The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter

On clear nights Mara could see the other light, a steady amber eye across three miles of black water. Her father had warned her about the Selwyn family who kept it—competitors for the salvage bounties, he said, not to be trusted. But her father was gone now, and the loneliness of the lamp room was a weight she had not expected. One evening, out of boredom, she blinked her great lantern in a pattern: three short, one long. To her astonishment, the far light answered. Three short, one long. So began their conversation, spelled in flashes across the strait—weather and jokes at first, then confessions neither would have dared to speak aloud. She did not know his face. She knew the rhythm of his hand on the shutter, the way he lingered on certain words. When the winter storms came and the far light went dark for six nights, Mara stood at her window until dawn, blinking the same message into the gale, again and again: are you there, are you there, are you there.