"Because good stories usually are." He tilted his head, studying her with those warm hazel eyes. "The lighthouse keeper character. She keeps people at a distance. Talks to seagulls instead of humans. Acts like she chose isolation when really she's just scared. C'mon, now that I've met the infamous C.H. Winters, it seems a little on-the-nose."
Clara's stomach dropped. Being read that accurately by someone she'd known a week felt like having her diary cracked open on the kitchen table.
"You've known me for a week. I'd hardly say that you're an expert on me."
"Definitely not an expert but I'd have to be blind not to notice the parallels."
And that's why I chose to write under a pseudonym, Clara wanted to grumble.
"The lighthouse keeper isn't me," she lied through her teeth.
"Okay."
"She's just a character."
"If you say so."
"I'm not—" Clara stopped. Set down her pen before she stabbed through the paper. "Why does it matter?"
"It doesn't. I'm just curious." Jack pushed off the counter, hands in his pockets. "I build things with wood. You build things with stories. I just wondered how much of yourself you put into them."
"Well, keep wondering," she retorted, unwilling to budge on that score.
Jack's mouth twitched. "You know, Hawkins, you're something else. Hand-holding in a thunderstorm one night, back to 'none of your business' by morning."
"It's called range," Clara said, smothering the grin that had no business finding her lips. "Now, leave me alone. I have a deadline and you're blocking my Muse."
Jack raised his hands in apology, though that crooked grin as he backed away did terrible things to her ability to remember why she didn't want him in her space, and then he was gone.
Damn him for being so observant. Of course she was the lighthousekeeper.
The comic had been her form of therapy, the way to work out the feelings she didn't have the ability to share. Somehow an illustration had felt less painful than saying out loud how badly Sam had hurt her.
How Sam had decimated her sense of self in ways that she couldn't have imagined were possible.
Clara swallowed the sudden lump in her throat.
She tossed her pen into the mug she kept on the desk, unable to think after that. Couldn't focus. It wasn't Jack's fault that he'd washed up on her shore, wasn't his fault that he'd ended up stuck in her spare bedroom.
Definitely wasn't his fault that she was emotionally constipated after her last relationship.
She paced the circular room, her footsteps echoing off stone walls. This was ridiculous. She barely knew him. Shouldn't care two shits about his business, his issues, or what he seemed to pick up about her from sharing space together.
And yet…
She cared that he'd lost his brother. Cared that he carried guilt that wasn't his to carry. Cared that he moved through the world like he didn't deserve to stay anywhere long enough to matter.
She cared, and caring felt like opening a door that led directly to the sea.
six
The knock came at seven in the morning, and Jack's first thought was that someone had died.
Nobody knocked like that—rapid-fire pounding that suggested urgency or emergency—unless something was seriously wrong. He was pulling on jeans before his brain fully caught up to his body, grabbing a shirt from the chair as he headed for the door.
Clara beat him there, looking annoyed in a way that suggested she knew exactly who was on the other side and wasn't happy about it.
She yanked open the door to reveal Maeve O'Connell flanked by three other people Jack vaguely recognized from town. The pub owner beamed with the kind of enthusiasm that immediately made Jack suspicious.
