recognized. You never once say so. You just let him sit in a parked car for nine pages until the reader feels it in their own chest. I kept waiting for you to be a hack. You never had the decency to be a hack."

She didn't know what to do with her hands. She'd written a hundred scenes where a man told a woman something she'd waited her whole life to hear. She'd never once written the part after. The woman just standing there, undone, with no clever line ready.

"That should have made you happy," she said. "I don't understand why you look like it ruined your week."

"Because of what it meant." He turned away, ran a hand along the spines of a shelf, the way she'd seen him do when he was thinking. "For thirty years I've sorted books into the ones that matter and the ones that don't. That's not a small thing for me. That's how I've sorted the whole world. Serious and unserious. Worthy and not. I built a life out of standing on the right side of that line."

"And my little mysteries put a crack in the line."

"Your mysteries—which are not little, by the way—put a fist through it." He faced her again. "If I was wrong about that, then I had to ask what else I'd built to keep from feeling anything. After Annette died, I told myself I was choosing the serious life. The real one. I sold the house, I bought a failing shop, I stocked the books I respect and let the shop lose money, and I called all of it integrity." His mouth twisted. "Standing here reading your fifth book in the dark with the shop closed, I wondered if it was ever integrity at all. Or if it was just a version of what you were doing. Hiding. Dressing it up so well that even I couldn't see it."

She stood there for a moment, letting his words sink in. "We're both hiding," Fiona said quietly.

"We were. And now we've both been caught. Exposed." He shook his head slowly. "A publicity department caught you. I caught myself. I'm not sure which is sadder."

"Yours. Definitely yours." She let the corner of her mouth lift. "At least mine came with a record advance."

And he laughed. A real one, surprised out of him, the laugh lines crinkling around his eyes. It cracked something open in the room, and the guarded look finally went out of his eyes.

"You're impossible," he said.

"You read five of my books in a town this size and drove to another county to do it. We're both impossible." She softened. "I'm glad you read them. I'm glad somebody whose whole life is books thinks they're good. You don't know what that means, coming from you."

"I think I do, actually." He looked at her steadily. "That's rather the point of everything I just said."