Read Chapter 16: The Protest

The first sound wasn’t raised voices. It was the clatter of a metal bucket hitting the pier, followed by the low, building hum of an engine—not one, but several. Freya had come down to the harbour at first light to capture establishing shots of the village waking, but the village was already awake.

A dozen islanders, maybe more, had gathered at the far end of the jetty. Men she recognised from the pub, women she’d seen at the post office, old Donald hunched on a wooden crate with a hand-painted board propped against his knees. It read, in uneven red letters: KEEP OUR LIGHT.

Morag stood at the centre, her grey hair whipped loose by the wind, a paper megaphone in her fist.

“It’s not about nostalgia,” Morag was saying, her voice crackling over the headland. “It’s about safety. When the satellite fails, when the power goes, when the sea decides it doesn’t care about your fancy technology—there’s nothing out there but rock. You all know it. You’ve all lived it.”

A murmur of assent rippled through the crowd. Freya lifted her camera, adjusted the focus. The protest had been organised in a single night—Morag’s doing, by the look of it—and it had drawn more people than Freya expected. She panned across their faces and saw something she hadn’t anticipated: fear. Real, present fear, not sentimentality. These weren’t people mourning a postcard image. They were people who’d watched ships run aground in winter storms, who’d counted the seconds between flashes to know they were still alive.

Freya filmed. She moved among the crowd, capturing a woman clutching a child’s hand, an old fisherman with a placard that read THE SEA DOES NOT FORGET. She caught Morag mid-sentence, caught Donald’s slow nod, caught the way the light bent over the water and made the whole scene look like something out of a film she might have made years ago, before she stopped believing in endings.

But she kept returning to the same frame: the edge of the crowd, where he should have been.

Alistair wasn’t there.

She lowered the camera. Scanned the gathered faces again—half of the island must have been here, from the butcher’s apprentice to the headmistress of the island’s two-room school—but no tall figure in a waxed jacket with his collar turned up against the wind. No doctor standing at the back, watching with the quiet reserve he wore like a second skin.

Morag’s voice rose over the crowd: “We’re not asking for much. We’re asking them to see us. To see our water, our weather, our ways. We’re asking them to remember that some things can’t be switched off.”

Freya’s finger found the record button again, then stopped. She made a decision she didn’t fully understand, and lowered the camera entirely.

“Morag,” she said, stepping close, “I need to find Alistair.”

Morag’s eyes flickered with something—recognition, perhaps, or worry. “He wasn’t answering his door when I knocked at six.”

“Which door?”

“The clinic. He sleeps there more than he sleeps at the cottage.” Morag hesitated. “He knows about the protest. I told him last night after you left. He said it wouldn’t change anything.”

“He’s wrong.”

Morag glanced at the crowd, then back at Freya. “He won’t think so.”

Freya left the protest without filming another frame.

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The wind picked up as she crossed the headland, a hard offshore gust that flattened the grass and made the distant protest chants sound like the cries of gulls. The cliff path was narrow and slick with rain from the night before. She moved carefully, boots finding the familiar grooves in the rock, and eventually the shape of him came into view.

He was standing at the eastern edge of the headland, where the ground fell away to the sea and the memorial stone rose from the grass like a grey tooth. He had his back to her, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the wind. She recognised the posture—the same one she’d seen in village photographs of him at funerals, at the harbour when the boats came in late. The posture of a man waiting for something that was never going to come.

She approached slowly. The grass was wet underfoot, and the sound of her steps was swallowed by the crash of waves below. When she was within ten feet, he spoke without turning.

“You should be filming the protest.”

“You should be at the protest.”

He let out a breath that was half laugh, half something else. “They asked me to speak, you know. Morag did. Said a doctor’s words might carry more weight.” He finally turned, and she saw what he was holding: the compass. Eilidh’s compass. It glinted in the pale light, its glass face cracked and clouded with seawater that had never fully dried. “I told her I had nothing to say.”

“You had something to say to me,” Freya said. “Last night. About the closure. About why you’re hiding the ultrasound machine instead of using it.”

Alistair looked out at the sea. “Different things.”

“They’re the same thing. You’re just better at hiding from one than the other.”

He didn’t deny it. The wind tugged at his jacket, and she saw his fingers tighten around the compass, knew he could feel the worn brass under his thumb, the same way she could feel the weight of it in her own pocket when she carried it. She’d returned it to him the morning after the storeroom confrontation, left it on his desk without a note. He hadn’t mentioned it since. She hadn’t expected him to.

“I’ve been standing here for an hour,” he said. “Trying to decide whether to throw it in.”

“You won’t.”

“I’ve thrown it before. Thrown it and gone back for it when the tide was out.” His jaw tightened. “It always comes back. Like everything else. The grief, the guilt, the questions I can’t answer. It all comes back.”

Freya stepped closer, until she was standing at his side, looking out at the same grey water. “The islanders are down there fighting for the lighthouse. For your sister’s lighthouse. And you’re up here holding her compass, waiting to throw it away.”

“It’s the only thing I have left of her.”

“It’s not.” She nodded toward the memorial stone, marked with a fresh sprig of heather laid against its base. “You visit her. You leave flowers. You put her name on a machine to help people who’ll never know she existed. That’s not nothing. That’s not—” She struggled for the word. “That’s not a man who’s already given up.”

Alistair’s face crumpled, briefly, like paper crushed on the first attempt to fold it. He looked at the compass, then at her. “The closure is in twelve days. Not a month. Twelve days, Freya. I checked the board’s filings this morning before the protest started. They moved the date up—they’ve been moving it up all along. The public announcement was never real.”

“The islanders don’t know.”

“They know. They’ve guessed. Morag’s protest isn’t about stopping the closure. It’s about making sure someone witnesses them fighting.” His voice cracked. “That’s all we can do, isn’t it? Fight something we can’t win, so that at least we’re seen.”

Freya’s hand moved to her pocket, where her own compass—his compass, Eilidh’s—had sat for days before she gave it back. Now her pocket was empty, and she felt the absence like a missing tooth.

“What if you didn’t have to lose it?” she said quietly. “What if there was something you could do? Something that would keep the lighthouse operational long enough to force the board to reconsider?”

He looked at her with a weary, disbelieving expression. “You think you can film a protest that changes corporate minds?”

“No,” she said. “I think you can.” She stepped aside so he could see the path behind her, the way back toward the village, toward the harbour where Morag’s voice was still carrying across the water. “But you have to be there for them to hear it.”

For a long moment, he didn’t move. The compass stayed in his hand, and the wind kept blowing, and the sea kept crashing against the rocks below. Then, slowly, he closed his fingers around it, and slid it back into his pocket.

“I’m not going to make promises,” he said.

“I’m not asking for promises.” She stepped back to let him pass. “I’m asking you to come down from the cliff.”

His gaze shifted to her, and something in it had changed—not softened, not resolved, but real. Present. He gave a single nod, then turned and began to walk back toward the village.

Freya stood at the headland a moment longer, watching the distance between them grow. Then she raised her camera, framed the retreating figure in the viewfinder, and followed.

Before she descended the path, she paused, looking back at the memorial stone. The heather was still fresh. The stone was still grey. And somewhere in the water below, in the deep green and black of the North Atlantic, a body that had never been recovered still remained unclaimed.

Twelve days, she thought. She lowered the camera and hurried after him.