Chapter 10 My Lighthouse
MY LIGHTHOUSE
VIOLET
Do you fall in love like rain, sudden and soft, or like fire, slow and consuming?
SilenceInMidnight: Fire. Ashes first.
It has been forty-eight hours since I woke up, but time feels slippery. For all I know, I could still be asleep. Everything around me feels like a bright white canvas stretched too tight, empty of detail and any meaning.
When the doctor first asked me questions—What’s your name? What day is it? Do you know where you are?—panic detonated inside my chest violently.
Each question echoed into nothing. There were no answers that rose and no instincts that kicked in.
A sound tore out of me before I could stop it, sharp and animal.
I clutched my hair with my free hand, the one not trapped in a cast, pulling until my scalp burned, until pain finally broke through the numbness.
I need something to be real. I need proof that I still exist. Yet there’s just silence and blank space where something vital should have been.
Everyone calls me Violet, but the name slides right past me. It doesn’t spark or settle; rather, it feels like someone else’s coat draped over my shoulders, too familiar for a stranger, yet utterly not mine.
I repeat it silently. Violet. Violet. Violet.
Shouldn’t a name I’ve supposedly heard my entire life do something? Unlock some feelings of joy, irritation, embarrassment, love?
I don’t care what emotion; I want anything. But every minute that passes stretches the emptiness wider, and with it, my hope thins.
Dissociative amnesia. That’s what the doctors are calling it.
The cruel part is that I remember what the word “amnesia” means. I remember the definition, the clinical explanation, but I’ve lost all those relevant memories that make me me.
I turn my face toward the window and inhale slowly. I won’t be alone for long. Since I woke up—after the panic, after the sedative—solitude has come only in brief, stolen minutes like this.
Most of the time, Elodie is here, or Willow, or Daisy, or all three of them together. They tell me they’re my best friends, that we grew up together, that sisters might be a better word for what we are.
I want to believe them, as I have nothing else to believe. Yet beneath their presence, there’s a quiet ache that never leaves. There are no parents, no family waiting for me in the hall. The thought slips in uninvited—How lonely of a life did I live?
My eyes drift toward the glass beyond the room.
In the gallery outside, I see him again, the dark silhouette leaning against the window. He’s always there, like a shadow that never quite moves out of frame. He sits on the hallway bench, angled toward my room like he’s been stationed there to guard some door.
The strange thing is, in this unfamiliar body, inside a life that doesn’t feel like it belongs to me yet, his presence is… grounding. He feels like a lighthouse I didn’t ask for but keep instinctively searching for anyway.
But soon another thought twists sharply, slicing through the comfort. Someone in this hospital has a guardian angel, and I don’t even have a family. There’s no one pacing the hallway for me. No parent or partner or someone who once promised forever.
There’s no one bound to me by blood or by rings or by history.
“Hi, Vi. How are you feeling?” Elodie asks as she steps into the room.
She’s holding a mug of coffee, steam curling into the air, and sets it on my nightstand beside the bouquet of purple roses that appeared sometime while I was still under the impact of sedatives.
Willow follows her in, and my attention drifts past them to the hallway. Daisy has paused just outside the door, speaking quietly to the man on the bench by the window.
Wait—
Do I also know the guardian angel?
When Daisy walks inside and smiles at me, I finally reply to Elodie. “Fine.”
“Let’s see if we can upgrade that to amazing,” Willow says brightly, setting a pastry box onto my lap.
I stare at it, confused.
“Go on,” she urges with a grin. “It’s your favorite dessert.”
I hear the hope beneath her words, feel it pressing gently against my ribs. Since I woke up, they’ve all been doing this, offering pieces of my life like breadcrumbs, waiting to see if any of them can lead me home.
“I… might not remember it,” I whisper. When I search my mind for favorite dessert, there’s nothing, just the same white space.
“That’s okay, Vi.” Daisy smiles. “No pressure. Besides, hardly anyone dislikes Willow’s mom’s baking.”
At the mention of mom, my stomach dips with a feeling of grief for my family, who I’ve already grieved once in the past. Today, I don’t just grieve for them but also for the memories I’ve lost of them.
“Did anyone in my family cook or bake?” I whisper. “Like… something special?”
Elodie sits on the edge of my bed, hesitation flickering across her face before she rests her hand over my knee.
