Original AI-generated book

The Tide Log of Widow's Reach

About this book

Twelve-year-old Caspian Maren keeps the tide log at Widow's Reach Lighthouse, the last inhabited rock in the Gull Shoal chain. Six months ago his mother, marine biologist Dr. Vera Maren, went out on a routine reef survey and did not come back. Since then Caspian has told the story of that night to ferry passengers, supply-boat skippers, and anyone else who asks — and every telling is different. A ghost net. A light under the water. A dive that never happened at all. He isn't lying for sport. Each version keeps someone safe, and he hasn't yet decided whose safety counts most. When his fifteen-year-old sister Robyn is pulled out of her mainland boarding school and delivered to the island, she brings a battered field journal taken from Vera's campus office. Inside are transect notes, sonar mosaics, and photographs of night dredging in the protected reef corridor — work made legal by waivers signed with their own father's name. Robyn's memory runs backward from the day the coast guard investigator lands, through a frozen reunion with a brother she barely recognizes, toward a night she overheard a voice on channel sixty-eight and said nothing. Caspian's runs in every direction at once: the dive mask on the rocks at dawn, papers burning in the lighthouse furnace, the first fabricated story and the terrible relief of it. A spring gale strands the investigator on the Reach with no boats running, and Caspian's contradictions begin to fail one by one. Robyn must decide whether her mother's journal is evidence or a confession — and whether handing it over will make Vera's work matter or destroy it. Told in two unreliable voices braided with field notes, harbor daybooks, deposition tapes, and case files, this is a story about salt-eaten stone, currents that reveal as much as they hide, and the discovery that people we love are capable of quiet, devastating harm — and that love does not cancel consequence.