Page 14 of Beachfront Pages

The message ended.

Fiona sat with her coffee and didn't move.

Something good. The kind of good we don't say no to. She knew what that meant. A new contract. The multi-book deal Rachel had been circling for weeks, the one with the number in it that would make a sane woman weep with gratitude. A career-defining yes, sitting in her inbox, her voicemail, and the back of her own throat, waiting.

And she couldn't reach it. That was the thing she couldn't explain to Rachel, who'd worked twenty years to put exactly this in front of her. She couldn't make herself reach out and take the good thing, because taking it meant promising books she didn't know how to write, in a voice she wasn't sure she still had, as a person who'd been telling everyone she was fine for months.

She'd have to sign her real name to it. Fiona Wells. And Fiona Wells was a woman whose husband had decided she wasn't enough, and a woman who hadn't told her own agent her marriage was over.

How did you say yes to your whole future when you couldn't say one true sentence about your present?

She picked up the phone. She held her thumb over Rachel's name. She thought about how it would go—Rachel, hi, sorry, I've been heads-down—and how easy the lie would be, how it would slide out smooth as the husband-is-traveling lie had slid out at the fire pit, and how she was getting frighteningly good at this.

She deleted the voicemail instead.

The little red number dropped to two. It didn't feel like relief. It felt like kicking a thing under the bed.

"I'll call her tomorrow," she said, out loud, to the empty kitchen. Then, because she was a writer and writers heard their own dialogue, she noticed how it sounded. The same thing she'd said yesterday. And the day before.

Not that anyone was counting.

She opened the laptop.

And Hank Carson was still in the alley.

Of course he was. Fiona had left him there, mid-crouch over the dead man with the rain coming down, and the alley hadn't moved an inch, because alleys in unwritten scenes didn't move. They just waited. They waited the way the cursor waited, blinking at the end of the last sentence she'd managed to write months ago. So many months she'd practically quit counting.

Hank knelt beside the body and saw the thing that changed everything.

That was the sentence. That was where it stopped. Because Fiona didn't know what the thing was. She'd written fifteen books on the faith that the thing always came, and that if she put the detective in front of the body the answer would rise up to meet her the way it always had. Hank would see the scuffed heel, the wrong watch, the matchbook from a bar across town, and Fiona would know, and the chapter would unspool from there.

She put her fingers on the keys.

She waited.

Nothing came. Not the scuffed heel, not the wrong watch. Just the rain she'd already described and a detective she'd stranded and a writer who couldn't remember why any of it had ever felt like magic. She typed a sentence. She read it back. It was flat. Dead on the page, deader than the man in the alley, who at least had the decency to be interesting. She deleted it.

She typed another. Deleted that one too.

This was the part nobody warned you about. Not the blank page. Everybody talked about the blank page like it was the enemy, but the blank page was honest, at least. The blank page didn't pretend. The real enemy was the page that filled up with words that meant nothing, that did the shape of writing without the soul of it, and a writer sat there producing them like a factory that had forgotten what it made.

She'd been good at this once. Hadn't she?

She had. She knew she had. There were fifteen books on shelves to prove it, and a man in a bookshop calling her detective functional, and a whole reading public who thought F. L. Maxwell was a man and had never once been disappointed by him.

So where had it gone? Had it left when Drake did? Had he taken it with him, the way he'd taken the good knives and the painting from the front hall, and some essential thing she hadn't thought to ask for in the settlement because she hadn't known it was hers to lose?

That was a maudlin thought. She closed the thought the way she'd closed the voicemail.

She closed the laptop too and wandered over to the reading chair. The lighthouse book was still open to where she'd left it the night before, facedown and splayed in a way that would have made Marty Fuller wince. She'd fallen asleep in the armchair reading it and woken at two with a crick in her neck and her hand still marking the page.

She picked it up now and meant only to find her place and set it aside. She had work to do. She had a detective in an alley, an agent on the phone, and a deadline rolling in like a hurricane.

But the page she'd fallen asleep on had a photograph.

Black and white, grainy, the caption set in that small serious type old local presses used. The Lockhart family on the gallery deck, circa 1911. A cluster of people in high collars and long skirts, squinting into a sun that had set a hundred years ago. A bearded man with his hand on the rail like he owned the whole Gulf. A woman beside him, unsmiling, holding a child who'd moved during the long exposure and come out as a blur of white. And behind them the tower itself, younger, its paint not yet weathered, rising up out of a coast that had been nothing then but scrub and water and one stubborn family who'd decided to put a light on it.

Fiona looked at the blurred child for a long time.