Nightswimming

Chapter 1: Cottage Four

The key stuck in the lock the way everything about this summer was going to stick—reluctantly, with a grinding protest that suggested the universe had opinions about Maeve Farrow's life choices.

She jiggled it, shouldered the door, and stumbled into a cottage that smelled like salt air and old paperbacks. Cottage Four at the Edisto Colony for the Arts was exactly what the brochure had promised: a single room with a writing desk facing the ocean, a bed narrow enough to enforce solitude, a kitchenette that could generously be described as "functional," and bookshelves stuffed with the abandoned drafts of previous residents. The floorboards creaked under her sandals. A ceiling fan turned with the lazy conviction of something that knew it would never cool the room.

Maeve dropped her suitcase and her laptop bag on the bed and stood at the window. The Atlantic stretched out in every direction, steel-blue and indifferent, the late-June sun hammering it flat. Edisto Island sat at the bottom of South Carolina like an afterthought—no resort hotels, no boardwalk, just marshland and live oaks dripping with Spanish moss and a beach that went on forever in both directions. The colony occupied a cluster of raised cottages on the dunes, connected by wooden walkways and a shared main house where meals happened.

She'd applied on a Tuesday night in February, three glasses of wine deep, six months after her father's funeral, two months after the box of letters arrived from his lawyer. The acceptance email had come in March, and she'd spent the intervening months telling herself this was about the novel. The bleak, unsparing literary novel about a woman unraveling after discovering her dead father's double life. The novel that would prove to every critic, every literary magazine editor, every smug panelist at every book festival that Maeve Farrow was not her father's disappointing daughter but a writer of serious, unflinching work.

The novel she hadn't written a single page of.

She pressed her forehead against the warm glass. Through the window, she could see the shared porch that connected Cottage Four to Cottage Five—a wide, weathered deck with two Adirondack chairs, a hammock, and what appeared to be a single outdoor shower at the far end, shielded by a slatted wooden screen that hid nothing above the shoulders or below the knees.

A shared shower. She'd deal with that later.

What she needed now was to unpack, set up her desk, open a blank document, and stare at it with the focused despair of someone who'd told her agent she was "making excellent progress."

Her phone buzzed. Speaking of her agent.

*How's the colony? Settling in? Random House is asking about the manuscript timeline. No pressure but also ALL the pressure. xo Judith*

Maeve typed back: *Just arrived. The cottage is perfect. Words are flowing.* She deleted the last sentence. Even for a fiction writer, that was too much invention. She replaced it with: *Will check in next week.*

She unpacked methodically—clothes into the small dresser, toiletries into the bathroom that was barely larger than a closet, books onto the desk in a careful stack. Her father's last novel, the one that had won the National Book Award the year she was twelve. A craft book on structure she'd been meaning to read for three years. And, buried at the bottom of her suitcase where no one would see it, a paperback with a shirtless man on the cover and the title *The Compass Rose* emblazoned in gold script.

By Kieran Westcott.

She'd bought it at an airport two years ago, read it in a single sitting on a flight to Denver, and hated herself for crying at the ending. It was manipulative. It was formulaic. It was everything she'd argued against in her essay for *The Quarterly*—the one that had gone unexpectedly viral, the one where she'd called romance novels "emotional anesthesia for readers too afraid to sit with the real texture of human suffering."

The essay that had made her briefly famous and permanently insufferable at parties.

She shoved the paperback into the bottom drawer of the desk, beneath a ream of blank printer paper, and opened her laptop.

The blank document glowed.

She typed: *Chapter One.*

Then she deleted it.

Then she typed it again.

Then she closed the laptop and went to find the main house, because surely there was coffee, and coffee was a form of progress.

---

The main house was a sprawling, salt-bleached structure with a wraparound porch, a communal kitchen, a dining room with a long farmhouse table, and a living room filled with mismatched furniture and the particular silence of people trying to be creative. Harriet Greenway, the colony's director, had greeted Maeve at check-in with the brisk warmth of someone who'd spent thirty years managing artists and their neuroses. She was seventy, silver-haired, with reading glasses perpetually pushed up on her forehead and a voice that could have narrated documentaries about the deep sea.

