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A gentle bedtime adventure about Mira, a nine-year-old in a seaside village who finds a glowing pebble and, with a clockwork owl and quiet courage, learns to bring back the small lights stolen by a lonely night-weaver. Warm, calm, and full of seaside wonder.
At the end of Willow Lane, where the cobblestones remembered every footstep and the houses leaned toward the sea as if to listen, Mira kept a small museum in a battered tin box. She called it a museum because everything she kept had a name and a story. A green marble that looked like a meadow; a blue button marked with a ship; a pale shell like a sleeping ear. On windy evenings she carried the tin down to the jetty, sat with her feet dangling over weathered wood, and let the village lights ripple like small fish across the dark water.
People in Willowharbor spoke softly by daylight and hummed softer by night. The bakery door sighed warm bread into the lane; the baker’s cat, Porridge, stretched in a patch of lamp light and blinked slow, heavy eyes. Mira’s grandmother, whose hands smelled of lemon peel and old paper, mended nets while humming a tune that sounded like the sea. That tune settled in Mira’s ribs and kept her steady when gulls cried and the tide sighed against the pilings.
Mira was nine and clever in ways that did not always make sense to grown-up eyes. She could tell, by the angle of a rake or the shadow on a cup, what the weather would do. She could unpick a broken pocket watch and lay its teeth and springs in a neat row until it looked as patient and ordered as a tiny city. She walked with a small satchel slung across her shoulder. In it she kept a pencil stub, a scrap of blue ribbon, and a folded map of the places she wanted to visit.
The thing she loved most, though, were the small bright things the sea threw up when storms slept and then woke again. They were not always pretty. Once there had been a spoon rubbed to an odd curve, and another time a silver ticket with the word HARBOR stamped across it. Mira listened to these things the way a book listens when you open it. She would hold one close to her mouth and imagine it telling a long soft story.
On the night the sea brought her something too big for her tin, there was a moon in the sky rounding like a belly ready for sleep. The lighthouse on the headland blinked in a slow, steady rhythm: white, pause, white. Mira had eaten her supper—porridge with a spoon of plum jam—and slipped out without waking Porridge. Her socks were damp from walking on the damp stones, and her hair smelled of salt.