“All right,” she said. “But I’m not putting on lipstick.”
“I wouldn’t dream of asking.”
Melissa spent twenty minutes setting up while Winnie finished in the kitchen. She didn’t bring lights or reflectors. The room didn’t need them. The windows provided a wash of warm, diffused afternoon light that fell across the wingback chair like it had been designed for exactly this purpose. She moved a floor lamp out of the background and shifted a stack of books off the side table so the frame would be clean. She considered the logbook cabinet, the framed photographs on the wall behind the chair. She left them. They were part of the story.
She checked her settings. Natural light meant a wider aperture, which meant shallow depth of field, which meant Winnie would be sharp and the background would soften into warm shapes and colors. Good. That was what she wanted.
Winnie came in carrying two cups of tea and a plate with two scones. She handed Melissa a cup and set the plate on the side table.
“Where do you want me?”
“The chair. Just sit the way you normally would.”
Winnie settled into the wingback. She didn’t pose. She sat the way she always sat, upright but not stiff, her hands resting on the arms of the chair with her fingers curled over the ends.
Melissa lifted the camera and looked through the viewfinder. She adjusted the focus. Winnie’s face filled the frame. The lines around her eyes, the silver hair pulled back, and the expression of someone who was comfortable being looked at but not accustomed to being studied.
“Can I ask you questions while I shoot?”
“You can ask. I’ll decide what I answer.”
Fair enough.
Melissa took the first frame. The shutter sound was quiet in the still room, and Winnie didn’t flinch. Some people did. They heard the click and their whole body changed. Winnie just sat.
“Tell me about growing up here,” Melissa said.
“Here in Starlight Shores, or here in this house?”
“Both. Either.”
Winnie looked toward the window. Not at the camera, not at Melissa. At the light coming in, or maybe at something past it.
“My grandfather, Henry, built these quarters. Not the lighthouse. That was here before him. But the house, the rooms we’re sitting in, he built those with his own hands when he became keeper in 1920. He was twenty-three years old and he’d just married my grandmother, and he told her he’d build her a house that could hear the ocean from every room.” Winnie’s mouth curved slightly. “She told him that was impractical and she’d rather have a proper kitchen. So he built her both.”
Melissa took three frames in quick succession. Winnie’s face had changed when she mentioned her grandfather. The formal stillness had loosened and warmed.
“Were you close with him?”
“He died when I was a young girl. But my father talked about him constantly. Henry Lockhart was the kind of man who kept every piece of paper, receipt, and letter. Just like his father, William did. He filled logbooks the way other men filled diaries. Not just tide charts and weather reports. He wrote down what the birds were doing, what the fishing boats brought in, and who he saw from the gallery walk at sunset.” Winnie glanced at the cabinet. “Those logbooks are over there. Years of daily entries in handwriting so precise it looks like it was typeset.”
“And your father kept the tradition.”
“My dad was born in this house. He was keeper for years after his father, and yes, he kept the logbooks.” Winnie paused. Her fingers moved on the arm of the chair, a small unconscious gesture, rubbing the worn fabric. “My father trained me on the lighthouse lens when I was ten. The Fresnel lens up in the lantern room. He’d take me up the spiral stairs every morning to check the mechanism, and I’d stand on a wooden crate so I could see the prisms.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility for a ten-year-old.”
“He didn’t see it as responsibility. He saw it as inheritance.” Winnie turned her face slightly, and the light caught the line of her jaw and the softness under her chin. “My father believed the lighthouse chose its keepers. Not the other way around. He said his grandfather and father had been called by it, and he’d been called. When I started climbing those stairs without being asked, he knew I’d been called too.”
Melissa lowered the camera for a moment. She picked up her tea, took a sip, and set it down. She wanted Winnie to forget the camera was there, or at least to stop tracking its presence.
“Did you ever want something else? A different life?”
Winnie’s gaze came back to Melissa. Direct and clear.
“Everyone wants something else at some point. I was eighteen and I wanted to go to Tallahassee. I wanted to study marine biology. I wanted to sit in a lecture hall and learn about the ocean from a textbook instead of from a window.” She let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “My father said I could go. He never once told me I couldn’t. But he also never said who would take over the light if I left.”
“So you stayed.”
