Chapter 22
The city was louder than she remembered.
Horns, footsteps, the buzz of electricity — all pulsing, constant. Amira moved through it like a woman stepping between worlds. Her new apartment was small, lined with windows and plants, the walls already filling with handwritten notes, old stones from the cove, and clippings from the sea.
But at night, she missed the hush.
She missed Elias.
Still, she wrote. And when she stood in front of her first lecture hall, reading from The Book of Echoes, something shifted in her chest — not pain, not loss, but anchoring.
"My name is Amira," she said to the students. "And I write stories the sea once tried to keep."
Her words moved through the room like waves. When the session ended, a student approached with tears in her eyes.
"My brother drowned last year," she whispered. "No one ever talks about him. It's like he never existed."
Amira took her hand and said, "Then let's write his name down. Start there."
And so it began — her work in the world beyond the lighthouse.
She mailed letters to Elias weekly. He rarely replied with words, but sent her feathers, pressed flowers, a photograph of a new child's stone placed beneath the memorial tree.
And every time she held those tokens, it felt like being kissed by the tide — brief, familiar, eternal.
One evening, as autumn rolled in, a package arrived.
Inside was a small carving of the lighthouse — hand-whittled, slightly uneven, clearly made by Elias.
Etched at the bottom:
"For when you forget where the light is."
Amira held it close to her chest, breathed in deeply, and whispered aloud:
"I never will."