That night, Coral Bell throws an impromptu bonfire on the beach. Music, laughter, too many marshmallows. Crew’s brothers show up with beer and bad jokes. Ivy sings, barefoot in the sand, her voice carrying across the waves. The song isn’t about us exactly, but the chorus feels like it is:you can’t cage a tide, but you can build a shore worth coming home to.
Crew pulls me into the circle of light. “Dance with me.”
“There’s no music.”
“There’s always music,” he says, and hums against my temple until I find the rhythm, too.
We sway, the fire painting us in gold. People cheer when he dips me dramatically, then groan when he kisses me because apparently, small towns like their romance PG. He kisses me anyway.
When the fire burns down to embers, we stay long after everyone drifts away. The lighthouse blinks steady in the distance. He pulls me into his lap, wraps his arms around me, and the world goes very, very quiet.
“What happens now?” I whisper.
He thinks for a long time. “We build something that doesn’t need fixing.”
“Like what?”
“Like this,” he says, and tilts my chin until I’m looking at him. “Like us. Like mornings that don’t start with a fight we didn’t pick.”
I laugh softly. “That sounds suspiciously domestic.”
“Terrifying, isn’t it?”
“Completely.”
He kisses me again, slow and deep, and for once, there’s no noise in my head, no countdown to disaster. Just salt, wind, his hands steady on my skin, and the faint hum of a town that finally gets to rest.
Weeks pass in the kind of blur that feels like living instead of surviving. The repairs are finished. The grant funds arrive. The lighthouse reopens officially on a Friday that smells like salt and lemon cake.
Kids line up to climb the stairs, parents take photos, and the town declares it an official holiday. Crew gives a short speech, charming and irreverent, the kind that makes everyone laugh and then cry a little. When it’s my turn, I manage exactly five words before emotion takes my voice.
“Thank you for coming home.”
Crew squeezes my hand and whispers, “You nailed it.”
Later, when the crowd thins, we climb to the lantern room alone. The sun’s setting, the beam ready to start its work again. He wraps his arms around me from behind.
“Looks different from up here,” he murmurs.
“How so?”
“Less like something we saved. More like something saving us.”
I rest my hands over his. “You know what’s funny?”
“What?”
“I used to think light was just… light. Now I think it’s a promise.”
He presses a kiss to the back of my neck. “Then let’s keep it.”
We stand there until the first sweep of the beam cuts through the dusk, steady and sure, reaching for anyone still out there looking for a way back.
Epilogue – Bailey
The first cool snap of fall tastes like apple pie and sea salt, and Coral Bell Cove dresses for it—jack-o’-lanterns on every stoop, mums the color of sunsets, scarves that exist mostly for attitude. The lighthouse gleams like it knows it’s pretty. New flashing, fresh paint, that quiet creak a building makes when it’s satisfied.
I turn the OPEN sign at A Page in Time and step onto the porch with two mugs. Crew’s at the rail fixing a stubborn shutter hook with the reverence of a man who worships at the altar ofthings-that-click.He wears a faded Stallions hoodie because irony is a love language, and a ball cap that’s survived more weather than the rest of us.
