I watched the last ferry leave from the harbour wall with my bag at my feet and my phone in my pocket, buzzing with the name of an editor I no longer answer to. I am Liv, thirty-four, a journalist by trade and, for the last three weeks, by nothing else, and I let the boat go on purpose. No one knows that. I would like to keep it that way.
By six the sea has come up and the harbour café has shut, and the only light on the whole headland is the one at the top of the lighthouse.
The keeper opens the door before I knock. He is tall, weathered, my age or a little more, and he looks at me the way you look at a delivery you didn't order. “Ferry's gone,” he says.
“I noticed.”
“There's no hotel.”
“I noticed that too.” The wind takes my hood and the rain gets in and I stand there dripping on his step while he decides. His name is Soren; it's painted on the tin box by the door. He does not want company. I can read it in every line of him. But he steps back and jerks his head, and I am inside a round room with a stove and one chair and a table covered in charts.
He gives me a towel and a mug of something dark and does not ask my name. I don't offer it. We sit, him on an upturned crate, me in his chair, and the whole tower groans in the wind like a ship, and it is the first hour in three weeks that no one has expected me to say anything at all.
Then he says, without looking up from the chart, “You let the boat go.” Not a question. I open my mouth to lie, and the lamp above us swings its beam once across the black sea, and I find that in this room, with this man, I can't.
