Page 56 of Beachfront Pages

So she wasn't going to pretend she hadn't seen him. Fiona should have known. Winnie didn't pretend.

"He's at The Tides Inn. For a few days, he says."

"Mm." Winnie nodded, slow. "He called himself your husband, out on my path. Walked up like he had a right to the address." She paused, then added, "I didn't much care for the way he did it, though."

"He was my husband. He isn't anymore. The divorce went through months ago. I never told a soul."

She braced for the questions. The careful, kind, digging questions everyone always had.

Winnie didn't ask one. "That's a lot to carry alone," was all she said. "And now he's come back?"

"Why do you think he came back?" Maybe Winnie could answer this, give her a valid reason.

"That's not a question for me. You'll have to answer that yourself." Winnie looked at her for a moment, then nodded slightly. "I expect you already know. You've got the look of a woman doing her thinking, sorting it out."

"I'm not sure I want the answer I'm getting."

"The truth is like that, more often than not." Winnie patted Fiona's arm once, her hand cool and light. "Eat the bread. Then go do whatever it is you've worked out you're going to do. You've got more spine than you let on, and I'd guess you've known it longer than you let on too."

She turned and went, down the steps and along the path, not looking back.

Fiona stood in the doorway with the basket in her hands. She turned and walked inside. She set the plate on the table and glanced at the laptop screen. She made herself look at the dates stamped under the headlines. Monday. Monday. Tuesday. The big roundup post, Monday afternoon.

And Drake had stood right here in her front room saying, "I want you, Fee," on Wednesday evening. She counted it instead of feeling it. Two days. Two days after her name was broadcast across the whole world.

But…

She tried the kind version first. Coincidence. He'd been working up to it for weeks, the way he said. He'd looked at his life, found her missing from it, and the timing was only timing.

She almost made it stick. She'd gotten good these last months at making things stick that she needed to.

But she wrote people for a living. Fifteen books built on one ruthless skill, looking at what a person did and working backward to what he wanted. Hank Carson didn't believe in coincidence and neither did she, not when the pieces lined up this neatly. A man tells his wife she isn't enough. He files the papers. He finds someone present. He lets her drive off the edge of the map, then goes half a year without a single call.

And then her name turns up in every trade headline in the business, with a fortune attached.

And then, two days after that, there he is on her porch in a pressed blue shirt, saying he made a terrible mistake.

"Oh," Fiona said. The empty cottage did not answer. "Oh," she repeated, sure now.

He hadn't come back because he'd decided he was wrong about her.

He'd come back because she was worth something again.

She crossed to the sofa and sank down onto it. Fury washed over her, fast and hot, hotter than anything she'd let herself feel in months. He'd stood right there on the rug she'd been embarrassed by, looked around her new, small good life, and said, "It suits you." She'd let that scrap of approval warm her like a starving woman. She had been starving. He'd counted on it. He knew which buttons to push because he'd spent twenty years learning them.

"Of course," she said to no one. "Of course that's what this is."

And then, under the fury, relief came rising up slow through all the heat.

Because if Drake had come all this way for the money, if the whole tender, practiced speech was only a man chasing a headline to a bank, then the math she'd been doing in her own head for half a year was wrong from the very start.

She'd taken his leaving as a verdict. She wasn't enough. She had packed that ruling into a suitcase, carried it across three states, clung to it at every warm gathering where she'd hung around at the edges.

And the man, it turned out, couldn't tell her worth from her bank balance.

"Huh," she said softly, almost a laugh. There it was. The thing she'd carried all this time was really nothing—and certainly not the truth—when she looked at it honestly in the light.

His leaving had never once been about her. It was about what she could do for him in a given season. As a wife who wrote "articles, corporate stuff, or whatever," she wasn't enough to stay for. Even though he'd known she was F. L. Maxwell, it hadn't meant anything to him, he wasn't a reader. He thought of her Maxwell books as "little books." But now, as a name worth a fortune, she was worth crossing the country to reclaim. Same woman. The only thing that moved was the number on the page.