“All in all, we were probably stuck here for about eight or ten hours. When the storm finally passed, you started crying when Fisher and I got ready to leave. Fisher gave you what he’d carved and your face lit up like a Christmas tree,” Trip says with a laugh. “I wish I could remember what the hell it was he made.”
Another memory hits me and I gasp. I see him handing me the finished product. It’s red and white and beautiful and I’m so happy that I helped him make something so amazing.
Snatching up a flashlight and turning it on, I get up from the couch without a word and race to the stairs. I take them two at a time until I get to the top, running down the long hallway until I reach the door to the Fisher’s Lighthouse room, throwing it open and bursting through the doorway. I stop right inside the room, my heart pounding so hard that I’m certain it might pop right out of my chest. The wind and the rain beat against the side of the house as I slowly walk over to the windows in the middle of the wall on the far side of the room.
With a tentative hand, I reach out and run my palm down the side of the red and white wooden lighthouse that I’ve been drawn to since I found it in the attic when my parents and I first moved here. I dusted it off and stuck it right here in this room that very first day when I was sixteen years old. I would come in here almost every afternoon and sit in front of it, staring at it, touching it and loving it for reasons I never understood.
Another memory assaults me and I remember my parents telling me that I couldn’t take the lighthouse home with me because it was too big and wouldn’t fit in our suitcases. I cried almost the entire way home from the island.
Dropping down to my knees, I lift the two-foot tall wooden lighthouse from the floor. I see another flash of a memory in my mind and I have to know if it’s real. Tipping the lighthouse upside down, my face crumbles and I sob, seeing that it was, indeed, real. In the same block script that he writes in now, just a little larger and a little messier, are carved words that make my thundering heart ache.
I hope someday you find your way back here.
If you do, I’ll meet you at the lighthouse.
I cradle the lighthouse to my chest and rock back and forth. How can this be happening right now? The promise he always made me about finding his way back to me and the words we said to each other on our wedding day when we spoke of renewing our vows and how we’d meet each other at the lighthouse… he carved those same words to me into a wooden lighthouse when he was eleven years old. It doesn’t seem possible, and yet, it is. I have the proof and the photo and the story from Trip and Grace and my little snippets of memories to reassure me that it’s all true and it really happened.
“I found my soul mate when I was a child and she will always be the love of my life, no matter how many years go by.”
“We were meant to fall in love on this island.”
“You were meant to be with me.”
The words Trip spoke when he told us how much he loved his wife and the words that Fisher wrote to me in his note swirl through my head faster than the wind and the rain outside.
Placing the lighthouse on the floor, I jump up and race out the door and down the stairs. Reaching into Trip’s coat pocket, I grab the keys to his SUV and I’m already racing out the door and into the harsh, biting wind and rain just as everyone comes into the front room and starts screaming at me to come back.
Chapter 41
Lucy
Present Day
I try calling Fisher again as I slowly make my way through the flooded streets in town, but all I get is a voice recording telling me that all systems are down. Tossing my phone across the seat angrily, I flip the wipers from low to high and lean forward against the steering wheel, trying to see better.
I drive past every business on Main Street, I drive by Barney’s, I drive by the beach and I drive by Trip’s house, but I don’t see Fisher’s truck anywhere. The storefronts were boarded up as soon as the storm started picking up earlier this afternoon, and I’m the only idiot out on the streets right now.
A trip to Bobby’s house produces the same results, but when I get to Ellie’s, I see both her and Bobby’s cars parked in the driveway. Her house is on a hill right in the middle of the fork in the road that splits Main Street into two separate streets and one of the few houses that doesn’t sit directly on the beach. Aside from the inn, which is a huge structure, and the evacuation center, Ellie’s house is one of the safer places to be right now since it’s further inland than anywhere else, and I’m glad that she and Bobby are holed up in here instead of his beachfront cottage.
I pull the SUV up behind their vehicles and make a mad dash up to the house, noticing that Ellie’s hurricane shutters are wide open and smacking against the siding. Finding the front door unlocked, I start shouting their names as I move through the house, but I don’t get an answer. The faint sound of snoring comes from the finished basement that she uses as an extra living room, so I quickly make my way down the carpeted stairs.
I find Bobby and Ellie curled up together on the couch, fast asleep. While I’d normally find the sight in front of me so sweet that I’d immediately want to snap a picture of it with my cell phone, I don’t have time for that now.
Saying both of their names softly so I don’t scare them, I rush over to the couch and shake Ellie’s shoulder. She jerks awake and stares up at me in confusion, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
“What’s going on? What time is it?” she asks in a raspy, sleep-filled voice.