The cottage felt different after the cove. The silence was no longer an empty void but a charged space, humming with the memory of our unspoken exchange. Every glance, every time we passed each other in the cramped main room, carried the weight of that morning. He had seen me utterly exposed, and I had seen the raw, unguarded intensity of his gaze. We were like two magnets, held in a tense equilibrium, repulsion and attraction warring in the narrow space between us.
My notebook, once a source of frustration, now felt like a shield and a weapon. I had to regain some semblance of professionalism, to re-establish a boundary that I had so recklessly dissolved. The interview was my pretext. It was the reason I was here, the official story. I needed to cling to it.
Two days after the swim, I found him sharpening a set of fishing hooks outside the shed, his movements precise and focused. The morning was still cool, the sun not yet at its full strength.
"Andre," I began, my voice deliberately neutral. "I was hoping we could do that interview today. If you have time."
He didn't look up from his work, the file scraping rhythmically against the steel. The sound was grating. I braced for a dismissal.
"What do you want to know?" he asked, his tone flat, but not overtly hostile.
It was more than I'd expected. A small victory. "The basics, to start. How long have you been a keeper? Why this life?"
He finished with one hook, held it up to the light to inspect the point, and set it aside before picking up another. "Three years," he said. "And it is not a life. It is a job."
A job. He made it sound like working in a factory. I scribbled in my notebook, the pen scratching loudly. "But it's so isolated. Most people wouldn't last a week. What made you choose it?"
The scraping stopped. He looked out towards the sea, his profile stark against the bright water. For a moment, I thought he wouldn't answer. Then, he said, "The world is too loud. Here, the noise is simple. The wind. The waves. The generator. It is a noise you can understand."
The world is too loud. The phrase resonated deep within me. I understood it viscerally. But I sensed there was more. This was the flicker I was looking for.
"Is that the only reason?" I pressed gently. "To escape the noise?"
His jaw tightened. He resumed his scraping, the sound more aggressive now. "It is reason enough."
I decided to change tack. "Tell me about the light itself. The mechanism. It's beautiful."
This, finally, sparked something. A slight shift in his posture. A lessening of the defensive tension in his shoulders. "It is a third-order Fresnel lens," he said, and for the first time, there was a thread of something akin to passion in his voice. "French. From the nineteenth century. Brass and glass. A masterpiece of engineering. It concentrates the light from a small bulb into a beam that can be seen for twenty nautical miles. It floats on a bed of mercury. Frictionless."
He was looking at me now, his stormy eyes alight with a technical fervor. "Mercury? Isn't that dangerous?"
A ghost of a smile, there and gone so fast I might have imagined it, touched his lips. "It is contained. It is what makes it perfect. Smooth. Silent. It turns without you even hearing it. Like… like a planet turning."
Like a planet turning. The poetry of the phrase, coming from him, was startling. This was not the grunting hermit. This was a man who saw the cosmos in a machine.
"You speak about it with… reverence," I said softly, lowering my notebook slightly.
The shutters came down again. He looked back at his hook. "It is my responsibility. If the light fails, men die. It is not a complicated equation."
Men die. The words hung in the air, heavy and grim. I thought of his father, lost at sea. The puzzle pieces were there, but he wouldn't let me assemble them.
"Your father…" I ventured, the question a delicate probe.
The file stopped dead. The air around us went cold. He slowly placed the hook and the file on the workbench, the deliberate nature of the movement more threatening than if he'd slammed them down.
"That is not for your notebook," he said, his voice low and final, a door slamming shut and bolting from the inside.
I had crossed a line. I nodded, chastened. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry."
He didn't acknowledge the apology. He just stood there, a statue of contained pain, his back to me as he looked out at the sea, the very element that had taken his father. The flicker of intelligence and passion I'd seen was now drowned in a well of old, profound grief. I had been so focused on the story, on breaking through his guard, that I'd blundered straight into the heart of his wound.
The interview was over. I had my soundbites: Three years. The world is too loud. A masterpiece of engineering. Men die. They were fragments, shards of a story, but they told me more about him than any lengthy biography could. They revealed the contours of the fortress, the location of its deepest, most heavily defended dungeons.
I retreated to the cottage, the weight of my intrusion heavy on me. I had tried to chip away at the ice, and instead, I had only managed to show him how thick and deep it truly ran.
The day passed in a strained silence. He avoided me, spending hours up in the lighthouse. I stayed in my room or on the bench outside, pretending to write, but mostly just staring at the page, seeing the stark pain in his eyes when I'd mentioned his father.
As dusk began to settle, painting the sky in shades of violet and rose, I knew I couldn't leave it like this. The tension was worse than before. It was now layered with my guilt and his freshly opened hurt.
I found him at the base of the lighthouse, performing his pre-dusk check of the generator. The machine rumbled to life, its familiar thrum a vibration in the pit of my stomach.
"Andre," I said from the doorway.
He didn't turn, but he stilled, listening.
"I owe you an apology," I said, my voice clear in the metallic space. "A real one. I am a journalist. It's my habit to ask questions, to dig. But I was intrusive. Your past… your reasons for being here… they are your own. I won't ask about them again."
He turned then, slowly. The low light from the single bulb carved shadows into his face. The anger was gone, replaced by a weary guardedness. He studied me for a long moment, as if assessing the truth of my words.
"You are here to write a story," he stated.
"Yes," I admitted. "But the story doesn't have to be an autopsy. It can just be… what it is. The light. The island. The silence."
He gave a slow, considering nod. The generator hummed between us, a neutral third party. "The lens," he said, his voice quieter now. "It was made by a company in Paris. In 1887. It was brought here by ship, piece by piece. Men carried the pieces up that path you struggled on. They built this tower around it. For over a century, it has never failed. Not in war, not in storm." He looked up, towards the lens room above us. "There is a dignity in that. In maintaining something so perfect, for so long."
It was an offering. A piece of the story, but on his terms. Not about the pain inside him, but about the timeless beauty he tended.
"There is," I agreed, my voice soft with genuine awe. "It's… a form of immortality."
Our eyes met, and the last of the day's tension seemed to dissolve in the generator's steady hum. The ice hadn't been broken, not completely. A glacier that size couldn't be melted in a day. But a fissure had appeared, and through it, a trickle of understanding was beginning to flow.
He turned back to the generator, making a final adjustment. "The Bura has passed. The sea will be calm tomorrow. Good for swimming."
The comment was so casual, so utterly unexpected, that it took my breath away. It was his way of acknowledging the morning in the cove, of accepting my apology, of declaring a fragile, tentative truce.
"I might just do that," I managed to reply, my heart beating a strange, hopeful rhythm.
He didn't look back, but I saw the slightest nod of his head before I turned and walked back to the cottage, the thrum of the generator following me like a promise. The interview had been a failure. But the conversation that ended it had, somehow, been the beginning of something else entirely.