Andrew first spotted her in the beginning of September. Frustrated once again after a sleepless night followed by a full morning of not writing a word, he decided to take a walk on the beach. A rickety wooden fence, made of weather-washed gray planks, surrounded his yard. He was just about to open the beachside gate at the back corner, under the biggest tree on his lot, when movement caught his eye. He paused, looking over the chest-high fence.
She came from the north, from the direction of the only other cabin in the area. It belonged to old Gloria and had been empty so long Andrew almost forgot it was there. He felt possessive of the beach, this narrow strip between the land and the sea, this wind-blown sand stretch filled with pebbles and whatever drifted in with the tide. It was almost always windy, the currents made it treacherous to swim, and since there were more hospitable beaches nearby, it was usually his alone to roam.
His first reaction to seeing her was intense annoyance. He stayed in the tree's shadow and watched. It was a warm day, but she wore rugged jeans and a long-sleeved gray shirt. Her long, dark hair was tied in a ponytail, but a few strands had escaped, whipped by the wind. She had her arms crossed tightly over her chest, and she looked down in front of her as she slowly trudged across his field of vision, barefoot.
Andrew waited until she was a tiny figure in the distance, then ventured onto the beach. He eyed the line of her footprints. Most were already swallowed by the drifting sand, and the rising tide would erase the rest. Bristling with indignation, he stiffly turned to walk the other way.
His route took him by the other cabin. It looked as empty as ever, but there was a car in the yard. He walked by, glaring at the evidence of the intruder. A few hundred meters further the beach ended, and he climbed up the slope to the wind-swept forest to walk onwards along the shoreline. He came back along a path following the coastline further inland, hoping not to run into his new neighbor.
She didn't seem to have a steady schedule. Andrew saw glimpses of her on most days, either walking past his cabin or returning to hers. Even more often he saw her footprints, following an almost identical trail each day. It irked him to be reminded he wasn't alone in the world.
Andrew had withdrawn to this remote, windy beach a little over a year before, soon after his wife had lost her fight with cancer. The cabin technically belonged to him and his sister, but Emma lived overseas with her family, and was more than pleased Andrew wanted to live in it and maintain it. It had been their father's pet project, and they'd spent all their childhood holidays there. Emma wanted to keep it in the family, even when she didn't have many opportunities to visit herself.
Andrew had written three successful novels before Lina had first become sick. After that, their life had been a deepening spiral of treatments and rebounds, cancer beaten then recurring, sprouting anew like a weed no matter how dutifully it was ripped out. Round by round, Lina had weakened, her belief in survival deteriorating, until finally she was gone. It had been a losing battle, but knowing it hadn't made any difference; it wasn't possible not to fight.
For a while after Lina's diagnosis, Andrew had been able to write: articles, short stories for anthologies, even poems, although those he had never even considered publishing. As Lina got worse, so did his creativity, and he thought he'd buried it with her. After the funeral, he sold their home in the city, packed the barest essentials, and moved to the remote coastal village. He had brought a small box of memorabilia, but stuffed it at the back of a closet and tried to forget it was there.
He still could not write, but sat in front of his laptop every day. Sometimes he wondered why he kept torturing himself when it was clear he had become a literary castrate. Financially, his late parents had left him well off so he didn't need to write to sustain himself. He didn't have any other occupation, and no ambition for anything else, and out of sheer stubborn habit he sat down after breakfast and stared at the blank screen for a few hours. He did some fishing, a lot of reading, took walks along the beach, and that was about it. His life was a limbo of pain, dulled by time but always present.
On his next supply run to the village, he asked the shopkeeper, Martha, about the mystery woman. Martha was a good-natured woman and looked old even when Andrew was a child. To his eyes, she still looked almost exactly the same. She would have been an awful gossip, if she wasn't so nice. As it was, it didn't feel like gossiping, even when she knew everyone's business.
"Gloria's cabin?" she asked, while ringing in his purchases. "I heard it was rented. Didn't hear to whom."
"Oh?" said Andrew. He spread his canvas bag and started packing his groceries. "It's a woman, I've seen her on the beach a few times. I haven't seen anyone else. But she must come here for groceries."
"Haven't seen her," Martha said. She seemed displeased by the fact. "How's writing going?"
"Oh, splendidly, as always," Andrew said. This was a return to their usual small talk. "Want me to write you into the book as a cameo?"
Martha laughed and waved him away. Andrew suspected she knew he was lying, but she never challenged him, never asked when he was publishing his next book.
Outside, Andrew ran into Martha's husband, George. He was a scrawny and wrinkly man, wind-beaten like everything else on the coast. He helped maintain several cabins for those who didn't visit regularly and had kept up Andrew's and Emma's cabin for years.
"Fixed that roof, have you?" George asked. "You'd better, it's gonna be a snowy winter, mark my words."
"Snow?" Andrew asked, incredulous, while loading his bags into his car. "You're thinking about snow?"
That autumn had been unusually warm, and even in mid-September the sun was still shining warm. George smiled, cocked his hat and went inside.
George usually knew what he was talking about, and he knew Andrew's cabin. A few days later, Andrew took his advice and climbed up on the roof to check a few places near the chimney where George had said it needed patching. He didn't find them at first but, of course, the old geezer was right. He was an excellent caretaker.
