Read Chapter 13: The Compass Connection

The ultrasound machine hummed to life in the storeroom, its glow cutting through the dim light like a small sun. Freya hadn't meant to turn it on. She'd only wanted to see the brand, the model number, something she could verify from Edinburgh. But her hand had found the power switch before her mind caught up, and now the screen displayed a frozen test pattern, waiting.

Alistair had left her alone with it. A mistake, or maybe a test of his own.

She pulled the compass from her pocket. It was warm from her body heat, the brass case worn smooth at the edges. She'd carried it for days now without really examining it. The needle still pointed north, unwavering, as if it hadn't spent who knew how long in the wet grass of a cliff edge.

Freya turned the compass over. That's when she noticed the engraving.

It wasn't decorative. The marks were small, precise, stamped into the brass like a signature. A maker's mark, the kind of thing she'd seen on maritime antiques at auction houses. JM & SONS. GLASGOW. 1932. And below it, something fainter, scratched by hand. She angled the compass toward the ultrasound screen's glow and squinted.

A date. 14 March.

Freya's breath caught. March 14th. Three years ago, almost to the day of Morag's vague warnings and Donald's careful silences. The anniversary of something.

She pulled out her phone, grateful for the storm's temporary reprieve and the weak signal that came with it. Her search was clumsy, her thumbs thick with anticipation. But she knew the keywords now. She had the date. She had the name of a maker whose workshop had closed decades ago.

It took her four tries before she found it.

A news brief from the *Glasgow Herald* archive. March 1987, not three years ago. *Lighthouse keeper's daughter dies in rescue attempt off East Cliff.*

Freya read it twice, then a third time, her eyes tracing the same words until they blurred.

Elizabeth Eilidh MacAllister, twenty-nine, daughter of keeper Robert MacAllister of the Inverleith Light. She'd gone out in a small boat during a squall to reach a fishing vessel that had run aground on the rocks below the east cliff. The fishermen had been saved. She had not.

Freya scrolled deeper. The article mentioned the community's grief. It mentioned a memorial service attended by nearly every island family. It mentioned that Elizabeth had been training as a nurse, that she'd hoped to open a clinic on the island.

A clinic. Like the one with the hidden ultrasound machine dedicated in her name.

The pieces began to shift in Freya's mind, rearranging themselves into a shape she didn't want to acknowledge. It happened three years ago. Three years ago, Alistair's sister had gone into the water. Three years ago, the light had started failing, and Alistair had come to the island. Three years ago, the first keeper had vanished, replaced by a man who ran a lighthouse that wasn't supposed to need running.

But the date didn't match. The article was from 1987.

Freya refreshed the search. She typed Alistair's surname, Elidh's full name, the name of the island. She filtered by date, by relevance, by anything that might give her the truth in a single clean page.

It didn't come that way. But the fragments were enough.

Eilidh Robertson. That was her name. Not MacAllister. Robertson. She'd been the keeper before Donald. She'd come to the island two years after the old keeper had retired. She'd been a nurse first, on the mainland, but she'd grown up in a lighthouse family. She knew the rhythms. She knew the sea.

And she'd vanished during a rescue attempt of her own.

The reports were thin, unofficial. A blog post from a maritime historian. A mention in a parliamentary inquiry about island safety protocols. A charity fund that had been set up for a rescue boat, never completed.

Freya's hands were shaking as she set the compass down on the ultrasound machine's cold surface. She thought about the memorial Donald refused to visit. The way Morag had choked on her tea at the word *witnessing*. The way Alistair had gone so pale when Freya had held up the compass that he might as well have been a ghost.

He'd known what it was. Of course he'd known. It was his sister's compass.

Freya didn't hear the door open. She only noticed Alistair when his shadow fell across the storeroom floor, cutting through the machine's glow. He stood in the doorway, his face unreadable, his hands red from the cold.

"Freya." Not a question. A statement.

She didn't look away from him. She picked up the compass, held it out to him, palm open.

"March 14th," she said. "That's when she died, isn't it? Three years ago you came here. You took over the tower. You hid the truth about what happened to her, and you've been trying to keep the light alive ever since. Because you think if the light goes out—" her voice cracked, and she forced herself to breathe, "—you think it's your fault. All of it. That she was out that night because someone had to be, and it should have been you."

Alistair was very still. He looked past her, at the ultrasound machine, at the equipment she'd helped unbox. At the memory of a sister who was supposed to have used it.

"The islanders blame themselves," Freya said, quieter. "But you blame yourself the most."

He didn't deny it. His compass sat in her open palm, and he looked at it like it was something that had been lost to sea for years and had only just floated back to shore.