However, he had not anticipated that giving Clara Hawkins the ability to see herself from head to toe would add thirty minutes to every departure. In retrospect, this was a predictable outcome. He should've installed a half-length mirror. Waist up. Enough to check hair, not enough to reconsider shoes.
Too late now. The anchors were set. The mirror was level. The consequences were his to live with.
Jack scanned the lighthouse from where he stood — a habit now, the way some people checked their phone first thing in the morning. The gallery railing caught the afternoon light, all three sections complete, cable taut and gleaming with the cedar treatment that would hold for a generation. He'd finished it the morning he came back. First section, second section, third section — the project that had started in panic, stalled in retreat, and completed in return. Every time he looked at it, he felt something settle in his chest. Not pride exactly. More like evidence. Proof that he'd been here long enough to finish what he started.
The exterior trim was stripped and repainted — that had been a November project, him on a ladder in the cold while Clara handed up coffee and unsolicited opinions about color choices from below. The spareroom window opened and closed without a fight. The plaster cracks were patched. The dock had new cleats.
A year of work, visible from the driveway. A year of choices made physical.
His truck sat beside him in the gravel — same dented F-150 he'd bought in Camden, same crack in the dashboard, now sporting a Beacon's End resident parking sticker on the bumper and a toolbox bolted to the bed. It had survived its first Maine winter, which he considered a personal triumph and Clara considered a minor miracle. She wasn't wrong. There'd been a week in February where the engine turned over like it was preparing to die, and he'd spent two hours in the cold with his hands in the engine bay, talking to the starter motor the way you talk to a horse that doesn't want to cross a bridge.
A year ago, he'd owned a duffel bag. Now he owned a truck, a toolbox, a workshop lease, and a set of bath towels that Clara had picked out at a store in Portland because apparently new towels were the unofficial christening of official cohabitation.
The lighthouse door opened. Clara came out.
The dress was green — deep green, the kind that did something to her eyes that he didn't have the vocabulary for. Lena had picked it out, which meant it wasperfect in ways Jack could sense but not articulate because women were just better at that stuff than men.
Clara's hair was doing its usual thing — not quite tamed, not quite wild, existing in a state of beautiful negotiation with gravity. She had the book tucked under her arm.
Good god, the woman took his breath away.
The book.Tidal Lock, Volume One.Real paper. Real spine. Her art on the front and her face on the back. Her actual face — the pen name, the one that stayed, but the woman behind it finally visible.
She looked terrified. And beautiful. And like someone about to do something brave that she'd rather not do but was going to do anyway, which was basically Clara's entire operating mode and one of the things he loved most about her.
"Ready?" he asked, opening the passenger door.
"Define ready."
"Willing to leave the house."
"Barely."
He grinned. Couldn't help it — the real one, the full-face version he'd stopped trying to control around her months ago. "You're going to be great."
"I'm going to throw up."
"You can do both. I believe in you."
She shoved his shoulder and got in the truck.
***
The coastal road unwound beneath them like something he'd memorized by heart, which he had. A year of driving it in every season — the frost heaves in winter that rattled the truck's suspension, the tourist traffic in July that turned a twenty-minute drive into forty, the way the fog sat in the low spots on September mornings like the ocean was trying to reclaim the land.
He knew this road the way he knew wood grain. By feel. By instinct. By the particular vibration that told him the tight curve at mile two was coming up — the one where the shoulder dropped off toward the rocks and Clara always braced against the door handle, even though he'd never once come close to the edge.
He white-knuckled that curve too, actually. Just from the driver's side, where she couldn't see.
He was whistling. Off-key, because he'd never been able to carry a tune and had stopped being embarrassed about it somewhere around age twelve. Clara pretended to hate the whistling. He knew she didn't. He did it partly out of habit and partly because it filled silence the way work filled empty rooms — instinctively, without planning, because some part of him still got nervous when things were too quiet.
"Nervous?" he asked.
"No."
"Liar."
"Fine. Terrified. Nauseous. Questioning every decision I've ever made."
