Clara hadn’t climbed the lighthouse stairs in decades. The wooden steps groaned beneath her weight, each one a whisper of the past. The last time she stood here, she was a girl, watching the sea swallow the horizon, waiting for a father who never came home.
Now, the storm had brought something back.
She sat at her kitchen table, rain hammering the windows, the waterlogged journal trembling in her hands. Her father’s ink had bled with time, but one line remained clear, scratched deep into the paper as if he had been desperate to be heard:
“Find the hollow stone.”
Her arthritic fingers traced the faded maps sketched in the margins, markings leading back to the lighthouse. The wind howled as she climbed, salt thick in the air.
Near the base of the tower, she ran her hands along the tide-worn crevice, feeling for something—anything. Then, her fingers caught the edge of paper.
She pulled out a bundle of letters, edges curled, ink smudged by time. Wartime seals. Addresses she didn’t recognize.
She read.
And her world tilted.
The letters spoke of a brother she never knew. A boy lost to the sea before she was ever born. A secret her father had buried beneath waves and silence.
A floorboard creaked behind her.
Clara turned.
A silver-haired stranger stood in the lighthouse doorway, his coat damp from the storm. His weathered hands held something fragile—a faded photograph.
Her father’s face stared back at her.
And beside him, a boy with her eyes.
The stranger’s voice was barely more than the wind.
“He wanted you to have this.”