Read Chapter 5: A Patient's Plea

The dawn came grey and windless, the sea flat as slate. Freya had been waiting on the harbour wall since five, camera bag at her feet, jumper pulled tight against the damp. She'd expected Morag to appear from the post office path, all cryptic purpose. Instead, the only movement was a single figure rowing out to the *Isabel Rose*, a small fishing boat moored thirty yards off.

She raised her camera almost by instinct, framing the rower's back. Then lowered it. She hadn't come to hijack someone's morning. The promise she'd made herself on the ferry—document, don't intrude—felt flimsier with every hour on this island.

The day brightened slowly, and Morag never came.

Freya walked the main street, filming nothing, letting the island play out in front of her lens without pressing record. A woman hung washing. Two men repaired a net outside the general store. The pub door was still bolted. It was the mundane choreography of a place that didn't know it was being watched, and that was exactly the problem. Her producer wanted grit, tension, a story of decline. All she had was laundry and silence.

Then the sound of an outboard motor cut the quiet.

A skiff came around the headland, white hull smacking the chop, steering straight for the small concrete jetty beside the ferry landing. Freya recognised the boat's name before she could read it: *The Last Light*. A mainland fisherman, hauling boxes of mackerel to the island market, judging by his usual Tuesday run.

But there was no fish aboard. Only a man at the tiller and, clutched in his arms, a small bundle wrapped in oilskin.

The boat bumped the jetty and the man leapt out, boots slapping stone, already shouting before he'd tied off.

"Munro! I need Munro!"

Alistair appeared at the clinic door before the shout finished echoing. He didn't run, but his stride was long and hard. Freya lowered her camera, and for a moment she was just a witness.

"Calum." Alistair reached the jetty as the fisherman laid the bundle on the stone. The oilskin parted to reveal a boy of maybe four, face flushed scarlet, lips parted and breath whistling thin. "What happened?"

"Fever since last night. Couldn't break it. An hour ago he started seizing," Calum said, voice cracking. "His mum's at her sister's in Oban. I had no one—"

"You did right." Alistair knelt, pressing the back of his hand to the boy's forehead. "It's still coming down. Okay. Let's get him inside."

He lifted the child easily, cradling him against his chest, and started back toward the clinic. Calum followed, stepping out of his boots at the door, shoulders shaking. Freya stood at the edge of the jetty, camera hanging at her side, a knot tightening in her stomach. She was an outsider here, and this was not her story. She stayed.

The clinic was small, a converted croft house with whitewashed walls and a single treatment room. Freya lingered at the open door, stubborn distance at her back, watching Alistair lay the boy on the examination bed. He worked with a calm economy her filmmaker's eye couldn't help but admire: a pulse taken, a stethoscope warmed in his palm before it touched skin, oxygen tubing fitted with one hand while the other reached for a chart.

"The lung's congested," he said, more to himself than Calum. "Has he been short of breath before? Any asthma?"

"Not that I know," Calum said. "His mother's got—wait, she's got something. Wheezy."

Alistair nodded, already pulling a nebuliser mask from a drawer. "We'll treat this as a bad flare and see. You said seizing—that can happen with a rapid spike. I'm not seeing anything that worries me yet."

Freya turned away. She shouldn't be this close. She was the outside eye, the one who came to capture and leave. Her fingers found the cold weight of the compass in her jacket pocket, worn brass, the engraving rough against her thumb. Eilidh. Every time she touched it, something pulled in her chest, and she couldn't say why.

Inside, the nebuliser hissed. Alistair's voice was low, even, talking to the boy in a soft Gaelic cadence Freya hadn't heard him use before. It wasn't the sharp, guarded English he'd turned on her the day she arrived. This was a different man, and she found herself watching him instead of the boy.

Ten minutes passed. The boy's breathing eased. His colour drained from scarlet to a stubborn pink, and he began to cry, weakly, which Calum took as a good sign. Alistair straightened.

