My father answered on the fourth ring.
“Dad.” My voice broke. “Dad, it’s me.”
There was a long silence. Then he said, “Is he listening?”
“Yes. Dad, please. He just wants you to tell the truth about Lily Hale. Please, just tell them, and I can come home.”
Another silence. I could hear ice clinking in a glass.
“Nora,” my father said, in his calm business voice. “Listen to me carefully. There is nothing to tell. I need you to stay quiet, do what he says, and not make this worse. My people are handling it.”
“Handling it how?”
“Quietly,” he said. “This family does not need a scandal. Do not say anything to anyone.”
I looked across the table at Rowan. His face had gone white.
“Dad,” I whispered. “Did you do it?”
The line went dead.
I sat there with the phone in my hand. Rowan didn’t say I told you so. He didn’t say anything at all. He came around the table and knelt in front of my chair.
He took the phone out of my hand. Then he put his forehead against my knees, and his shoulders shook. I realized he was crying. Not for himself. For me.
Something inside me broke open then. I put my hand in his hair. I held on.
The Fisherman
On day twenty-four, a storm drove a lobster boat onto the rocks.
The fisherman was an older man named Cal. He came up to the house with a bleeding head, looking for help. I opened the door before Rowan could stop me.
Cal looked at me. He looked at my bare legs, my wool socks, and the bruises on my wrists. I saw him understand.
“Miss,” he said quietly. “You okay?”
I opened my mouth to say help me.
Rowan came up behind me. He put one hand on the back of my neck, gentle, almost loving. Cal’s eyes went to that hand.
“She’s fine,” Rowan said.
Cal reached into his coat. Maybe for a phone. Maybe for a knife. I never found out. Rowan moved so fast I barely saw it. There was a crack, a cry, and Cal was on his knees on the porch, holding a broken wrist.
Rowan dragged him back down to his boat. I watched from the window as he pushed it off the rocks and into the storm. I don’t know if Cal made it home.
When Rowan came back, there was blood on his knuckles.
“You were going to let him take you,” he said.
“Yes.”
He crossed the room and pressed me against the wall. Not hard. But there was nowhere to go. “Your father doesn’t want you,” he said. “The world forgot you in a week. I checked the news, Nora. There’s nothing. Nobody is looking. Nobody but me.”
“Then let me go.”
His hand slid up to my throat and rested there. Not squeezing. Just holding. Just owning.
“I can’t,” he said. “God help me, I tried. I can’t.”
That was the night I went to his room without a bargain. No price. I told myself it was the only way to make him trust me. The only way off the island.
That was a lie. I know that now.
The Thirtieth Night
On the thirtieth night, my father came.
I saw the lights first. A fast white boat, cutting through the black water toward the island. No police lights. No sirens.
Rowan saw them too. He was loading a rifle by the time I reached the kitchen.
“He came,” I said. I didn’t know what I felt. Relief. Dread. “Maybe he came to confess.”
Rowan laughed once. It was not a nice sound. “Men like your father don’t confess, Nora. They clean up.”
He took my arm and led me up the spiral stairs of the lighthouse. Round and round, a hundred and twelve steps, to the lamp room at the top. He pushed me down behind the iron wall.
“Stay here,” he said. “Whatever you hear, you stay here.”
“Rowan…”
He kissed me. It was quick and hard and tasted like goodbye. Then he was gone.
The shooting started three minutes later.
I counted the shots. Four. Then six. Then a man screaming. Then a silence so long that I thought my heart would stop.
Then footsteps on the stairs. Slow ones. More than one person.
My father came into the lamp room first. He looked older than I remembered. He wore a nice wool coat, like he had come to a dinner party. Behind him was a big man with a pistol and blood on his sleeve.
“Nora,” my father said. “Thank God. Are you hurt?”
I stood up slowly. “Where’s Rowan?”
“Taken care of.” He came toward me with his arms open. Then he stopped. He looked at the camera on the shelf. The one Rowan had used for the videos.
“Did he make you say anything?” my father asked. “On camera? About me?”
“No.”
“Did he tell you things? About the accident?”
I didn’t answer fast enough.
My father sighed. It was the same sigh he used when a deal went wrong. He looked at the big man and gave a tiny nod.
I didn’t understand. Then the man raised his gun and pointed it at me.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” my father said. And he did look sorry, the way you look sorry when you sell a car you liked. “The story is simple. A madman took you. He killed you before I could save you. Everyone will know I tried.”
The gun was so close I could see down the barrel.
A shape came up the last step behind them.
Rowan was covered in blood. Half of it was his own. He hit the big man from behind, and they both crashed into the great glass lens. It cracked with a sound like ice breaking on a lake. The gun went off. Glass rained down on all of us.
They fought out on the narrow iron walkway around the lamp room. The wind was screaming. I saw Rowan get his arm around the man’s neck. I saw them hit the railing. I saw the old railing bend.
And I saw them both go over, into the dark, toward the rocks and the sea a hundred feet below.
I screamed his name. The wind took it.
My father was on the floor in the broken glass. His face was cut. He looked up at me.
The big man’s gun was lying at my feet.
I picked it up.
“Nora,” my father said. “Sweetheart. Think about this. Think about who you are.”
I thought about it for a very long time. My hand did not shake.
Then I put the gun in my coat pocket, walked down a hundred and twelve stairs, and used the radio Rowan never let me touch to call the Coast Guard.
After
They searched the water for nine days. They found the big man’s body on the third day, caught in the rocks. They never found Rowan.
My father told the police a beautiful story. A brave father. A crazy stalker. A rescue. The news loved it. He went on TV and cried real tears.
I told the police I didn’t remember much. I said I was drugged most of the time. Trauma, the doctors called it. They were very kind to me.
I never told anyone what my father tried to do in the lamp room. I never told anyone about the call, or the bargain, or the socks, or the piano.
I went home. I taught piano again. I smiled at little boys playing “Ode to Joy.” I took the pills the doctors gave me.
I did not sleep.
Every night, I sat at my own piano, my expensive, perfectly tuned piano, and I played the slow songs for a doorway with nobody standing in it.
One Year Later
My father died in November. One year to the day after I was taken.
His housekeeper found him at his desk in the morning. The police said heart attack at first. Then they found the papers.
It was a confession. Twelve typed pages, signed in his own hand. The party. The bike. The girl. The paint report he paid to lose. The witness he paid to forget. And on the last page, one more thing: the night on Gray Rock Island, and the gun he told his man to point at his own daughter.
It was all over the news by lunch. Nobody could explain how a healthy man’s heart just stopped. Nobody could explain why the only fingerprints on those pages were his.
I could.
That night I came home late. My apartment was dark. The door was locked, the way I had left it.
But my piano was open.
On the keys sat a smooth gray stone. The kind that covers every beach on Gray Rock Island. Under it was a folded note in handwriting I would know anywhere.
He told the truth. You’re free now.
Come home.
I stood there in the dark for a long time, holding that stone until it was warm in my hand.
Then I went into my bedroom, took my suitcase down from the closet, and started to pack.
I didn’t pack any shoes.
