Chapter Two: Port Ellis

The radio crackled with somebody else's emergency. A fishing boat out past the shoals. A road washed out on Highway 9. A woman asking, over and over, whether anyone had seen her son's truck.

"Cape Halloran to Port Ellis," Wren said for the fourth time. "My father is sick. We need a doctor."

When the answer came it was a man's voice, tired and kind. "Port Ellis copies, Cape Halloran. Nobody's crossing the bridge tonight, sweetheart. Can you keep him warm?"

She could. She did. She dragged the quilt from the kitchen and the good pillow from her own bed, and she sat with her father on the floor of the oil room while the light turned above them, sending its long white arm out across the water every twelve seconds.

"There's a ledger," he said, near midnight. "Bottom drawer. You should read it."

"Later."

"Now, Wren."

The ledger was older than the lighthouse. The handwriting changed every few decades, but the entries did not. Each one was a date, a time, and a single line: Light held. They did not come ashore.

She read it twice. "Who," she said slowly, "didn't come ashore?"

Her father closed his eyes. "Turn the page," he said. "There's a reason we never let it go dark."