Chapter 15
Life, for a while, settled into something close to peace.
Mornings brought the scent of salt and sun-warmed stone. Elias repaired old parts of the lighthouse, oiling the gears and repainting the railing. Amira spent her days journaling, capturing the silence not as absence, but as presence — a sacred, steady hush that now filled the spaces where ghosts once roamed.
But healing wasn't linear.
Sometimes Elias woke gasping in the middle of the night, haunted not by spirits, but by guilt. And sometimes Amira heard whispers in her dreams — not sinister, but soft. Familiar. Like someone remembering her name from far away.
One evening, while cleaning out a locked drawer in the lighthouse's base, they discovered a stack of old letters — faded and water-stained. They were addressed to Selene and never sent. All in Elias's handwriting.
You should be here.
I saw a girl today who reminded me of you.
I don't know how to be alive without feeling like I'm stealing someone else's time.
Amira read them one by one, her fingers trembling. "You've been grieving out loud all along," she whispered.
"I think," Elias said, "I was writing to her so I wouldn't disappear with her."
They bundled the letters and placed them in a weatherproof jar, burying it beneath the roots of the sea pine tree behind the lighthouse — a tree Selene once climbed, and where Mirabelle used to sing beneath the shade.
They marked it with a single word carved into stone:
"Remember."
And that night, Amira lit a candle not for the dead, but for the living — for those who choose to stay, for those who carry memory like a lantern through dark woods.