Page 17 of Beachfront Pages

"That's what I said."

"He's buying a doorway. One owner says yes to a number that good, and the next one starts to wonder why they're holding out. And the next. That's how it goes." She'd watched it go that way in other towns, towns that used to have a working waterfront and now had a row of identical shops selling the same seashell soap, the whole strip punctuated by high-rise resorts. "He gets a handhold. Then he pulls."

"You always say that. The handhold."

"Because it's always true." Winnie turned her cup slowly on the table. "He'll come for the lighthouse too. He thinks I'm the hardest knot, so he'll save me for when the rest of the rope's already frayed. Though, he did make me a laughable offer when he first came to town."

"Don't talk like you're a knot to be untied."

"I'm seventy years old, Sally. To a man like George Morton I'm a complication that'll resolve itself if he's patient." She said it plainly, because it was true, and there was no use pretending the math of it. "But I've been resolving myself to that fact for a long time. He'll have to be more patient than that."

Sally reached over and squeezed her wrist, quick and fierce. "The town's not selling. Not the real ones."

"Some of them will. People get tired. People get old, or sick, or their kids want them up north." Winnie patted Sally's hand and drew her own back. "We'll keep an eye on it. That's all we can do. Keep an eye and make sure folks know what a yes really costs before they say it."

"Mayor West won't make a peep, you know. She loves a tax dollar."

"Linda loves the idea of a tax dollar. She doesn't think past it." Winnie reached for a second cinnamon roll she'd absolutely told herself she would not have. "We'll mind the mayor too."

"And the historical committee? They'll back you on the old Alexander place?"

"Half of them. The other half think a fresh coat of paint downtown is worth more than the truth of the place." Winnie shrugged. "I've outlasted worse halves than that."

"You've outlasted everybody," Sally said fondly, then grinned. "That's the trouble with you."

Sally let it sit a beat, the way she did when she had a second thing and wasn't sure she should say it. Winnie waited. She was good at waiting.

"There's something else," Sally said. "And I don't want you making a face."

"I never make a face."

"You make the worst faces of anyone I know." Sally took a sip of coffee, then slowly put the cup back down. "Sam was in the store yesterday."

The name went through Winnie like the first cold step into the Gulf in December. She kept her hands very still on the table.

"Was he," she said.

"Buying supplies. Coffee, batteries, one of those notebooks he likes, the black ones." Sally was watching her carefully now, the way a person watches someone carry something breakable down a flight of stairs. "He said he's staying on a while longer. The research with Melissa, the structures book, all that. Said the Gulf had more to it than he figured and he's not done."

Not done. Her hand had found the bracelet. Her thumb moved over the smooth pieces, the way it always did, the soft green glass and the milky white worn down by forty-five years of the same nervous thumb. Sea glass and silver wire. He'd made it for her the summer they were young and certain, and she'd worn it through every single day she'd been neither of those things anymore.

A reminder of promises kept, she told people, when they asked. It was true. She just never said which promise, or who she'd kept it to, or what it had cost to keep.

Sally's eyes went to the bracelet and then, kindly, away. She didn't say anything. She never did. Sixty years of friendship, and Sally Morris had never once made Winnie explain the bracelet. That was a gift Winnie had never properly thanked her for. Never would, because thanking her would mean talking about it.

"More to it than he figured," Winnie said at last, light as she could make it. "Well. He always did chase a thing past where sensible people stopped."

She looked out the window at the sun that had broken through the morning clouds and spilled across the water. "We talked, you know. Not too long ago."

"And?"

"And nothing. Just talked a bit."

"Winnie."

"I'm fine, Sally."

"I didn't say you weren't."