Page 53 of Beachfront Pages

Because here was the thing. Here was the rotten, pathetic truth. This was the same man who'd told her, with the dishes drying and the TV murmuring in the other room, that she wasn't enough. And that was the message she'd packed into a suitcase and driven away with. She was not enough.

She'd carried it so long it had stopped feeling like his voice and started feeling like the truth. Like weather. Like something that had always been there.

And now he stood in her living room and said he wanted her.

So maybe she wasn't a failure. Maybe, if the man who'd decided she wasn't enough had traveled all the way here to take it back, then she'd been worth something the whole time. Maybe she was worthy. Maybe⁠—

She caught herself. Stop it. Stop reaching.

But it was already happening, the reaching, fast and quiet and underneath everything, the way water finds the lowest place. She could feel herself tilting toward him and the awful, sweet relief he was holding out. Here. You can have it back. You can stop wondering.

"You said—" She stopped. Started over. "You made it pretty clear how you felt. Before."

"I was wrong." He said it fast, like he'd been waiting for it. "I was scared. I was stupid and I said things I didn't mean."

"Some of them you meant."

He didn't argue. Give him that, at least. He just stood there with his hands a little open at his sides and let her look at him.

And she wanted to believe him. That was the part that scared her. Not him. Her. The eagerness of her own heart to be told it was good enough. The way it leaned toward him like a plant toward the sun.

"I don't know what to say," she said.

"You don't have to say anything tonight."

"I'm not going to."

"Okay." He nodded. "Okay. That's fair."

"I need to think. I need to actually think, Drake. Not just here, with you standing there saying all the right things."

A flicker of something crossed his face. She couldn't tell if it was hurt or strategy. Once she'd been able to read him like the front page. Now she wasn't sure she'd ever read him at all.

"I'm staying in town," he said. "There's a little hotel by the water. The Tides Inn?" He said it like a question, like she'd know it. She did. She'd walked past it a dozen times. "I'll be there a few days. Take your time. I just… I just needed you to know."

He moved toward the door, and at the last second he stopped close to her, closer than friends stand, and for one breath she thought he might reach for her hand. He didn't. Maybe he knew better. Maybe that was some kind of strategy too.

"It's really good to see you, Fee," he said. His hand came out. Close to her face. She didn't know if she wanted to jerk back or lean into it, and that annoyed her. Annoyed her a lot.

He dropped his hand and then he was gone, down the steps and along the path Winnie had taken, and the door clicked shut, and the cottage was hers again.

Except it didn't feel like hers.

It felt like he'd left something behind in it. Not something she could pick up and set outside. Just a charge in the air, the way a room feels after an argument or a phone call you didn't want. She stood in the middle of her own front room and didn't know where to put herself.

She made it to the porch on legs that didn't entirely belong to her and sat down hard in the old Adirondack chair by the rail. Out past the dune grass the Gulf rolled to shore, oblivious to her emotions.

Her hands were shaking.

She pressed them against the arms of the chair to make them stop and they didn't stop. She knew this feeling. That was the awful part. She knew it instantly. The fast pull of her own heart toward anyone who'd tell her she was fine. She was fine. She'd been fine for months, hadn't she? She smiled at the women in the checkout line back home, told her mother on the phone that everything was great, told herself in the bathroom mirror that she was fine. Fine, fine, fine. Until the word lost all its meaning and became just a sound her mouth made.

And here it was again. The reaching. The same desperate reach for someone to hand her the worth she couldn't seem to hold on her own.

The terrible part wasn't that he'd come. The terrible part was how much of her wanted to say yes. Not because she missed him. She'd searched and searched and she didn't think she did. But because yes was easy, and yes meant the question got answered, and she was so tired of being the only one who got to decide whether she was enough.

But seeing something and stopping it were two different things, and she of all people knew that.

What was she supposed to do now?