The lighthouse had a habit of looking like an answer and also like a question. From the road it rose, stubborn and white, a narrow throat against the low sky. By the time Mara arrived it had become a lamp in the middle distance, its paint dimpled with winter's neglect. The path down to the headland narrowed and smelled of wet stone and seaweed; the wind came in gusts that pushed against a person as if the coast itself were testing resolve.
People gathered in small clusters under the lighthouse's circling beam, movement and voices brushed thin by the weather. Lanterns bobbed like small planets in gloves and hands. Captain Hart stood near the gate with the air of someone who had made peace with the sea's poor manners and gone on organizing it anyway. He wore a wool cap pulled low and a jacket patched with different shades of canvas; his smile was broad and practised, like someone who had a story for every weather pattern. He greeted the arriving with the warmth of someone who'd chosen this job because social discomfort was less painful than only sitting with one's worst thoughts.
Mara's presence felt conspicuous to her—like a model with its cover removed. She had not told anyone she was coming, and yet here she was among strangers who had come to test something of themselves in the dark. June had been right: the group folded in the edges of many motives—some came for spectacle, some for comfort, others for the solace of shared risk. The crowd hummed with small talk — where is the thing that keeps us human, people asked each other in roundabout ways. Lantern light gave them halos and made them votive figures against the wind.
Leo was there. Mara spotted him first by the steady way he carried himself—hands calm against the thermos he held, his shoulders squared like a useful tool. He spotted her as if she were a structural flaw he could not pass without examining. For a half-second, seeing him flooded her with something like bright, painful clarity. Somehow he had managed to be both familiar and foreign. He moved toward her with that slow certainty she wanted and feared all at once.
"You didn't have to do this alone," he said, as if he were pointing out an obvious deficiency in the town's accounting system.
"I thought it was better to see what happens without an audience," she said, which wasn't true at all. She had been trying to decide whether to be seen. "But I'm glad you're here."
June found them, weaving through the crowd like someone who'd mapped the shop's aisles into the coastline. She dropped a hand on Mara's shoulder, a small, steadying pressure brighter than any lantern.
"You picked the storm watch," she said. "Good choice. It makes people honest."
Hart called the group to a loose semicircle. He spoke plainly about tides, about not misjudging the rocks, about staying in pairs, about what to do if someone else did what they'd all come to consider: taking that plunge. There was a ritual element to his speech that felt like a lifeguard's hymn—do not leave things to improvisation, respect the sea, respect the group.
Mara listened, counting the words in the way architects sometimes counted beams. There were edges she understood—metres, the length of rope you should carry—but other edges had no measure.
The wind began a steadying tantrum, one that smoothed people's bravado into a quieter, more honest talk. Someone joked about the romantic possibilities of storm-tinged courage. Someone else said that courage was over-rated and that the real work was getting up the next morning. A teenage boy with a scraped knee recited a poem he'd learned at school and everyone applauded because they were human and ritual demanded applause.
The group trickled toward the rail when Captain Hart gave a small nod. People moved in couples and small guilds of dare, stepping gingerly to the lip where the land broke into sea air. Mara went last. She was braced by Leo a little and by June's hand briefly on her arm—small human anchors. She held the watch in her palm, wrapped in the warmth of her coat, and felt its faint motion like a distant heart.
When she stood at the lip and looked down, she felt the old and simple vertigo of being small in the face of a larger, unanswering thing. Waves hit the rocks below with a precise measurelessness. The spray made a ghost-white veil. The lighthouse threw its turning beam across the sea like a thought. The group's murmurs flattened into a single sound—a wind-sown murmur behind her ears.
"You okay?" Leo's voice was close; his face was a plan she had once loved to participate in drafting. He moved as if to take her hand, to offer steadiness. For a moment it looked like she might accept, as if a small domestic redo was the next obvious phase.
Instead she closed her fingers around the watch and felt something in it move—not mechanical and not meaningless, but a shift like a reed finding its answer to wind. A thread in her loosened. The ledger she had been keeping—obligations stacked like blocks—seemed suddenly frivolous, and something tender and reckless that had been Nolan's stubborn inheritance crept into her chest: the idea that maybe you could not find a scaffold to carry grief, that sometimes one answered a question by leaping and seeing where the ground happened to be.
She said nothing. Her mouth tightened. She thought of Nolan's note and felt a heat under the chill of the night: There's more than one way to start again. It had been a joke and a map both.
"Do it," someone nearby said, breath fogging like a small signal to the dark. The call was casual, as if asking for dares were the most mundane thing in the world. Captain Hart's eyes flicked over the edge and did not judge; he regarded his participants with a complicated duty that combined safety and permission.
Mara unclasped her hands and stepped forward. It was not a grand arcing motion. It was precise and wrong in a geometry she had known all her life. Her feet left where the wind had decided they should. For a fraction of a second, exhilaration flared sharp enough to be pain. The air opened in a way that made her breath spike in her throat, and time did what the sea does when it meets rock: it contracted to a thin seam.
