"I know you didn't. That's my point." Lena reached over and squeezed Clara's hand. "I'm not saying Jack is Sam. I've met him. He's kind and he's genuine and he looks at you like you invented color. But a person leaving because they're scared hurts just as much as a person leaving because they're cruel. The suitcase still ends up by the door either way."
Clara's breath caught. She hadn't mentioned the duffel bag.
"What?" Lena said, reading her face.
"Nothing. It's — nothing."
Lena held her gaze for a beat too long, the way she always did when she knew Clara was editing, but let it go. "What about the agent thing? Where does that stand?"
"Nora needs an answer by Friday."
"And?"
"And I've been staring at her email like it's written in a language I don't speak."
"It's written in English, Clara. Specifically, it's written in 'someone thinks your art is brilliant and wants to give you money for it' English. Which is a pretty good dialect."
"It's not that simple."
"It's exactly that simple. You're just making it complicated because you're you." Lena picked up her palette knife again, pointing it at Clara for emphasis. "You've got two things happening at once, and they're the same thing wearing different outfits. Jack is asking you to be vulnerable. Nora is asking you to be visible. And you're sitting here on my floor trying to figure out how to say no to both of them without losing either of them."
Clara opened her mouth. Closed it.
"I hate when you do that," she said.
"Do what?"
"See me."
Lena smiled — crooked, fond, a little sad. "Somebody has to."
Clara stopped at Maeve's on the way back to the dock.
She hadn't planned to — had planned to go straight to the boat, straight back to the lighthouse, straight backto the productive denial she'd been cultivating all week. But the pub was there, and the door was open, and Maeve was behind the bar as usual and that familiar routine was comforting. “Clara.” Maeve looked up. Set down the glass. "Sit."
It wasn't an invitation. It was an instruction. Clara sat.
Maeve poured her coffee without asking and slid it across the bar. Then she leaned on her elbows and studied Clara with those sharp eyes that had been cataloguing the emotional weather of Beacon's End for forty years.
"You look tired," Maeve said.
"I'm fine."
"I didn't say you weren't fine. I said you look tired. Those are two different things, and you know the difference."
Clara wrapped her hands around the mug. The pub was empty — mid-afternoon lull, Evan nowhere in sight, just the two of them and the faint smell of yesterday's chowder and lemon polish.
"Jack came by yesterday," Maeve said. "Fixed the wobbly leg on Table Six. Didn't stay for coffee."
"He's been doing that. Projects.Staying busy."
"I noticed." Maeve was quiet for a moment. The cloth moved in slow circles over the glass. "I told him something. About you. I wasn't sure if I should, but I'm old enough not to second-guess myself, so I did."
Clara's stomach tightened. "What did you tell him?"
"The truth." Maeve set down the glass. Met Clara's gaze. "I told him about the first month after Sam. Not the version you tell — the one where you were sad but managing, where you leaned on your art and got through it. The real version."
Clara’s hands tightened around the mug as her chest constricted with the painful memory.
