Keep your outline close. Keep writing.

The lighthouse keeper's daughter stood at the edge of the cliff, her heart pounding against her ribs like a caged bird desperate for freedom. The wind whipped her dark hair across her face, carrying with it the salt-spray of a restless sea.

Eleanor Blackwood had always known this day would come. The letter in her pocket—crumpled now from being read a dozen times—confirmed what she'd long suspected: her father was not who he claimed to be.

She pulled the paper out once more, squinting at the elegant handwriting in the fading light:

My dearest Eleanor,

If you are reading this, I have failed in my duty to protect you. The lighthouse holds secrets older than the stone it stands upon. Find the key beneath the seventh step. Trust no one—especially not the man who calls himself your father.

Your true guardian,

M.W.

"What secrets?" she whispered to the churning waves below. What could possibly be worth all this deception?

The door to the lighthouse creaked open behind her. Eleanor spun around, her hand instinctively reaching for the pocket knife she always carried—a gift from the man she'd called "Papa" for eighteen years.

It was only Thomas, the relief keeper, with his coat buttoned wrong and his hair full of weather. He stopped when he saw her face.

"You've found it, then," he said.

Not what's wrong. Not Eleanor, you're white as the lamp glass. He had gone straight to found it, and in the two seconds it took him to understand what he had said, she watched him try to take it back.

"Found what, Thomas?"

He looked at the sea. Everyone in Wrackham looked at the sea when they wanted to stop talking.

It came up without protest. That was the part that frightened her—not the hollow beneath, not the oilcloth bundle, but the clean grey line where the stone had been lifted and set back, lifted and set back, for longer than she had been alive.

Someone had been coming here. Someone had been coming here the whole time.

The tide went out further than it had all year, and the light stood on something that was not its own foundation.

Eleanor crouched in the wrack and put her palm flat against the lowest course. Dressed stone, mortared, and weathered into softness—nothing like the hard Portland above it. Whoever built the lighthouse in 1798 had not started from nothing. They had started from whatever this was, and then they had built ninety-one feet of grey stone on top of it.