The letter arrived on a Thursday, which Marguerite would later consider significant. Thursdays had always been the day things changed — her father left on a Thursday, the war ended on a Thursday, and now this: a single sheet of paper, folded twice, informing her that she had inherited a lighthouse on an island she had never heard of.
Holm Skerrie. She turned the name over in her mouth like a pebble. The solicitor's letter described it as "a minor island in the northern archipelago, presently uninhabited." There was a lighthouse, a cottage, and according to the enclosed survey, approximately four acres of rock and heather. The previous keeper — her great-uncle Stellan, a man no one in the family had spoken of — had died in November, alone.
She took the ferry on a morning so grey that the sea and sky were a single surface. The other passengers were few: a woman with a crate of chickens, two men in oilskins who spoke a dialect Marguerite couldn't follow, and a boy of about twelve who sat at the stern and stared at nothing with an intensity that made her uneasy.
The island appeared slowly, as if the fog were deciding whether to reveal it. First the lighthouse — a white column against the grey — then the dark mass of rock beneath it, then the small harbour with its stone quay, half-collapsed. The cottage stood just above the waterline, its windows dark, its roof patched with mismatched slate.
Inside, she found the remains of a life she didn't understand. Star charts pinned to every wall. Clocks — dozens of them — all stopped at different times. A notebook on the kitchen table, filled with entries in a cramped hand, each one dated and each one beginning with the same three words: The light returned.
Marguerite lit the stove, boiled water, and sat in her great-uncle's chair. Outside, the lighthouse beam swept across the water in its slow, mechanical arc. She opened the notebook to the final entry, dated three days before Stellan's death.
The light returned. Stronger this time. I counted fourteen seconds between the flash and the response. Whatever is out there, it is closer now. I have decided not to be afraid.
She closed the notebook and listened to the wind. Somewhere above her, the lighthouse turned and turned, casting its beam into a darkness that, she was beginning to suspect, was not entirely empty.