Read Chapter 12: The Clinic's Secret

The clinic smelled of antiseptic and damp wool, a combination that made Freya think of every waiting room she’d ever sat in as a child, always for her mother, never for herself. The storm had passed overnight, leaving the sky a bruised, watery grey, and the islanders had emerged from their cottages like creatures from hibernation, complaining of blown fences and flooded vegetable patches. Charity had asked her to help sort through the supply cupboard, a task that felt both useful and mercifully free of the lighthouse, the east cliff, and the weight of Alistair’s confession.

She stood on a stool, pulling down cardboard boxes labelled in faded biro—bandages, saline, iodine—when her hand brushed against something cold and metallic at the back of the highest shelf. She pushed aside a stack of dusty gauze rolls and froze.

It was a compact ultrasound machine, still wrapped in its original plastic sheeting, a manufacturer’s sticker gleaming on the side. State-of-the-art, the kind of thing she’d seen in glossy NHS procurement catalogues, portable but powerful, with a sleek curved probe nestled in a foam cut-out beside it. It had never been used. The plastic hadn’t even been peeled away.

“Charity?” Freya called down. “What’s this doing up here?”

Charity looked up from her clipboard of inventory lists. Her face went through a brief, complicated series of expressions—surprise, then something like guilt, then a careful blankness. “Oh. That.” She set the clipboard down and came over, peering up at the machine where Freya perched. “That’s been there for… God, nearly two years now. Ever since Dr. MacNeil’s brother sent it over.”

Freya’s heart gave a dull thud. “Alistair’s brother?”

“Aye. Ewan. He’s a surgeon in Glasgow, works with some big charitable foundation. He arranged it as a donation for the island. Said the ladies wouldn’t have to take the ferry to the mainland for their scans anymore, what with the surgery being so small.” Charity’s voice trailed off, and she looked away, towards the window where the light was shifting from grey to a weak, watery gold. “It arrived on the mail boat, all crated up and fancy. We were that pleased.”

“So why isn’t it in the exam room?” Freya stepped down off the stool, holding the box in her arms. It was lighter than she’d expected, precision-engineered and expensive. She knew what that cost, she’d seen grant proposals for equipment like this being turned down for months, years. “It’s brand new. It’s never been touched.”

Charity opened her mouth, closed it, then sighed. “Alistair wouldn’t let us unpack it. Said it was too complicated for a practice this size, that we’d be spending more time training than using it, that the ferry wasn’t that big a hardship anyway. He put it up there himself, actually. The day it arrived. Barely looked at the thing.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” Freya turned the box over, checking the seams. The tape was still factory-sealed. “This could save someone a four-hour journey. Could catch a complication early. Why would he turn that down?”

Charity shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. He’s not usually like that—he’s the first to fight the health board for better supplies. But this… he wouldn’t discuss it. Morag asked him about it once, at the community hall, and he went all quiet and closed-off. You know the way he gets when he doesn’t want to talk about something. Like a door slamming shut.”

Freya did know. She’d seen that door slam herself, just hours ago, when she’d asked about the keeper who vanished and he’d shut down like a cliff face shearing into the sea. But this was different. This was equipment. Lifesaving equipment. It didn’t fit with the man she’d watched run the light through a storm, his hands steady on the mechanism, his voice low and fierce as he talked about the responsibility of a light that had to keep burning.

“Unless he has a reason,” Freya said slowly, thinking out loud. “A reason that has nothing to do with the clinic.”

Charity gave her a sharp look. “What kind of reason?”

Freya didn’t answer. She was thinking about the lighthouse, about Alistair’s voice on the radio telling the coastguard it was automated. About the way he’d bent over the mechanism, adjusting and nursing it, keeping it alive when everyone else believed it was dead. And then she thought about what Donald had said—that the light had been failing for years, that Alistair’s vigil was a patch on a broken system. A patch. He was good at patching things. At keeping them running just long enough. At hiding the scope of what was wrong.

