“We’re not leaving,” I say.
“What?”
“The wind’s already too high for the Whaler. Dawson’s boat sits low. It’ll take water over the bow in this chop. And if there’s lightning —” I shake my head. “We’re staying until it passes.”
“How long?”
“Could be twenty minutes. Could be two hours.”
The first crack of thunder rolls across the water like a drum. Not close yet, but coming. The lighthouse windows rattle in their frames.
“We’re stuck here,” she says.
“We’reshelteredhere. This lighthouse has stood through worse than a summer squall.”
“We’re stuck in a lighthouse.”
“You’re repeating yourself.”
“I’m processing.”
Wonderful. Excellent. I’m trapped on an island in an abandoned lighthouse with the woman I almost kissed, a storm that’s settling in like it’s ordered room service, and no way off until the weather decides we’ve suffered enough. If this were a novel in that book club of hers, the ladies would be circling thischapter with a pen and writingfinallyin the margins.
Rain hits. Not gradually—all at once, like someone turned a faucet on full blast. It hammers the windows and the roof and the gallery above us, a wall of sound that fills the tower and makes the whole world shrink to this room. This curved, gray-lit, salt-smelling room with two windows and an iron staircase and a woman holding a camera and a man who chased her across open water because he couldn’t stand the thought of her out here alone in a storm.
I should probably stop pretending that was about boat safety.
The rain doesn’t let up.It gets worse—heavier, louder, the kind of rain that turns the air white and makes the ocean disappear. Through the south window, I can’t see the water anymore. Just gray. The lighthouse groans—not dangerously, just the sound of an old structure settling into a familiar fight. It’s done this before. It’ll do it again.
Emma sits on the floor beneath the east window, her back against the curved wall, camera in herlap. I’m standing at the west window because if I sit down, this becomes something. Two people on the floor of a lighthouse waiting out a storm is a situation. It requires conversation. It requires addressing what almost happened on that beach and why I fled to my truck like a middle-aged man in a romantic comedy, which—and I cannot stress this enough—I am not.
“You came after me,” she says.
“You took a boat into open water with a storm system approaching.”
“I didn’t know the storm was coming.”
“I know. That’s why I came.”
She’s quiet for a moment. The rain fills the silence the way it fills everything—completely.
“Paul.”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you just call?”
Because calling would have been the practical thing. The sane thing. The thing a landlord does, or a neighbor, or a responsible marina owner with functioning emotional boundaries.
I didn’t call because calling wasn’t enough. Because I needed to see her. Needed to know with my own eyes that she was above the waterline and under shelter and not out there in the gray.
This is what I’ve become. A man who boards avessel in deteriorating conditions because a text message felt insufficient. My insurance agent would have questions. My father would have a standing ovation.
“I don’t know,” I say, which is the biggest lie I’ve told sinceit was a safety issue.
She looks at me. In the gray light of the watch room, with rain hammering the glass and thunder rolling across the water, she looks at me the way she looked at me on the beach—patient, steady, waiting for something she’s not sure I’m brave enough to give her.
“You do know,” she says. “You just won’t say it.”
