Page 5 of Beachfront Pages

"I left her soup."

"Soup." Sally said it the way other people said excuses. "Sit, honey."

Fiona sat. It seemed the path of least resistance, and the chair was, annoyingly, very comfortable.

"Don't let Sally mother you to death on the first night," said a man across the fire. He had paint on his forearm, a streak of blue he hadn't quite gotten off. "She'll have you in a casserole rotation by Tuesday. I'm Grant. The gallery in town's mine."

"Stone's Gallery," Emily added, with the small proud lift people got about a person they loved. She sat back down on the arm of his chair, easy as breathing, and Grant's hand found the small of her back without either of them looking. "Grant's the one with the paint. I'm the one who pretends to be tidier than him."

"She is not tidier than me," Grant said.

"I am so much tidier than you."

"Fiona, you'll referee," Grant said. "Objective party. Fresh eyes."

"I've known you ninety seconds," Fiona said. "I'm not qualified."

"Smart," said the woman beside them, lifting a foil-covered plate as if in evidence. "Don't get in the middle of those two. I'm Cassidy. Heron Cottage. Here, I made these." She peeled the foil back. "Lemon bars. Take two, it's rude not to."

"They're genuinely incredible," said the man next to her, his arm slung along the back of her chair. "I'm from a restaurant family and I still drive across town for these. Bryan. The Sandpiper's ours, down by the water. You'll come eat. The grouper's the thing."

"Order the hush puppies," Cassidy said.

"Order the hush puppies," Bryan agreed.

"I'll write it down," Fiona said, and took a lemon bar she didn't intend to eat and ended up eating anyway. It was, of course, genuinely incredible. She was starting to feel like the only person here who hadn't been let in on something.

"If you're after quiet, you've come to the right place," Emily said. "But don't hide the whole month. Town's worth a look. Sally's store, Grant's gallery, the bookshop down on the harbor."

"There's a bookshop?"

"Tides & Tales." Cassidy nodded. "Marty's place. All the old maritime stuff, local history, the books nobody else stocks. You'd like it. Everybody who reads ends up there eventually."

"It's mostly dust and dead sea captains," Grant said. "She'll love it."

"I might," Fiona admitted, and was surprised to find she meant it.

"That's Melissa and Clint," Emily said, nodding to the last pair, a little outside the firelight. A woman with a camera resting in her lap even now, the strap looped twice around her wrist. A broad, quiet man beside her, still in a way that made Fiona trust him before he'd said a word.

"Captain's Watch," Melissa said. "I do the photography. You'll see me out at dawn looking like I'm up to no good. I'm not. Mostly."

"Mostly," Clint said, the corner of his mouth going up. "I'm at Driftwood, the big one by the lighthouse. Winnie's my aunt, so I'm the one who fixes the gutters and gets told I did it wrong."

"You do do it wrong," Winnie said from her seat, and the whole circle laughed, the comfortable laugh of a joke worn soft from handling.

Fiona looked around at the gathered crowd. It was lovely. That was the awful part.

She'd been to a hundred gatherings that worked harder than this one. There was no pretending here, no one angling, no one watching the door to see if someone better had arrived. Just a ring of people who liked each other, in a garden, while the sky did its slow apricot business overhead.

She watched Grant steal a lemon bar off Emily's plate and Emily let him. She watched Bryan tuck a strand of hair behind Cassidy's ear midsentence, not breaking his story. Melissa leaned into Clint's shoulder during a lull like she'd been doing it for years. The couples were so easy with each other. Hands on backs. Private little jokes. The long comfortable silences of people who didn't need to fill every gap to feel safe.

It was exactly the thing Fiona wrote. The warm ensembles. The found family. The corner of the world where a wounded woman lands and is gathered up.

And it sat inside her like she'd swallowed glass.

Because she knew the trick of it now, didn't she? She knew what it cost to keep a thing like this, the daily small attention, the choosing of a person over and over. She'd had twenty-some years to learn it and had somehow graduated without the certificate. Drake's voice, helpful as ever, telling her she lived more in those books than she did in her own house.

She reached for her wine instead of that thought.