But an ultrasound machine wasn’t a light. It didn’t need to be hidden. Unless—

“Does the surgery have an X-ray machine?” She asked the question before she’d fully thought it through.

Charity looked startled. “No. We refer everything to the mainland hospital. The health board said it wasn’t cost-effective for a population this small.”

“And the lighthouse. When the board decommissioned it, did they say the same thing? That maintaining a keeper wasn’t cost-effective?”

Charity’s face paled. She was quick, quicker than most. “You’re not saying Alistair’s… that he’s doing both?”

“I’m saying he’s been running a light he’s not supposed to run for three years,” Freya said, her voice low. “He’s been lying to the authorities, hiding the truth, doing it alone. So if he was offered something new and expensive that would make the island look like a viable investment, something that might draw attention to how under-resourced everything actually is…” She trailed off, the idea forming even as she spoke. “He’d reject it. To keep the status quo. To keep people from asking questions.”

Charity stared at her, the clipboard forgotten in her hands. “Questions about what?”

Freya set the ultrasound box down on the table between them. The plastic crinkled accusingly. “About why he’s fighting so hard to save a light that’s already been condemned. About what else he might be hiding.” She looked at Charity. “Who was the keeper before Donald? The one who disappeared?”

Charity’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. For a long moment, she just stood there, her fingers tightening on the clipboard until the plastic buckled. “I don’t—” she started, and then the door opened behind them.

Alistair stood in the doorway, his oilskin jacket still dripping from the morning’s rain, his eyes moving between the ultrasound machine on the table and Freya’s face. He didn’t say anything. But his jaw tightened, and Freya saw the door slam again—not on her, not quite, but on something. He knew what they were discussing. He’d known the moment he’d walked in.

“Charity,” he said quietly, without looking at her. “Could you give us a moment? I need to talk to Freya.”

Charity practically fled, murmuring something about checking on Mrs. Fraser’s dressing. The door clicked shut behind her, and the clinic suddenly felt very small, the ultrasound machine a bright, accusing third presence between them.

Alistair took a step closer. “You found it.”

“Why is it in storage?” Freya asked, her voice steadier than she felt. “Why did you reject a machine that could help your patients?”

He didn’t answer. He just looked at the box, and she saw something flicker across his face—not guilt, not anger, but something closer to sorrow. Deep, bone-wearied sorrow, like the weight he carried had just shifted, revealing a corner of itself.

“It belonged to Eilidh,” he said finally, so quietly she almost didn’t hear him. “The donation. Ewan sent it in her name. It was meant to be her project.”

Freya’s breath caught. “Eilidh. The keeper who vanished.”

He met her eyes then, and she saw the truth of it in him, raw and unguarded. “Aye,” he said. “My sister. She was the keeper before Donald. And she was meant to come back after her training, to run this clinic, to make it something more. This was going to be her gift to the island.” He reached out, his fingers brushing the plastic wrap. “I couldn’t look at it. I couldn’t watch it gather dust and pretend it wasn’t a marker on her grave.”

The room tilted around Freya. The vanished keeper wasn’t a stranger. She was his sister. The grief Donald had spoken of—the grief no one would name—it belonged to Alistair. And it had shaped everything he’d done for three years: the secret light, the lies, the refusal to let go of a world that had taken her.

“Where is she?” Freya whispered. “What happened to her?”

Alistair’s hand fell away from the box. He turned towards the window, his reflection ghosting in the glass. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, his voice hollow. “You and Morag. You’ll see where she went. You’ll understand why I can’t talk about it.” He paused, and when he spoke again, there was a fracture in his voice she hadn’t heard before. “But you have to promise me something, Freya. Whatever you find out there—whatever you see—you don’t make it a story. Not until the light goes out.”

The words hung in the air between them, heavy as the storm that had just passed. Freya’s hand went to her pocket, her fingers closing around the compass, cold and solid. She didn’t promise him anything.