Aldous Finn kept the light at Cormorant Point for thirty-one years, and he wrote down everything.

Not the interesting things. The weather at dusk. The hour he lit the lamp. The names of ships that passed close enough to read, and the ones that did not. A ledger a year, thirty-one of them, stacked in the keeper's cupboard in order, each spine marked in the same square hand.

The inspectors loved him for it. Nobody else on that coast wrote anything down at all.

When they found him in the spring of his thirty-second year, the lamp was lit, the stove was cold, and the current ledger lay open on the table with the day's weather already entered. Fair, falling glass. Wind sou-west, freshening.

He had been dead, the doctor said, for two days.