Falling felt like a channel opening and all of the world spilling into it.
It was not the black cold she had expected. It was not the immediate end. Instead, the fall became a corridor of images, a rapid, scattered montage that had the clarity of memory and the foreignness of someone else's holiday photos. She did not think; she saw.
She saw a small kitchen strewn with holiday paper, sunlight sliding across a wooden table where two cups steamed and a child—blond hair in a messy crown—clapped. She smelled warm bread and felt a hand, not Nolan's but familiar in the way of close design—someone holding a pot with care. She was a builder of domestic things in that life, and the house hummed with the soft noise of being settled into.
She saw a studio with sun and trains of scale models, a life where she had taken a fellowship and lived in Amsterdam, her hair cut short, her hands inked with blueprints stamped by a European firm. There were people speaking a language she almost understood, and friends who kissed her on the cheek like everyday ritual. She smelled rain that was not the coast's rain, rain full of different salts.
She saw the night Nolan lived: him alive, sitting on a stoop with a cigarette he'd never have allowed to smoke in her presence because he'd always cared about lungs more than he admitted. He laughed and the laugh fixed her in a way she had thought impossible. They argued about trivialities—whether to paint the bathroom a pale blue—and then he stood, sudden and alive, and hugged her with the kind of long, unnecessary affection he had once given her for reasons too small to name.
She saw an award ceremony, a stage, the light of a spotlight—and a version of herself in a dress she'd never owned, accepting something for a building that contained a library she had designed, and the applause echoed as if from another country.
The montage was not chronological. It did not obey logic. It felt instead like a hand pulling at different seams of a sweater to show the different threads that made the whole. Each vision carried weight so dense it was physical: the smell of a child's hair, the crispness of a formal speech, the raw and bright ache of Nolan being alive again. Each image pressed the height of what might have been into her chest until she could not breathe around it.
She felt, too, a version in which she had never left Brant Cove, where she had rebuilt the harbor and opened a shop with Leo and they had grown old with the town, and Nolan had pushed in every so often with a grin. That one had quiet sadness in its corners: ordinary compromises building a life that was at once secure and small.
When she thought she might hover forever in the seam, another sensation: the watch in her pocket heated to an odd, precise warmth. It felt like a pulse she could trace. Then darkness took her as if the sea itself had folded an enormous hand and covered her face.
The next thing she knew there was sand under her and someone was shouting her name.
Her ears filled with ordinary, panicked noise—Captain Hart's voice ordering people, someone saying call an ambulance, a dozen footsteps and a slap of wet coats against the rocks. She tasted salt and copper; the air was bright with the sting of cold.
Mara opened her eyes to wind and faces and lantern light delineating features that made no coherent pattern at first. She rolled onto her side and the beach rose and fell like a breathing thing. Someone pressed a wool blanket over her shoulders. Leo's face hovered into focus; his hair was plastered by rain to his forehead, and his eyes were wide and terrible and full of something like fear.
"Are you—" he began, and his voice broke. "God, Mara. You scared us."
She tried to speak and her mouth made a sound like a thin animal. Her limbs shook. Pain then, small and precise: the sting of a graze on her knee, the ache of a bruise along her ribs where the water had found purchase. Her head pulsed with residual images—bright and impossible—and something inside her felt rearranged, as if a room had been refurnished while she was out of it.
June was there, steady as if she had stepped out of the shop and brought the place with her. She crouched at Mara's side, not in fright but in a slow, knowing way that made Mara feel like a watched, fragile instrument.
"You flew much farther than most," June said, and the sentence had no judgement, only an observation. She tucked Mara's hair behind her ear with a rough tenderness. "You opened a seam."
Mara blinked and tried to anchor to the present—the cold wool under her chin, Leo's hand squeezing her shoulder, the taste of sea on her lips—but the visions clung like varnish. "I—I saw...so much," she said. The language came out thick. "I saw Nolan. I saw—" She could not name all of it fast enough. "I saw places I never went."
June's expression softened into a professional curiosity. "The lighthouse sometimes does that," she said. "It…amply magnifies what's already loose in you. You don't have to be a sailor to hear it. You have to be a person with a question."
A man in a yellow anorak knelt by them—one of the group—and had that peculiar intimacy of strangers who'd just gone through the same small near-tragedy. He offered a paper cup with something steaming in it. "Hot tea," he said. "You want it?"
Mara took the cup as if accepting a treaty. The warm liquid steadied her hands. The world around her occupied itself with practicalities—someone calling for a blanket, someone looking for a radio to call the station. Captain Hart was businesslike, marshaling people as if they were a rescue team more accustomed to keeping beer bottles from rolling into surf than real emergency. He kept asking questions in a voice that insisted on clarity: Did she lose consciousness? How long was she out? Did she hit any rocks on the way down?
"She didn't hit the rocks that looked sharp," June said to him, succinct and useful. "But she did fall through a seam of possibility." When Hart blinked at the phrasing she shrugged, as if it were the most sensible answer for the night's work.
