Salt and Sea Glass

Chapter 5: Local Colour

The Salt Water Café smelled like cinnamon and burnt espresso, and the woman behind the counter had the kind of face that made strangers confess things open, amused, apparently unbothered by whatever chaos was happening in her own life, which Jessica could tell just from the flour and blueberry stains streaked across her apron.

"You're the one borrowing Cee's place." Not a question. She slid a coffee across the counter before Jessica had finished ordering. "I'm Dahlia. Run this circus. You look like you need the biggest size we've got, and don't argue, it's on the house for new arrivals."

"I didn't say anything."

"Didn't have to. You've got the face." Dahlia leaned an elbow on the counter, studying her with a frankness that should have felt invasive and somehow didn't. "The face of somebody who drove here to get away from something. We get a few of you every summer. Divorces, mostly. Occasional bad business deal."

"Is it that obvious?"

"Honey, you've got 'recovering from something' written across you like a neon sign. Don't worry, nobody's going to ask what it is. This whole town's personality is minding its own business and gossiping about the weather instead."

Jessica laughed, surprised by it, and wrapped both hands around the mug like it might anchor her to the counter. There was something disarming about a stranger who saw straight through the careful blankness she'd been practicing and simply declined to comment.

"Jessica," she offered.

"Pretty name for someone hiding from the world." Dahlia said it without malice, already pulling something out of the oven, the whole exchange conducted with the ease of someone who'd had this conversation a hundred times with a hundred strangers. "You met Finn yet?"

Jessica's grip on the mug tightened. "The photographer? Briefly."

"Briefly." Dahlia said the word like it tasted funny. "Mm-hm. Man's basically a hermit since he got here. If he gave you more than four words, that's practically a marriage proposal by his standards."

"We talked about photography. That's it."

"Sure." Dahlia clearly didn't believe a word of it, but let it go with the grace of someone who knew better than to push a stranger. "He's good, for what it's worth. Rough patch before he came out here, some ex who used his personal stuff for internet clout, if the rumor mill's got it right, which it usually does around here, give or take an embellishment. Doesn't talk about it. Doesn't talk about much, honestly. But he's decent. Rarer than you'd think."

Jessica filed that away next to the stillness she'd already clocked in him, the careful distance he kept from nearly everything except his camera. It didn't surprise her that his quiet had a wound underneath it too. Felt, oddly, like recognizing someone's handwriting.

"You want a muffin with that?" Dahlia was already reaching for one. "On the house, same as the coffee. Slow day, I'm bored, you seem like good company even like this."

"I don't know if I am, right now."

"Nobody's good company the first week. Give it time." She set the muffin down like she was closing an argument. "This town's good for that, if you let it be."

The text came in at 11:47 that night, long after Jessica had convinced herself she was done checking her phone.

I know you probably don't want to hear from me. I just need you to know none of it was planned. I miss you. Can we talk?

She read it four times before she let herself feel anything about it, the way you poke a bruise to check if it still hurts. It did. Not the gutting, breathless kind from six weeks ago, but something duller, like an old injury on a rainy day. Proof it had happened. Not proof it deserved her.

She typed three responses and deleted all of them.

I hope you and Ashley are very happy. Too bitter, and also not entirely true.

Please don't contact me again. True, but it felt like slamming a door, and some exhausted part of her still wanted to leave it cracked, if only so closing it fully didn't feel like admitting the last four years had cost her something she'd never get back.

I'm doing fine, actually. The pettiest option, and infuriatingly the one that felt best to type. She deleted it before her thumb got anywhere near send.

In the end she sent nothing. Set the phone face-down on the nightstand, the way she'd started doing every night like a small ritual of self-preservation, and lay in the dark listening to the tide instead, letting the sound scrub at the edges of the feeling until it dulled enough to carry.

It wasn't that she wanted him back. She'd been sure of that since the third week, once the shock had worn thin enough to reveal the plain fact underneath that she spent years quietly editing herself smaller to fit a relationship that had never once asked what she actually wanted. Jonah hadn't just cheated. He has been unraveling her slowly a long time before Ashley's hotel balcony made it public, and some nights that felt like the worse betrayal.

What unsettled her was how easily the text still found its mark, six weeks and four hundred miles later like her phone kept a direct line to the rawest part of her no matter how far she drove.

She thought of Finn's careful stillness that morning. The way he hadn't asked a single question about where she'd come from or why. There was something almost radical about that kind of restraint, in a world built to demand every private thing about you as the price of being noticed at all.

She fell asleep without answering, and told herself the silence was its own kind of answer, the only one she owed him.

In the morning, she deleted the message without rereading it.