What the Sea Keeps

The lamp burned for six nights and then it did not, and no one on the headland could agree afterwards on what they had seen.

Mira did not try to correct them. Let the story be a story. The ones who needed to know already did, and the rest slept better for the version where nothing came up out of the water at all.

She kept the notebook. Three short, one long. She still counted the forty-one steps, every night, out of habit and out of something else she did not have a name for.