Page 10 of Beachfront Pages

She'd been staring at Hank Carson for forty minutes. Hank was still in the alley. Still standing over the body. Still waiting for Fiona to tell him what came next.

Fiona didn't know what came next.

She closed the laptop and stood up before she could talk herself into another hour of pretending the blinking cursor counted as progress. The cottage was too quiet. Too full of books she hadn't written, a manuscript she couldn't finish, and a silence that kept reminding her she was the only person in it.

She needed air. She needed to walk somewhere that wasn't the twelve steps between the desk and the kitchen.

She needed to stop thinking about Drake. That was the real thing, wasn't it? She'd caught herself reaching for her phone to text him a photo of the harbor at sunrise, the way she used to. She'd stood there with her thumb over the screen before she remembered there was nobody on the other end of that habit anymore.

Six months. A person would think six months was enough to break a reflex.

Well, a person would be wrong.

She pulled on her shoes and went out.

The walk into town took twenty minutes along the harbor road. A generous name for a two-lane stretch of cracked asphalt with palmetto scrub on one side and the water on the other. The air was warm, thick, and salty. She passed a bait shop. A church with a marquee that read GOD'S WIFI IS ALWAYS ON. A gas station that looked like it hadn't updated its signage since 1987.

Not Georgetown. Not the curated life she'd built with Drake in their brownstone. The good address, the dinner parties, and the shelves of first editions she'd earned and he'd displayed. This was rougher and less polished.

Nobody here was performing for anybody. She wasn't sure if that was a relief or a threat.

Four blocks of cheerful, pastel storefronts. She passed Grant's gallery, dark this early. Sally's general store was already open, and Sally herself was out front arranging a display of something in baskets.

"Morning, honey." Sally waved a hand without looking up. "You eat breakfast?"

"I had coffee."

"Coffee isn't breakfast. Come back on your way home and I'll fix you a biscuit. I brought a batch in with me and some of my strawberry jam."

"I'm fine, really."

"Nobody's ever fine on just coffee." Sally gave her a look that suggested this was a settled matter. "Go on, then. Biscuit'll be waiting."

Fiona kept walking. Past Harbor Brew, where two women sat on the patio arguing about somebody's nephew. Then she saw Tides & Tales.

The bookshop sat on the corner facing the water, its front windows tall and salt-hazed. A wooden sign hung from a bracket over the door, the letters carved deep and painted the blue-green of old copper. The door was propped open. She could see shelves from the sidewalk.

She went inside.

The smell hit her first. Paper and dust, faintly woody, like the shelves themselves had opinions. High tin ceiling. Wide plank floors. Morning light coming through the front windows at an angle that made the whole place glow. Shelves ran floor to ceiling on three walls. Not arranged for show. These shelves were working. Spines crammed and double-stacked, paperbacks wedged sideways on top of hardcovers. The whole inventory looked handled and reshuffled. Lived with.

She liked it immediately, which surprised her. She hadn't liked much of anything immediately in a while.

A reading chair sat in one corner, leather worn to the color of honey. A stack of books on the floor beside it suggested somebody used it more than any customer did. The register was old, the mechanical kind, with a slip of paper clipped to the side of it in smudged ink she couldn't read from here.

She was halfway down the local history shelf when a voice came from somewhere behind the stacks.

"If you're looking for beach reads, you're in the wrong shop."

She turned. A man came around the end of the shelf carrying a cardboard box, which he set on the counter with the easy thud of someone who'd done this a thousand mornings. Tall. Broad shoulders with a slight stoop to them. Silver-threaded brown hair that needed cutting. Wire-rimmed glasses pushed up on his forehead like he'd forgotten they were there. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and his hands had ink on them.

"I wasn't looking for beach reads," she said.

"Good." He slid a box cutter along the tape. "Because I don't carry them. Fair warning."

"What do you carry?"

"Books worth reading." He said it without looking up, but the corner of his mouth moved. He knew how it sounded and he didn't mind. "Marty Fuller. This is my shop."