Page 2 of Beachfront Pages

The gravel gave way to a stone path, and Fiona made herself notice things, because noticing was the one muscle that still worked. A central fire pit ringed with chairs. A garden gone a little wild in the good way, all silver-green leaves and salt-tough flowers. A bench under a gazebo with names carved into the back she couldn't read from here.

"It's quiet," Fiona said.

"It can be. Won't always be." Winnie said it cheerfully, like a warning she had no intention of softening. "Folks gather most evenings out here. You're welcome. Never required."

Never required. Fiona could have kissed her.

Sea Glass Cottage was pink—though Fiona couldn't remember ever seeing pink sea glass—with white trim and a porch that ran the full front. Winnie worked the key, pushed the door open, and stepped back to let Fiona go first.

And there it was. The walls were lined with books. Floor to ceiling on two sides, shelves crammed and double-stacked, the spines faded to the colors of things left in the sun. A worn armchair sat in the corner by a window with a little table beside it. A reading lamp. A writer's nook, somebody would call it in a listing. The kind of corner Fiona invented for fictional women who had their lives together.

"Oh," she said.

"Told you." Winnie sounded pleased. "Kitchen's small but it works. Linens in the chest. Wi-Fi password's taped inside the cupboard, though I'll warn you it sulks when it storms."

"Noted. I'll be gentle with it."

"You do that." Winnie set the key on the counter. "I'll let you settle. You've had a long drive."

"I'm fine. Just road-tired."

Winnie looked at her a beat longer than the words warranted. Her green eyes didn't miss much, Fiona suspected. It was the kind of attention she gave her own characters, and she did not love being on this end of it.

"There's soup in your fridge," Winnie said finally. "I always leave some for new arrivals. You should eat it." She moved to the door. "Sunset's the best part. Don't sleep through your first one."

She let herself out, and the door clicked. The cottage went very, very quiet.

Fiona stood in the middle of it and breathed.

Alone. Finally, blessedly alone, where no one knew her, where no one would ask how Drake was or whether they'd both be at the Hendersons' in the spring. Here she was just a woman who'd rented a cottage. A writer on retreat. That was the story, and it was even mostly true.

She'd only left out the part where there was no marriage to come home to.

The car held more than she remembered packing.

Fiona made three trips, then stood over the open suitcases on the bedroom floor and ran out of reasons to keep moving. She hung the linen blazers in the closet, because blazers wrinkled and she had standards even now. The rest she left. Folded jeans and a few sweaters stayed stacked in the case. The second suitcase she didn't open at all.

"It's a writing retreat," she told the empty room. Saying things out loud helped sometimes. "You write the book. You go home. The end."

Except unpacking was a commitment. Unpacking meant she intended to stay, to settle in, and live here. She wasn't living here. She was waiting here. There was a difference, even if she couldn't have explained it to a single soul, which was fine, because there wasn't a single soul to explain it to.

Home. Now there was a word that had lost its footing lately.

She carried her laptop to the nook, sat in the worn chair, and opened it on the little table. The cursor blinked at her from the manuscript she was four months late delivering. F. L. Maxwell's sixteenth. Her detective, Hank Carson, was standing in a rain-soaked alley exactly where she'd abandoned him in February, waiting for Fiona to tell him what she'd found on the body.

Fiona had no idea what she'd found. She wasn't sure she cared, which was a new and unwelcome feeling about a woman whose books had paid her mortgage for fifteen years.

She typed a sentence. Read it. Deleted it.

She typed it again, slightly worse.

"Come on," she muttered. "He's a corpse in an alley. You've done a hundred corpses in a hundred alleys. Just pick one."

But the cursor only blinked, and the trouble with writing a murder was that it asked her to believe the truth mattered. That if she looked hard enough at the evidence, the lies fell away and something solid stood underneath. Fiona had built a whole career on that promise. Fifteen books of it. Then she'd spent six months proving, in her own life, that a person could look right at the truth every single day and simply decline to say it out loud.

She'd signed the divorce papers in a lawyer's office with good coffee and a nicer view. She'd told no one. Not her agent, Rachel. Not her editor. Not one friend, because the friends had mostly been Drake's first, or theirs together, and "theirs" had turned out to be a fiction too.

The cursor blinked.