"Coffee's always on," Harriet had said. "Dinner's at seven. The beach is yours. The ocean doesn't care about your deadlines, which is either comforting or terrifying, depending on where you are in your draft."

Maeve poured herself a mug and stood at the kitchen counter, surveying the space. Through the window, she could see two of the other residents—a poet named Viveka, who'd arrived the day before, sitting cross-legged on the lawn with a notebook, and a playwright named Douglas, who was doing tai chi on the beach with the unselfconscious commitment of someone who'd stopped caring what anyone thought around age fifty.

There were eight residents total this session, she'd been told. Novelists, poets, one memoirist, one screenwriter. Eight weeks of funded solitude. Eight weeks to produce something.

She was contemplating whether a second cup of coffee counted as procrastination or fuel when the screen door banged open and a man walked in carrying a duffel bag over one shoulder and a guitar case in his other hand.

He was tall—taller than she'd expected, though she wasn't sure why she'd had expectations—with dark hair that needed cutting and the kind of face that looked like it had been designed to appear on book jackets: strong jaw, deep-set eyes the color of whiskey in low light, a mouth that seemed perpetually on the verge of saying something either very funny or very annoying. He wore a rumpled linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up and jeans that had seen better decades.

He set down the duffel bag, pushed his sunglasses up onto his head, and looked directly at her.

"Please tell me that's real coffee and not some decaf abomination," he said.

His voice was warm. Irritatingly warm. The kind of voice that suggested campfires and whispered confessions and other things Maeve did not need to be thinking about.

"It's real," she said. "Mugs are above the sink."

He crossed to the counter, and she caught the smell of him—salt, something woody, the faint ghost of airplane recycled air. He poured coffee, took a long sip, and closed his eyes with an expression of genuine relief.

"I've been traveling since five a.m.," he said. "Layover in Charlotte. The Charlotte airport is where hope goes to die."

"That's dramatic."

"I'm a dramatic person." He extended his hand. "Kieran Westcott. Cottage Five."

The name landed like a stone dropped into still water. Maeve felt the ripples move through her in concentric circles of recognition, embarrassment, and a sharp, defensive irritation she didn't fully understand.

"Maeve Farrow," she said, and watched his face change.

It was subtle. A flicker behind his eyes, a slight tightening at the corners of his mouth, and then—infuriatingly—a slow, genuine smile.

"Ah," he said. "The emotional anesthesia woman."

"Ah," she replied. "The beautiful misery tourism man."

They stood there, hands still clasped, coffee cooling, the kitchen suddenly too small for both of them and whatever this was.

Kieran released her hand first. "For the record," he said, "I stand by that quote. Your last novel was exquisitely written and absolutely committed to making sure the reader felt terrible about everything, including the act of reading."

"For the record," Maeve said, "I stand by my essay. Your books are beautifully constructed delivery systems for the narrative equivalent of a warm bath. They feel wonderful and accomplish nothing."

"A warm bath accomplishes quite a lot, actually. Muscle relaxation. Stress reduction. A general sense that the world isn't entirely garbage."

"And there it is. The romance novelist's thesis statement: the world isn't entirely garbage. Groundbreaking."

Kieran leaned against the counter and studied her with an expression she couldn't quite read. It wasn't hostile. It was something closer to curiosity, the way you'd look at a puzzle you hadn't expected to find interesting.

"Cottage Five," he said. "That's next to yours, isn't it?"

"We share a porch."

"And a shower, I'm told."

"We'll work out a schedule."

"I'm an early riser."

"Then you won't be a problem."

He picked up his duffel bag and his guitar case and paused in the doorway, looking back at her with that almost-smile.

"For what it's worth, Maeve Farrow, I did read your novel. The whole thing. And the sentence about the woman standing in her dead husband's closet, pressing his shirts to her face one by one, trying to find the one that still smelled like him? That sentence broke something in me that I haven't been able to fix."

He left before she could respond, which was probably for the best, because she didn't have a response. She had a hot feeling behind her sternum and a sudden, furious awareness that the man who wrote books she'd publicly dismissed had just quoted her own work back to her with more precision and feeling than any reviewer ever had.

She poured her coffee down the sink and went back to Cottage Four to stare at her blank document some more.