The Lantern Over Harbor's Reach

Lina Armitage woke before the gulls. The first thing she noticed was heat — not the soft, safe warmth of a stove but the precise burn of her kiln easing itself awake. It hummed like a living thing, a low, expectant sound that threaded through the timbered room and settled beneath the bones of the old boathouse. Salt hung in the air in thin ribbons; her hair smelled faintly of it, and the glass dust under her nails shimmered like tiny constellations. Outside, Harbor's Reach yawned and breathed: a town of fishermen's boots, varnished planks, and shopfronts that opened to the sea.

She moved with the rhythm she'd learned as a child — check the gas pressure, lift the lid just so, slide a tray of cobalt and topaz into the fire. Her hands knew how to read glass like a language. They could coax blues into the mood of twilight and make a shard forget that it had once been broken. The Lantern, her studio and the old boathouse wrapped into one, had the windows blown out to frame the harbour; in the mornings the light painted the floor with jewels.

Margot's kettle had been on the hob when Lina arrived; the old woman's cough came from the back room like an old clock tick. Margot, who had raised Lina after her mother left for a job in another city and never came back, kept the ledger of the boathouse and the spare mugs. She sat at a small table with a stack of postcards and a pencil that had been chewed nearly to nothing. Her hands shook only when she chose.

"The water's nearly at your knees this month," Margot said without looking up. Her voice was a familiar reed — brittle and kind. "You need to seal the south sill before the next tide."

Lina smiled, moving to wrap a strip of solder around a window frame. "I will. After the kiln cools."

She should have been content. The Lantern paid her rent; tourists came in the summer; she taught a night class on Tuesdays to teenagers who loved the way glass stole light. Her life was careful, measured, filled with small pleasures: the first blue in a cooling pane, the way the town bell threw knuckles of shadow across the dock. But contentment rested on wood that creaked and plans written in pencil. Old buildings were beautiful precisely because they were fragile.

When Lina stepped outside with her mug, Harbor's Reach had the particular clarity of a town that smelled of fish and possibility. A rowboat jutted from the water like an exclamation. Children ran along the boardwalk with sticky hands. The notice nailed to the Lantern's weathered door had not been there the night before.