The Light Between Notes

The Letter

Spring, 1921 — Lighthouse Island, Maine

The fog had a taste to it that morning—salt, ash, and something sour, like an old tin of peaches gone bad. I remember because I licked it off my lip without thinking and thought of her. My daughter. Ruth.

She would’ve hated it here.

Too damp. Too still. Not enough noise to cover the silence. The kind of place where thoughts echoed too loud and ghosts didn’t even bother hiding.

I was finishing my morning log when the supply boat came through the channel, horn low and apologetic. It left a wrapped bundle in the drop crate—a sack of potatoes, two tins of condensed milk, and a letter tucked between them like a secret. The envelope was damp at the corners and sealed in red wax.

The handwriting stopped me cold.

I didn’t have to read the name to know who had sent it.

Clive Thornton.

God help me.

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The Visit

He arrived two days later in a rented slicker three sizes too large, hat cocked like a man who thought he could charm the weather into cooperating. He was carrying a leather case, a rusted trombone case, which I knew full well didn’t hold a trombone. It was Clive’s traveling library—mostly books on syntax and jazz theory, some notebooks, and a copy of The Elements of Style that had been corrected in his own pen.

“Franklin Mays,” he said, smiling like we were meeting at a train station in Paris instead of on this godforsaken rock. “You look like hell.”