Three Short, One Long

My father walked into the storm on the night I turned sixteen. Three days later, a man walked out of the sea wearing his coat.

He had my father's face. My father's voice. My father's laugh. He knew the name of my first dog and the scar on my knee from when I was six.

He was not my father.

On Merrow Island, the sea takes people. Everyone knows that. So when lighthouse keeper Sam Calloway comes home after three days lost in the waves, the whole town calls it a miracle. His wife holds him and weeps. His little boy won't let go of his hand.

Only Ivy sees what no one else will. The gloves he never takes off. The old dog that growls every time he walks in. The bedtime song he sings with a verse she has never heard before.

And worst of all, her mother knows too. And she is saying nothing.

Then, at two in the morning, the dead lighthouse on Gull Rock blinks across the black water. Three short. One long. A secret signal that only Ivy and her father ever shared.

Someone is out there. Someone in her house is lying. And the truth about the man who came home reaches back to a shipwreck seventeen years ago, and to a secret buried before Ivy was even born.

Some people come back from the sea.

Not all of them should.