On a remote island where the sea keeps its own counsel, lighthouse keeper Thomas finds a message in a bottle that shouldn’t have survived the decades. The note points to a long-buried shipwreck, a missing treasure, and a woman named Eleanor whose past is knotted to the island’s darkest night. As Thomas follows the trail through salt-stained records and whispered local lore, the truth surfaces with a price neither of them expected to pay.
Rain had a way of making the island feel like it was being erased in real time. It came down in thin, relentless lines that blurred the horizon into a smear of pewter and turned every surface honest—stone showed its slick black heart, grass flattened into a dark pelt, and the lighthouse glass wore a film of salt like a guilty sheen.