Emma would have seen it from the beach, or from the marina on a clear day—the silhouette on the horizon, the tower rising above the tree line of the little island. She would have looked at it with her photographer’s eye and seen what I see when I look at a well-built boat—something worth paying attention to.
I push the throttle forward. The bow lifts. The marina shrinks behind me.
The water is still calm—the storm hasn’t reached the surface yet, but I can feel it in the air. That pressure. That weight. The way the atmosphere gets heavy before it breaks open. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty, before the wind picks up and the water goes from flat to ugly.
I don’t think about why I’m doing this. I don’t think about the fact that I could have called her. I have her number. I could have sent a text—storm coming, head back now—and gone back to my charter bookings and let her handle it.
I didn’t call. I didn’t text. I got on my boat.
There’s probably a metaphor in there. I’m choosing not to examine it.
I seeDawson’s Whaler before I see the island—tied off to the old dock on the leeward side, rocking gently in water that’s starting to get ideas. The dock is half-collapsed, more memory than structure.
I pull alongside and tie off my own boat. She’s used the one piling that’s still solid. Good knot. Dawson definitelytaught her that. The wind is picking up—not dangerous yet, but purposeful. The kind of wind that’s going somewhere and wants you to know it’s coming.
Two boats tied to a crumbling dock on an uninhabited island with a storm rolling in. This is a scenario from a survival manual, not a love story. Although, given how the last few weeks have gone, I’m starting to think my life doesn’t know the difference.
The island is small—maybe three acres of sand and scrub. The lighthouse stands at the center, rising out of the vegetation like it grew there. Up close, it’s exactly what I expected—white paint long gone to gray, the brick underneath showing through in patches like an old coat wearing thin. The door at the base is open. Not broken—just open. The latch rusted away years ago and nobody came to replace it.
She’s inside. I know because her camera bag is on the step, and because I can hear her—not her voice, but the sound of her shoes on the iron stairs. The spiral staircase that winds up the center of the tower, every step ringing out in the hollow space like a bell.
I step inside.
The lighthouse is cool and dark and smells like salt and rust and old concrete. The stairs spiral upward in a tight helix, the iron treads worn smoothby a century of keepers who climbed this same path to tend a light that kept people from crashing into the rocks. The walls are curved and close. Light comes from above—the lantern room windows, grimy but intact, letting in a gray glow that shifts as clouds move across the sky.
“Emma.”
The footsteps stop.
“Paul?” Her voice comes from above, echoing down the stairwell. “What are you—how did you —”
“Storm’s coming. There’s a small craft advisory starting at three.” I’m climbing now, my boots on the iron stairs, the sound ringing in the cylinder of the tower. “You need to head back before the wind picks up.”
“I checked the weather this morning. It said partly cloudy.”
“It changed. Weather changes on the coast. That’s why you check it more than once.”
“I was going to check again before I left.”
“When? After the lightning starts?”
I reach the landing where the stairs open onto the watch room—the level just below the lantern room, with windows on all four sides. She’s standing at the south-facing window, camera in her hands, herface lit by the gray light coming through the salt-crusted glass.
She’s been shooting. I can tell by the way she’s holding the camera—not ready to shoot, but just finished. Satisfied. The way she looks when she’s captured something she’s been seeing in her head and finally got it on the sensor.
“The light in here is incredible,” she says. “The way it comes through the glass—it’s diffused and directional at the same time. I could shoot portraits in here that would make people cry.”
“People are going to cry if we don’t get off this island before that storm hits.”
She looks past me, toward the south window. The sky has changed in the twenty minutes since I left the marina. The wall of clouds is closer now, darker, the kind of dark that means business. The water below has gone from blue-green to steel gray, and the whitecaps are starting—small ones, but building.
“Oh,” she says.
“Yeah. Oh.”
“How long do we have?”
I cross to the window and look. The wind is bending the sea oats on the island flat. The air pressure has dropped enough that I can feelit in my sinuses. And to the south, the first flicker of something bright inside the cloud wall.
