The Grant

The lighthouse had not been repainted in eleven years, which Nadia Ferro took personally, and which was ridiculous, because she was the one who had left.

She stood at the bottom of the access road with her bag still over her shoulder and looked up at it — the rust bleeding down from the gallery rail, the boarded window on the seaward side that someone had boarded badly. Eleven years of weather doing what weather does to a structure nobody is fighting for.

The grant was for eighteen months. She had written the application in a single evening, in a flat six hundred kilometres away, and had known while writing it that she was not applying for a lighthouse.

“You’ll want the keys.”

Nadia turned.

Rosa Idris had not changed her voice. Everything else — the hair shorter, the hands rougher, a stillness that had not been there at twenty-four — but not the voice, which arrived in Nadia’s chest exactly where it had always gone.

“They gave you the keys?”

“Somebody had to have them.” Rosa held them out, and did not step closer than she had to. “I’m on the trust. Eight years now.”

Nadia took them. Their fingers did not touch, which had clearly been arranged.

“You knew I applied.”

“I read the applications, Nadia. All four of them.” Rosa put her hands in her pockets. “Yours was the best one. That’s why.”

There was a gull somewhere above them making the sound gulls make, and the sea doing its enormous indifferent work behind the headland, and eleven years standing between two women on an access road.

“Rosa—“

“The lamp room floor is rotten on the north side,” Rosa said. “Don’t stand on it. I’ll come by Thursday with the survey.”

She was already walking away. Nadia let her get six steps.

“Thursday,” she said.

Rosa raised a hand without turning round, and that — Nadia thought, watching her go — was the most anyone had said to her in eleven years.