The lighthouse stood at the end of the point, half a mile from the cottage, on a spit of rock that had been worn down by a hundred years of wind and salt. It was a hundred and four feet tall, and it was striped in bands of white and black, and the windows were broken, and the door was hanging off its hinges.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
I had been walking to the lighthouse since I was a child. My father had been its keeper for thirty years, and I had spent my childhood in the keeper's house at its base, before the Coast Guard had automated it and moved us to the mainland. I had climbed the spiral staircase so many times that my legs still remembered the shape of it.
I hadn't been inside since the year after I came back to Bar Harbor. I had stood at the base of it, on
