Page 6 of Beachfront Pages

"So." Sally settled in beside her with a plate balanced on her knee. "What brings you down to us, Fiona? You've got the look of somebody running from something. We get a lot of those. It's a good place to run to."

"Sally," Emily said.

"What? It's a compliment."

"I'm here to write," Fiona said, smooth as glass herself. "I needed quiet. A change of scenery."

"A writer." Cassidy lit up. "What kind? Would I have read you?"

There it was again. The question, always the question, two minutes in like a tide that came back no matter how many times she swept it out. "Probably not," Fiona said. "Small stuff. Nothing you'd know."

And even if she'd handed over the name, it wouldn't have given her away. That was the one good accident in fifteen years of careful choices. The books went out under initials and a jacket with no face on it, and somewhere along the line the reading world had quietly decided F. L. Maxwell was a man. A retired professor, probably. Somebody's grandfather with a pipe and a tidy study. Nobody had ever looked at a tall woman in a linen blazer and thought, there she is. The best disguise she owned, and she hadn't even built it on purpose.

"And some nonfiction articles," she added, because the quiet wanted filling. Okay, she'd written two articles fifteen years ago, but that counted, right?

"Try me. I read everything with a cover."

"It's not very interesting, honestly." Fiona heard the old reflex do its work, light and final, the conversational equivalent of closing a door so gently no one heard the latch. "Mostly I just need the time. Deadlines."

"Fair enough." Cassidy let it go, easy, and Fiona felt the small relief of having dodged again.

"And is there a Mr. Fiona?" Sally asked.

The fire popped. The question hung there, ordinary as weather, and Fiona opened her mouth to deploy one of the smooth deflections she kept for exactly this, the change-of-subject, the vague little laugh.

"My husband's traveling," she said.

It came out before she could catch it. Clean and easy, like it had been waiting to be said. Like it was true.

"Oh, that's hard," Sally said, all sympathy. "All this and you can't even call him to say look at this sunset."

"He travels a lot." Fiona's voice didn't even shake. That was the part that surprised her. Fifteen books on how the truth always surfaces. She should know better. "He's used to it. We both are."

"Well, you tell him Starlight Shores is worth the trip when he gets a break." Sally patted her knee and, mercifully, moved on to harassing Bryan about whether the Sandpiper was finally going to fix its left-hand screen door.

Fiona let the conversation close over her head. She'd done it. The lie had been soft and certain, and not one person at the fire had blinked. There was no marriage. There was a signed stack of papers in a drawer nine hundred miles away and a man who'd found someone present, and she'd just conjured a traveling husband out of the warm air like he was nothing, like he was easy, like she did this all the time.

She didn't. That was the thing. She'd spent six months telling no one anything at all. This was the first lie she'd told out loud to actual kind people who'd handed her lemon bars. It turned out to be the easiest sentence she'd said all week. That part stayed with her. The ease of it. How little it had cost to say it.

That was what frightened her.

She looked over and found Winnie watching her.

The woman sat just across the fire, a cup of tea going cold in her hands. Her green eyes rested on Fiona with a patient, unhurried attention.

Fiona held the look a moment, and then made herself smile. The fine smile. The composed one.

Winnie smiled back. But she didn't look away, and she didn't look fooled. "You've gone quiet," Winnie said. Just to her, under the noise of the others.

"I'm a quiet person."

"Mm." Winnie took a sip of her cold tea. "Quiet's allowed here. So's the other thing."

"What other thing?"

"Whatever it is you're being so quiet about." Winnie said it gently, with no demand for an answer. "Doesn't have to be tonight. Doesn't have to be me. But it gets heavy, carrying a thing alone. I'd know."

For one unmoored second, she had the wild urge to set the whole glittering lie down on the grass between them. The divorce. The silence. The manuscript she couldn't write. The husband who existed only in a sentence she'd invented minutes ago. To just hand it over to a small old woman with a sea glass bracelet and let somebody else carry it all a while.