Mara was already waiting at the back door of the café, as if she had expected this. She locked the door, turned off the lamps, and set a kettle on the stove. “He asked me not to tell you,” she said at last. “He said you’d be safer knowing nothing.” “Who did?” Nora asked, though she knew. “Your grandfather. He’s alive, Nora. He’s been alive the whole time.”
Nora gripped the back of a chair. Mara explained it slowly. Elias had staged his disappearance after a man from Harlan Ridge visited the lighthouse and made it clear that a lost-at-sea keeper would be convenient for everyone.
He had rowed to the far side of the island, where an old smuggler’s boathouse still stood, and he had stayed there ever since, signaling the island’s fishermen by lamp and gathering evidence with Mara’s help. “Every week I bring him food,” she said. “Every week he asks if you’ve come yet.”
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