Read Chapter 37: The Missing Person Found

The morning light came thin and grey through the cottage windows, and Freya had been packing for less than ten minutes before she realised she was doing it wrong.

She stood in the middle of Alistair's spare room—her room now, though the thought still felt strange—and looked at the neat piles of clothes on the bed. Edinburgh clothes. A lifetime of city-appropriate neutrals that seemed to belong to someone else entirely. She picked up a charcoal blazer and held it at arm's length, as if it might explain itself.

"You're not coming back, are you?" she murmured.

The blazer said nothing.

Freya sighed and folded it anyway. She'd need *something* to wear when she told Hugh in person. Her editor had been surprisingly patient on the phone—"Take the time you need, Freya, the rough cut's fine"—but there was a conversation coming that couldn't happen through a speaker. She'd booked the ferry for Monday. Three days. Enough time to pack, to say goodbye to Edinburgh properly, to come back with her life in two suitcases and a camera bag.

The compass sat on the bedside table. She'd taken to keeping it there, within reach, a small brass weight of promise. She picked it up now and ran her thumb over the scratched glass. Duncan's compass, she corrected herself. Duncan's guilt, once. Now, hers to carry differently.

She was still holding it when she heard Alistair's boots on the stairs.

"You're up early," he said, leaning against the doorframe. His hair was still damp from the shower, and he was wearing the jumper she'd bought him in Stornoway two weeks ago—the blue one that made his eyes look like the water on a calm day.

"Couldn't sleep. Too much to think about."

"Anything I can help with?"

Freya smiled and set the compass down. "Maybe. Do you know where I put the filming notes from the first week? The ones with the lantern-room schedule?"

Alistair frowned. "Did you leave them in the boathouse?"

"No, I—" She stopped. The memory surfaced uninvited: Duncan's old logbook, the one she'd found her first week on the island, hidden behind the loose panel in the lantern room. She'd photographed it for context, never read it fully. The handwriting had been so cramped, so hurried. She'd meant to go back.

"I need to check something," she said, already moving past him.

---

The lighthouse tower was cool and dim, the spiral staircase worn smooth by a century of feet. Freya climbed quickly, the way she'd learned to in the weeks of filming—two steps at a time, hand on the inner wall. The lantern room was as she remembered it: brass fittings gleaming, the great lens standing silent and dark now that the automated light had been restored.

She found the panel immediately. Loose planking, third from the left, behind the oil locker. She'd memorised its position weeks ago without realising she had.

The logbook was still there.

It was smaller than she remembered. Leather-bound, the spine cracked, the pages yellowed and soft at the edges. Duncan's handwriting filled the early entries—weather reports, tide tables, the ordinary rhythms of keeper's life. His last entry was dated four days before the storm.

*Wind rising from the southwest. Barometer falling fast. Eilidh says the sea knows before we do.*

Freya turned the page. Blank. Then another. Blank.

She was about to close it when she noticed something odd about the back cover—a slight bulge, as if something had been pressed between the leather and the last page.

She worked her fingers into the gap and pulled out a folded sheet of paper, yellowed and creased along sharp lines, as if it had been hidden in a hurry and never opened again.

The handwriting was not Duncan's. It was smaller, rounder, more careful—the handwriting of someone who wanted every word to count.

*If you find this, you are someone who looked. That makes you braver than most.*

*I am writing this on the night before the storm. Duncan does not know. He would not understand, and I cannot watch him tear himself apart over what he cannot change.*

*Everyone on this island believes I died in the water that night. They believe it because they need to believe it. Because if I lived, then someone must have failed—and it is easier to mourn than to blame.*

*But I did not die. I swam until the current took me past the rocks, and I came ashore on Eriskay, three miles and a world away. There is a woman there—Mairi—who knew my mother. She took me in, gave me a name that was not mine, taught me to be someone new.*

*I have watched this island from across the water for two years. I have watched Duncan blame himself, watched Alistair carry that blame like a stone in his chest. They built a memorial for me at the headland. I have visited it in the dark, when no one could see.*

*I want to go home. But I cannot go home in a grave. And I cannot face the island that decided I was easier to mourn than to question.*

*If you find this, tell Alistair—no. Do not tell him. Let him find me himself, if he ever has the courage to look.*

*The lantern does not lie. It never has. Watch it, and you will understand.*

Freya read the letter three times, her hands trembling slightly. She looked up at the great lens, at its silent glass, at the light that had been burning again only since the night of the rescue.

*The lantern does not lie.*

She crossed to the lens and looked at it differently this time—not as a machine, but as a message. Duncan had been keeper. He'd have known the codes, the old signals used between stations. A pattern of flashes, a sequence of durations, a language of light.

She'd filmed that lens from every angle over the past months. She knew its patterns by heart now, knew the automated sequence the way she knew her own breathing.

But there was another sequence in Duncan's logbook—recorded in the margins of his entries, small tick marks she'd dismissed as tide calculations. She flipped back through the pages, counting.

Four short. One long. Three short.

She closed her eyes. The Morse code came to her from a documentary she'd made years ago about wartime signals: four short, one long, three short.

*E-L-I.*

Her heart stopped.

She flipped forward, scanning the margins more carefully now. The pattern repeated in the weeks before the storm, always in Duncan's cramped hand, always in the margins facing the sea. Four short, one long, three short. Two short, one long, two short, one long. Four short, one long, three short.

*E-L-I. Something.*

She looked at the logbook, then at the letter, then back at the logbook. The letter was dated the night before the storm. Duncan's entries ended the same night.

He'd known she was leaving. He'd known, and he'd helped her, and he'd hidden his own guilt behind a memorial he didn't deserve.

Freya sat down heavily on the bench beneath the lantern. Her phone was in her pocket, but she didn't reach for it. She stared at the letter in her hands, at the small, round handwriting of a woman everyone on the island had mourned for two years.

She thought about Alistair's face when he'd shown her Duncan's compass. She thought about the weight he'd carried, the guilt he'd shouldered for a brother's death that had never been a death at all. She thought about the memorial at the headland, the small stone cairn the islanders had built for a woman who was alive on Eriskay, three miles away, watching.

And she thought about what this would do to him.

She was still sitting there when she heard footsteps on the stairs.

"This is where you went," Alistair said. His voice was gentle, concerned. He stepped into the lantern room and saw her face. "Freya? What's wrong?"

She looked at him—at his blue eyes, at the jumper she'd chosen for him, at the man who had finally, after two years, begun to let go of a guilt he'd never needed to carry.

She didn't know how to tell him that the guilt he'd buried was based on a lie. That the brother he'd mourned had known more than he ever said. That the woman he blamed himself for losing had been alive this whole time, hiding across the water, waiting for someone to look.

And that the lantern—the light they'd fought so hard to save—had been telling the truth all along.