Leo didn't leave her side. He held her hand like an anxious possibility, and his thumb rubbed circles against her knuckles. "Do you remember anything? Are you hurt?" His questions were practical and filled with trust; they wanted a ledger.
Mara looked at him and felt the echo of a life where they had stayed together, where his hands had been less tentative. The vision folded into the present like a borrowed coat. "I remember things," she said finally. "I'm not sure they were mine." She tried to think of the right way to classify what she had seen—visions, hallucinations, glimpses of alternate lives—and the words seemed pale compared to the intensity of experience lodged inside her.
June slid the watch out of Mara's pocket as if the object and she had an understanding. It lay in the older woman's palm, its brass now catching the lantern's light in a way that made the compass rose glow like a tiny sun. This time, the watch did not just tick. It also thrummed with a small, irregular pulse—like a language she could not yet decode.
"You opened a seam," June said again, quieter. "That's not a technical phrase. It's what the lighthouse does to people who are asking questions that have too many answers. Sometimes people get a gift from it. Sometimes they get a rash from it."
Mara tried to laugh at that and found her throat too tight. Around them people offered small kindnesses—blankets, dry jackets, quiet words. The storm came with intervals; the rain slapped at the crowd in irregular spells. Captain Hart suggested bringing Mara to the car where they'd be out of the wind; someone fetched keys, another person offered an extra jacket.
On the ride home, Leo drove with his face set in concentration and his hands white on the wheel. He radioed something to the station—an after-action account—and his voice had the steady cadence of someone who preferred to translate emotional excess into action. Mara sat in the passenger seat with the blanket over her legs and the watch in her palm. It seemed to beat with a rhythm that no longer belonged to seconds alone. She had the feeling of someone who had been given sliding doors to look under and had been slapped by the range of possibilities.
"What did you want me to see?" she asked June, who had insisted on coming along and now sat in the back like a steward.
June's eyes were thoughtful, as if she was counting the elements. "Not what. How." She tapped the watch with a fingertip. "Seams don't tell you which life to take. They show you what's inside the walls. Sometimes that's enough. Sometimes it's poison."
Mara turned the watch over again in her hands. Up close she could see, faint as a memory, an etching in the compass rose she'd never noticed before: not just four directions but tiny arrows that curved, like forked paths. The mechanism inside hummed with a clarity that pulled at something in her like a key. "Can I do it again?" she asked, almost without thinking. "Can I make it happen on purpose?"
June considered. "Some people can coax a seam open again with effort," she said. "But seams don't like being used like tools. They're…temperamental. And they remember. You can visit alternate rooms, but you can't change who built the house."
Mara let the answer settle without pinning it down. She felt, suddenly and profoundly, like a person whose ledger had acquired a new column—Possibilities—with its own taxes. The watch ticked and thrummed in her palm, timing out rhythms she could not yet read.
By the time they reached Brant Cove, the rain had settled into a steady gray. The town felt different in its smallness, as if the sea had shifted and revealed a gulf between what was and what might have been. Leo helped her up the steps to her apartment and into the kitchen that smelled of the bakery's yeast and the lemon oil from Nolan's boat polish. He made her sit and set a mug of tea before her like a treaty.
"Will you tell me more?" he asked, every syllable careful with the desire to understand.
Mara stared at the steam rising from the mug. The images she'd seen still thrummed at the edges of her perception—dinners she had never cooked, awards she had never accepted, Nolan sitting on a stoop breathing and tasting the night like someone who'd made a smaller, happier choice. She felt dizzy with possibility and dread—two companions that danced an uneasy balance in her chest.
"I don't know how to describe it," she said finally. "It felt like being given a room full of windows I didn't know I'd built." She wrapped her hands around the mug and felt warmth seep into her palms. "June says I opened a seam. That the lighthouse sometimes does that."
Leo nodded slowly. "You look different," he said. "Like you found a new set of gloves in a drawer."
She thought about going back—the lure of wanting to see Nolan again so bright it hurt—and she thought about the warning June had given: seams remember. She felt in her body the thin, persistent itch for more knowledge, and with it a resolve that felt dangerously like planning. The watch lay on the counter, its brass catching the kitchen light. It ticked in a heartbeat that no longer read as simple time.
Mara breathed, thinking of the note in the glove box: There's more than one way to start again. Tonight had shown its first argument. The seam had opened, and with it a corridor of choices. She was at the opening, as if a storm had blown a new door into the house of her life.
She set the mug down and did what she had always done when confronted with complex angles: she measured the nearest, smallest thing. The watch. She wound it again with the key June had given her, feeling its movement settle under her fingers. It answered with a faint, new rhythm.
Outside, the tide grumbled and moved like a thing that has been watching and is not surprised at any human conclusion. Mara sat for a long time, feeling as if the night had placed a question on her lap that would not be solved with drafts and rulers. Somewhere inside the house of her life a seam had been uncovered, and the rest of the night felt like the slow and careful business of choosing which window to look through next.