Margen
The logbook spoke of a night Una didn’t remember living and yet had written down in her own hand.
It told how, nine winters ago, a man came up to the lighthouse to shelter from a storm. That she, younger then, put out the light for a single hour so he wouldn’t have to leave at dawn. And that in that hour of darkness, a fishing boat called the Aurora searched for the lighthouse in the blackness, couldn’t find it, and broke apart against the southern rocks.
Twelve names. The logbook listed them all. Beneath them, a sentence Una read three times without understanding it and on the fourth understood all too well: «He comes back every year, at high tide, to ask me for the same hour of darkness. Every year I tell him no. And every year he takes one away with me in my memory.»
She looked up. On the other side of the glass, through the rain, two position lights bobbed as they neared the coast. A boat. A real one. Now. And it was heading straight for the southern rocks.