The note on the keeper’s table is written in the kind of handwriting that does not waste paper.

Fog after dusk. Stay on granite and planks. If the light answers, don’t you answer from the rocks. Thermos by the radio. Historical society delayed. Phone when you can. — Tess

You are the weekend helper at Last Light Station, which is a polite way of saying the backyard is a granite spit, a black-and-white tower, and a sea that keeps changing its mind. The lighthouse is decommissioned. The historical society wants the keys. Cousin Tess is sixteen and in charge of not letting the building invent new holes until Mr. Peck’s van can crawl through the marine layer.

The power has already blinked once. The wind worries the gallery rail like a dog with a shoe.

On the table: a station log, a stub of pencil, and a lantern with a full battery. Tess believes in old harbor stories the way she believes in barometers—useful, incomplete, and not something you ignore.

Out on the water, a pale lamp winks. It does not sit still. It drifts, pauses, drifts, as if a ship were answering Last Light’s dead beam with a beam of its own.

From the foghorn shed comes a moan.

It is low. It is late. It sounds almost like a throat.

You are brave enough to climb and old enough to have been told twice not to be foolish on wet rock. The lantern fits in your hand. The log fits in your pocket. The moan happens again, farther and then nearer, as if the night were arguing with itself.

The answering light winks a second time, greener now, like a thought.