Ronan O’Malley, 62, spent 27 years manning the Cape Arago lighthouse before he retired three years prior, and he’d avoided every small-town community event from the annual salmon bake to the 4th of July parade until last weekend. His flaw was a stubborn, almost curmudgeonly refusal to engage with anything that smacked of 21st century performativity: he carried a beat-up 2012 flip phone, had no social media accounts, and thought TikTok was a type of cheap seafood. He’d only caved to attend the coastal county crab feed fundraiser because his 16-year-old niece, Lila, was playing fiddle in the house band, and she’d showed up at his cottage with a plate of his favorite chocolate chip cookies to beg.
The minute he walked through the fairground barn doors, he regretted it. Crab shells crunched under work boots, kids screamed as they chased each other with melted butter on their fingers, and half the adults had their phones held above their heads, filming heaping plates of Dungeness to post to their feeds. He grabbed a plastic cup of cold IPA from the beer table and planted himself against the back wall, planning to stay only long enough to hear Lila play two songs before he bailed for the quiet of his cliffside cottage.
That’s when he smelled it: warm peach pie, thick with butter and cinnamon, cutting through the briny crab and beer fumes. He followed the scent to the far end of the barn, where a long table held stacks of pies baked by local women, all for sale to fund the county’s new pollinator habitat project. The woman running the table was leaning down to grab a paper bag for a kid, and when he reached for a stack of napkins set at the edge of the table, his elbow bumped hers, and their hands brushed when they both reached to catch a napkin that slipped off the pile.
He froze first. He recognized her immediately: Marnie Cole, 58, the younger sister of his late wife Eileen’s childhood best friend. They’d met once, 12 years prior, at Eileen’s cousin’s wedding, and he’d always thought she was off limits, even after Eileen passed from ovarian cancer eight years ago. That quiet, unspoken taboo hummed between them for half a second before she smiled, the corners of her hazel eyes crinkling at the edges, and didn’t pull her hand away.
She was taller than he remembered, her gray-streaked brown hair pulled back in a loose braid, flecks of what looked like beeswax on the cuff of her faded flannel shirt. She was a traveling beekeeper, he remembered, spent half the year driving up and down the West Coast setting up hives for small farms and teaching kids about pollinator decline. They were standing so close he could smell clover honey and lavender on her shirt, mixed with the peach pie scent drifting up from the table between them. When he mumbled that half the people here were more interested in filming their food than eating it, she leaned in so her shoulder brushed his, laughing loud enough to cut through the noise of the crowd, and said she’d already told three people to put their phones away if they wanted a slice of pie.
The guilt hit him first, sharp and familiar. He’d not so much as flirted with anyone since Eileen died, had convinced himself he was too old, too set in his ways, that wanting anything like that again was a betrayal of the 32 years they’d had together. But when she asked him if it was true he’d spent decades watching bee migrations from the lighthouse lantern room, her eyes bright with curiosity, that guilt softened into something warmer, something he hadn’t felt in years. He told her about the spring after Eileen died, when he’d stood in the lantern room for three hours watching a massive migration of honeybees pass the cape, heading north to the Washington wildflower fields. She didn’t look at him with pity, like most people did when he mentioned Eileen. She just nodded, and said she’d seen that same migration three years prior, when she was working a farm outside Astoria, and had always wondered what the view looked like from 100 feet up, over the ocean. He hesitated for half a second—he’d not let a single non-family member inside his cottage, or even onto his property, since Eileen died—before he told her she could come by Saturday, if she wanted, to see the spot.
When Lila finished her set, the sky outside had turned dark, and a light rain was starting to fall against the barn’s tin roof. Marnie said she was heading out to her truck parked at the edge of the fairground, and he offered to walk her, because the path was muddy and full of potholes. Halfway there, the rain picked up, hard and cold, and they ran under the awning of a closed concession stand to wait it out. His hand rested on her lower back as they ran, and he could feel the heat of her skin through her flannel shirt, even through the rain that had soaked through the fabric at the edges.
They were both breathing hard from the run, their shoulders pressed tight together under the small awning, when she leaned up and kissed him. It was soft, slow, no urgency, and she tasted like peach pie and peppermint gum. He kissed her back, the last of his guilt melting away, because he knew Eileen would have laughed if she could see him, standing in the rain with a beekeeper, after avoiding town events for three full years. It wasn’t a betrayal. It was just something new.
When the rain slowed to a drizzle, she pulled a scrap of paper out of her pocket and scribbled her phone number on it, and he copied it into the small leather notebook he carried in his flannel pocket—his flip phone only stored 10 contacts, all family, and he told her he’d rather write it down anyway, no risk of losing it if the phone died. She laughed when he said he’d call her tomorrow at 10 a.m. sharp, no back and forth texting, no playing games. He held the awning open for her as she walked to her beat-up pickup truck, and she waved out the window as she pulled out of the parking lot.
He watched her taillights fade down the coastal highway, the rain lightening to a fine mist, and tucked the notebook into his flannel pocket, already counting the hours until morning.
