She turned the question over the way she’d turned it over for decades. The honest answer was complicated. The simple answer was worse.
“No,” she said. “Not all of it.”
Sam waited.
“My father never told me what they argued about. I know they were close. I know they worked on something at the lighthouse, something that mattered to both of them. And I know it ended badly.” She looked over at a flower bed, noting it needed weeding. “I overheard one argument when I was young. Raised voices in the lantern room. My father said something about credit. About who had the right to publish. Your father said something back that I couldn’t hear clearly, and then a door slammed. After that, your father stopped coming to the lighthouse.”
“And we stopped coming for summers,” Sam said.
“Yes.”
“But that’s not why you ended things between us.”
Winnie sucked a quick breath. She’d rehearsed this conversation a thousand times over the years, always finding new ways to avoid it. But Sam was here, and he was asking, and she was seventy years old. Running out of years to keep running.
“My father asked me to,” she said.
Sam went very still beside her.
“After your family stopped coming, I wrote to you. You know that. And you wrote back. And we made plans to see each other that Christmas.” She could picture those letters, the thin airmail paper, his slanted handwriting. “My father found out. He sat me down in the keeper’s quarters and told me I needed to end it. The Copelands couldn’t be trusted, he told me. Whatever had happened between him and your father meant our families needed to stay apart.”
“And you listened.”
“I was twenty-five, Sam. He was my father. He’d never asked me for anything like that before. He looked…” She searched for the word. “Frightened. I’d never seen him frightened. Not in storms, not when the funding nearly dried up, and not even when my mother died. But he was frightened that day.”
“So you wrote me the letter.”
“I told you what he wanted me to tell you. That you had your life to live. That I was staying in Starlight Shores. That it was better for both of us.”
“And I came to Starlight Shores one more time to see you anyway. But… you sent me away.”
“I did.”
“I didn’t believe what you said.” Sam’s voice dropped. “Not entirely. But I was proud and hurt, and I let you go because fighting for you felt like begging.”
The honesty of it stung. She’d counted on his pride, even then. She’d known he wouldn’t push.
“He died a while later,” Winnie said. “Heart attack, right there in the keeper’s quarters. He’d been trying to tell me something that last week. He kept starting sentences and stopping them. There were things about the lighthouse I needed to understand, he told me. Things about his work with your father that I deserved to know. He promised he’d explain everything. That he owed me that much.” Her voice thinned. “He died one morning before he ever got the words out.”
Sam’s hand rested on the bench between them. He didn’t reach for her.
“So the secret died with him,” Sam said.
“Whatever it was. The full truth of what happened between them, why he was so afraid, what they’d been working on that mattered enough to destroy a friendship and tear apart…” She stopped. Us. She’d almost said us.
“I’ve spent forty-five years honoring his request that I never understood,” she said instead.
The lighthouse beam completed another sweep. Light, then dark, then light.
“My father never talked about it either,” Sam said. “He mentioned Starlight Shores exactly once after we stopped coming. I was in graduate school, working on mathematical linguistics, and he said I was chasing the same ghost he’d chased with Robert Lockhart. He wouldn’t say more. When he died, I found notebooks full of formulas and correspondence, but nothing that explained what went wrong between them.” He looked at her. “That’s part of why I’m here. And the historical book is real. The research is real.”
“But?”
“But you were always the reason I came.”
She felt the words deep inside. She looked at her hands in her lap, the knuckles swollen now, the skin thin.
“Tell me about your life,” she said. “All the years I missed.”
