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A gentle bedtime tale about Juniper, a ten-year-old keeper's apprentice who saves her coastal town's sleep. With a small fox, a brass key, and an act of listening, she mends what was lost and teaches a lonely shadow to ask instead of taking. A soft, warm adventure for sleepy heads.
Juniper knew the names of every creak in the lighthouse. She could tell, by the way the iron steps sighed, whether the tide had come in that afternoon or whether old Mr. Alder had been climbing home with a sack of potatoes. The night wind had a voice in Willowharbor, a gentle, briny thing that combed the hair of fishing nets and smelled faintly of lemon rind and ink. Juniper lived in the small room beneath the lantern, where her grandmother Marta mended nets and baked bread that always tasted like afternoons.
It was Juniper's tenth year when the story begins, the age at which her palms had grown steady enough to tend the wick and her legs had learned the spiral of stairs by heart. She kept a small brass key on a leather thong; she wore it always beneath her jumper like a promise. The key didn't fit any locked chest in the town, but Juniper liked to turn it between her fingers while she listened to the sea. The Night Lantern sat on Pebble Hill like a patient eye, its blue glass catching moonlight. For as long as Juniper could remember, the lantern had held the town's sleep: soft dreams spun from salt and memory, woven into a warm, safe light.
On our first evening with her, Juniper is finishing a list. She writes with a stub of pencil on the back of an old receipt: oil for lamp, cloths, a new wick if the old one keeps coughing. Marta hums at the hearth. From outside comes the patter of small feet—Mottle, the neighbor's cat, who believes Juniper is her chosen person. Mottle's whiskers tick against Juniper's ankle like a metronome.
—Don't look down, Marta says without looking up, and Juniper smiles because her grandmother's warnings are the same as the lighthouse: meant to keep someone safe.
—I'm not looking down, Juniper answers. She tucks the list into her pocket and slips the little key into her palm. The sea smells of iron and sugar; gulls have started their evening gossip. In the lantern room, the glass panels glow with trapped twilight. Juniper climbs the last few steps and runs a finger along the seam where two panes meet. She can feel the history there, a fine dust of other people's bedtime wishes. Her hands are steady, as always. For now, everything is precisely as it should be.