Page 31 of Beachfront Pages

"It was running." She said it gently. "Running's allowed. People act like it isn't. They act like the brave thing is to plant your feet and let it all roll over you."

"And it isn't?"

"Sometimes the door's right there, and a sensible person walks through it." She turned her cup. "The detectives I read never run. They stand in the worst room in the house and ask the next question. Book after book of it."

"And you envy them."

"I think anyone would," Fiona said, and steered them off it before he could pull the thread any further.

He studied her then, longer than was comfortable. "You'd know."

"I read a lot of mysteries," she said. "Everybody's running from something. It's the only reliable plot."

He let her have it. That was the thing about Marty. He noticed the dodge, she could see him notice it, and he let it stay there between them anyway.

And that was when it rose up in her, hard and sudden, the urge to put some truth on the counter beside his.

He'd handed her Annette. The whole shape of his grief, the resignation, the running, all of it laid out plainly because she'd asked one honest question. And she was sitting there with a marriage that had ended in February and a name she'd worn for fifteen years that wasn't even a real person, holding both of them deep inside her.

She could tell him. Drake left me. He met someone present, he said, like I was an absence. The words were right there.

Or the other thing. The bigger one. He'd ordered a few copies of F. L. Maxwell books and griped about each one of them. He wanted to meet the author who'd left Hal hanging on book sixteen. She could put a stop to all of it in a few simple words and watch his face make the whole journey. It's me. I'm him. There is no him.

Her heart went to a double beat at the thought of it. Just the thought of saying it out loud.

"Fiona?" He'd noticed the silence. Of course he had. "Where'd you go?"

"Nowhere." She wrapped both hands around her cup, though the coffee had gone lukewarm. "Just thinking your comma in Faulkner mattered. For what it's worth. You weren't wrong to care about it."

"That's a kind thing to say."

"I'm an occasionally kind person." She made herself smile. "Don't tell Jan. It'll ruin my reputation."

He laughed. The moment ended, soft as the rain on the glass. She let it end, and she hated herself a little for the relief.

The rain had thinned to a drizzle by the time she walked home. Warm even now, the puddles holding the gray sky in pieces along the road.

She'd done it again. She'd sat in front of a good man who'd opened up about the most painful thing in his life, and she'd given him a comma. A compliment about punctuation. She'd taken his honesty and paid him back in deflection, the same lies she'd been giving everyone since the day she signed the papers.

She didn't even need the lies anymore, that was the thing. There was no danger in Marty Fuller. He'd already proven that when he shared about Annette. He'd told her and survived telling it. He'd have done the same with hers. He almost certainly would have understood, and that was worse, because it meant the only thing stopping her was the same thing that had always stopped her.

She was a coward. She wrote brave people for a living and she was a coward.

Hank Carson would have said it. Hank said the hard thing in chapter nine of every book, looked the witness in the eye, and named the lie. Fifteen novels of a man who told the truth, written by a woman who couldn't manage it over a cold cup of coffee.

The lighthouse came up white through the last of the rain as she reached the cottage. She let herself in, dripping, and stood a minute in the quiet.

"Tomorrow," she told the empty room. "I'll tell him tomorrow."

The room didn't believe her, and neither, if she was honest, did she.

Chapter 11

"Sit anywhere you like," Bryan called from behind the counter. "We don't do assigned seats. House rule."

Fiona stood in the doorway of the Sandpiper. She was instantly surrounded by the smell of butter, fried food, and baking bread. Two ceiling fans turned slowly overhead, pushing the heat around without ever quite moving it. Vintage photos of fishing boats covered the walls, the boats bobbing in a harbor a hundred years younger.

She almost hadn't come. She'd stood at her own door twenty minutes ago with her hand on the knob, telling herself she'd show her face and leave early. She could do an hour. Anybody could do an hour.