The Last Lightkeeper's Daughter

Merit Halvorsen has kept the Gull Point light for four years, since her father's hands gave out, and she has kept it alone. Twenty-six, untouched, and stuck, she has spent two winters letting the treasurer of the Saltwinds MC climb her stairs on the excuse of a generator that has never once needed him. He is forty-five, kind and completely unreachable, and in February a storm strands him long enough for her to stop pretending. By April she is carrying his child. She does not tell him — not in April, not in September, not when the club votes to sell her lighthouse to a hotel group, and not when she finds out the buyer is Elio himself, who has been buying it back for her, quietly, for two years. Her daughter is born on a coast road in the rain. When the hospital billing office finally makes the introduction Elio never got, he has to do the thing his brother's death taught him not to do: stand in the open and ask.