"He'll need a hospital for a full workup. A paediatric ward, chest X-ray. I can stabilise him here but..." He looked at Calum, and something in his face shifted. "The ferry doesn't run until Thursday. You can't wait that long."

"I know. I'll radio the coastguard, see if they can send a boat."

"Do it. In the meantime, I'll keep him comfortable. He's not out of danger yet."

Calum left to make the call, and Alistair turned to wash his hands at the sink. He didn't look at Freya, but he knew she was there.

"You can film this, if that's what you came for." His voice was flat. "A sick child on a remote island. Good drama."

"That's not why I'm—"

"It's why your producer sent you." He dried his hands on a towel, still not facing her. "You think I don't know what you're hunting? I was born here, MacLeod. I've seen every version of the story: the dying island, the brave doctor, the last light. They're all true. And they're all lies."

The boy coughed, a rattling sound, and Alistair was back at his side in two strides, adjusting the mask, murmuring something that had the shape of a song. Freya stepped back, out of the doorway, letting the distance return.

Twenty minutes later, Calum came back grim. "Coastguard's got a call out already, a trawler fire off Barra. They say maybe four hours."

Alistair's jaw tightened. "Then we hold him here. You radio every two hours. I'll monitor—"

"And what about the lighthouse?" Calum asked.

Freya frowned. What did the lighthouse have to do with anything?

Alistair's mouth pressed into a thin line. "Donald took a fall on the stairs this morning. Turned his ankle bad. He can't climb. He radioed me, asked if I could keep the light going tonight."

"You, a medic man, running a lamp?" Calum shook his head. "That's no your job."

"It's no anyone's job, since the board stopped sending relief keepers last year. But Donald can't do it, and if the light goes dark, a fishing boat or two could hit the cliffs before morning. There's a storm coming in from the west."

"So you can't come with us to the hospital."

"I can't leave the boy and I can't leave the light." Alistair stood, shoulders square. "I'll do both. I've read the keeper's manual. It's not complicated. It's just lonely."

Freya looked between them. The boy was asleep now, breath still wheezing but no longer panicked. Calum paced, running a hand through his hair. And Alistair—Alistair was planning to climb a lighthouse tower at dusk after sleeping in the clinic beside a sick child. Alone. Because the island didn't have a margin for anyone to be unwell or injured or just tired.

This was the isolation the brochures never mentioned. Not the romantic postcard kind—cliffs and puffins and isolation as a selling point. The kind where one twisted ankle meant the light might go dark, and the dark cost lives.

She thought of Donald's resistance when she'd filmed the lens room. His quiet corrections, the way he'd said, *You're not telling the story of this place; you're telling the story you've already decided.* She'd assumed he was just stubborn, an old man protecting his fading glory.

She heard something else in his words now.

Her producer's deadline was Friday. The footage he wanted had to show something true. But she didn't know what was true here yet. She'd come to film the last light, but the light wasn't dying because it was obsolete. It was dying because the men who kept it were running out of hands.

"You'll need someone in the tower," Freya said.

Alistair looked at her properly for the first time since the boat landed. His eyes were grey-green, tired, and there was a guardedness that she recognised—she saw the same thing in the mirror most mornings.

"You're a filmmaker, not a keeper."

"I'm a pair of hands with nothing to do tonight. I can turn a lamp, or hold a fenestrate clock, or whatever it is Donald does up there. You teach me—I'll do it."

He shook his head. "Out of the question."

"It's not out of the question because I'm a stranger. It's out of your question because you think I wouldn't understand. But I watched you work. I know what this place needs." She paused, the compass edge biting into her palm. "And I know what it costs people who stay."

Something crossed his face. Not anger, not gratitude. Something harder to name.

The boy coughed again. Alistair looked at him, then at Calum, then at the window where the first clouds of the incoming storm were already stacking on the western horizon.

"You're certain?" he asked.

Freya nodded.

"Then you'll come to the tower at sunset. I'll teach you what Donald taught me." He turned back to the boy, and his voice softened. "Don't make me regret this, MacLeod."

She didn't answer. She wasn't sure she wouldn't.