“Your grandfather, Pop, did so many things for you. I know this is terrifying right now, but you were—you are—very, very loved, Vi.”
I nod. It feels safer than speaking. The reality is, I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel, and that’s the worst part.
Fear would make sense, grief would make sense, and even anger. But this, this hollow uncertainty, is like being handed a stack of photographs with all the faces burned out.
With trembling hands that won’t quite listen to me, I lift the lid of the box.
Warm sweetness spills into the room immediately.
The rich scent feels like it should belong to a memory—late afternoons, laughter echoing off kitchen walls, flour-dusted countertops, fingers sticky with sugar—but my mind stays stubbornly blank, a locked door with no handle on my side.
I keep staring, waiting for something to bloom. A spark or even the faintest sense of déjà vu of myself eating too many of these delicate red-tipped flower-shaped pastries, but nothing comes.
“Um… they look really nice.”
“They are apple roses. You used to devour these whenever Mom made them. Try one.” Willow is smiling, but it’s thinner now.
She truly believed these desserts might work—I can see it in her eyes.
I pick one up and take a small bite.
The pastry is tender, sweet, layered just right, the apple soft against my tongue.
I chew deliberately, letting the flavor linger, stretching the moment, wondering if my mind is just being slow, rummaging through drawers, and all I need is patience.
But no matter how long or slowly I chew, the taste stays only that—a taste.
It’s pleasant but empty of context, and there’s no memory that follows it home.
My throat tightens and I blink hard against the familiar burn gathering behind my eyes. I hate that my first instinct is to cry over something as small as a dessert, something that shouldn’t matter this much.
But it does. If something this specific doesn’t bring anything back, what will?
Or will it always be like this?
Will every future experience be accompanied by stories that are narrated to me? Stories I once lived but can no longer claim?
I set the pastry back into the box, unable to look at it anymore.
My gaze drifts, unmoored, until it finds the window and him. The man in the gallery, an unmoving silhouette leaning against the glass.
My lighthouse. My constant in this strange, fractured world. A quiet anchor I keep circling back to. For reasons I don’t understand, my chest eases just a fraction when I see him.
The fear doesn’t disappear, but it slows.
I tear my eyes away to look at Daisy and whisper, “Do I know him?”
“You mean Rowan?” Daisy glances at Willow, then Elodie, and something unspoken passes between them.
Rowan.
I turn the name over slowly, like a smooth stone in my palm, waiting for it to snag on something inside me. It doesn’t. It just slides through my thoughts, the way everything else has since I woke up.
When I nod, it’s Willow who asks, “Would you like to meet him? He’s been waiting until you’re ready.”
Waiting.
My mouth goes dry. He’s been here for me, not someone else. He’s not passing time or keeping vigil for another life.
“But if you’re not ready,” Elodie adds, “he can wait.”
I shake my head before fear of any kind catches up with me. “I want to meet him.”
He’s my someone out there.
Everything seems to slow the moment Daisy opens the door and he steps inside.
He’s like a figment of my imagination in some ways, and not in so many more—real and surreal all at once.
His midnight-black suit fits his tall frame, sharp and composed, but it’s the purple tie that draws my attention, a single, deliberate splash of color against the dark. My hand lifts to my hair without thinking, fingers brushing the strands where purple hides beneath black.
Is it just coincidence… or something else?
I wait for him to speak—maybe a hello? But he doesn’t. Instead, his eyes find mine and stay. They are deep green and filled with intensity. His gaze feels less like staring and more like sharing, as if he’s speaking to me without sound, memorizing my face.
The silence stretches, heavy but not uncomfortable. Still, the part of me that needs reassurance pushes forward.
“Hi,” I say quietly.
He swallows, his throat moving visibly, and then he gives a slow nod.
I wait for him to say something, but I’m greeted with silence. Those eyes, however, never leave me, following every breath, every blink.
“You’re Rowan?” I try again.
Another nod before his gaze drops and he pulls out his phone and begins typing.
He’s texting someone while I’m waiting for his words like my life depends on them?
The thought stings like a bruise. But then he turns the phone toward me and the screen lights up with words.
You call me Night.
I look from the phone to him. “Really?”
Night.
Yes. That fits him. It wraps around the way he’s been hovering just beyond reach, like a quiet guardian keeping watch.
My gaze lifts back to his face. “You can’t speak?”