Part 4
“Answer to what?” Owen asked, though he already knew.
Nora checked Nell’s fluid line before responding. “They offered me the emergency-service position.”
“The one you interviewed for last fall?”
“Yes.”
“You told me they chose somebody else.”
“I told you they were interviewing other people.”
“When would you start?”
“April.”
Owen’s caretaker contract at North Point expired March 31. The renewal packet had been sitting unopened beneath Marian’s blue-rimmed bread plate for nine days.
“Take it,” he said.
Nora gave a tired shake of her head. “You say that as if the word fixes the logistics.”
“What logistics?”
“The lighthouse road. The stairs. The furnace. Your knee. The fact that you consider answering your phone an infringement of personal liberty.”
“Ben has a key.”
“Ben has a plow route and a family. Mavis has a store. I’m the person listed on every alarm and emergency form.”
“I never asked you to stay in Morrow Bay.”
The words came out with the clean finality Owen once used when closing a watertight door. He knew they were wrong before Nora’s face changed.
She did not raise her voice.
“No,” she said. “You made sure you never had to.”
She returned to the treatment room and closed the door.
For the next four days, Morrow Bay dug itself out. Plows reduced the snowbanks along Main Street to narrow blue-white walls. The lake disappeared beneath a hard brightness that made distance difficult to judge.
Inside the clinic, the dogs improved by degrees.
Finn wore protective boots over his healing pads and removed them whenever no one watched. His siblings recovered enough to quarrel over a knotted towel. Nell stood with the help of a support sling, though she kept most of her weight off the injured shoulder.
No microchips were found. Mavis posted notices at the market, town hall, marina office, and online. Nora contacted animal control and the regional rescue network. No owner came forward during the required hold.
Ben arrived after a morning plow run with a faded green dog bed.
“Scout’s,” he said when Mavis recognized it.
His old Labrador had died the previous spring. The bed had remained folded in the heated public works workshop ever since.
Ben set it beside Nell’s recovery pen and adjusted one flattened corner. Finn climbed onto it first. Nell lowered herself beside him with Nora’s help, and the two smaller puppies filled the remaining space.
Owen watched the four bodies settle together. “I could keep them at the lighthouse until they’re placed.”
Nora continued writing in Nell’s chart. “No.”
“There’s room.”
“There are forty exterior steps, no fenced yard, and ice on the access road. Nell needs support walking and regular rechecks.”
“I can drive her.”
Nora looked at his knee.
“One dog, then,” he said.
“When one is ready, we’ll discuss it.”
Ben offered a better arrangement. His workshop had a fenced service yard, steady heat, and no stairs. He could foster Nell and the two weaker puppies once Nora cleared them to leave the clinic.
“What about Finn?” Owen asked.
Ben looked at the puppy, who had just dragged one of Scout’s blankets halfway through the recovery-pen bars.
“He needs somebody with time to be supervised.”
Owen understood the suggestion and pretended not to.
That afternoon, Nora called the hospital in Duluth from the supply room. Owen could hear only fragments through the door.
“Yes, I understand.”
A pause followed.
“No. Morrow Bay isn’t the problem.”
She looked through the opening and saw him beside Finn’s pen. Her expression closed.
“I’ll give you my decision Monday morning.”
When she came out, Owen held Finn still while replacing a boot.
“You want that job,” he said.
“I do.”
“Then take it.”
“And when the tower steps ice over?”
“I stay off them.”
“When the furnace quits?”
“I reset it.”
“When you fall?”
“I don’t plan to.”
Nora crouched and checked the strap on Finn’s boot. “Neither did Nell.”
Owen had no answer that did not sound like one he had already used.
He returned to North Point before dark. The lighthouse stood above the frozen shore, its white tower throwing a long blue shadow across the service yard.
Inside the cottage, everything occupied its proper place. Marian’s sewing chest remained beneath the bedroom window. His Coast Guard photographs hung above the desk. Weather journals filled two shelves in the order he had written them.
The renewal packet waited beneath Marian’s bread plate.
Owen made coffee, opened the document, and filled in the familiar sections. He wrote his name, the cottage telephone number, and his vehicle information.
Under EMERGENCY CONTACT, he wrote Nora Pike.
The next line asked for the contact’s current address. Owen wrote his own address because Nora still received some mail at the lighthouse.
Then he stopped.
He had told her to take the job while placing her name beneath every consequence of his staying.
Owen carried the packet into the office. The emergency panel showed a list of automated contacts: historical society, county dispatch, Ben Kowalski, Nora Pike. Nora’s number appeared beside furnace failure, missed daily check-in, and medical emergency.
He had never asked her to accept any of them.
Outside, the lighthouse beam crossed the windows and moved on over the ice. Owen picked up the phone and called the historical society’s board chair at home.
The man answered on the fifth ring.
“Owen? Is there a problem at the light?”
“No.”
“Then what happened?”
Owen looked at Nora’s name on the renewal form.
“Post the job,” he said. “I’m done March thirty-first…”
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