Remember the Lighthouse

By Hailey Chomette

Over the past eleven years it has become clear that the life Bianca Morton has built for herself is not where her heart is. After being given a clue to the path she believes she needs to follow, Bianca turns her life upside down and inside out as she begins the journey of finding out what matters most and repairing the damage she has done. But what happens when the mistakes she has made in the past shatters the hope of retrieving the time she has lost?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hailey Chomette
• Release date: Jul 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781777787615

Book preview

1

Chapter 1

Jerry sipped his nearing cold coffee in the echoey office that his books, papers, and research were scattered all over. The overwhelming scent of the hazelnut brew filled the tiny office. An ivy plant near the old, single pane window flourished in its accessible environment, splaying itself all over the walls, hanging about wherever it could just so it could keep growing. Jerry never bothered trimming it, the office was just as much the ivy plant’s as it was his.

Being a private investigator for a living, his clients were not expecting the pristine work space of a lawyer, but he knew they also were not expecting the chaotic blowout that was his office. As clients left his office before even asking about his services, Jerry moved his prices lower and lower, until they were rock bottom. Lowest in the city, and that’s how he cornered his market. Jerry was not a scammer, he did his job and well. He was just a little…spontaneous. That’s all. He followed leads as they popped into his head; he thought outside of the box; he took chances he knew that other P.I.’s never would. He also got a lot of the cases other P.I.’s never would. He was not the one investigating the high profile cheating scandals from pretentious, well-heeled clientele. Those jobs may pay well, but they bored Jerry to bits, and luckily, they were not the cases he was offered. The people who sought out his services were different.

They were the neglected housewives who feared their husbands were gambling away their household money, or worse, spending it on drugs. Jerry, who had spent over twenty years in the business, could spot these women the second they walked in. Broken and distraught, they had scavenged just barely enough to pay him to find out the truth. He was the cheapest P.I. in the city after all. They loitered outside his office until they could gather the courage to amble in. Red-rimmed eyes filled with shame walked into his office. Jerry gave these women a further reduction in his already discounted fees. He did this because, nine times out of ten, their husbands were throwing away their money on gambling, booze, drugs, and occasionally prostitutes. Sure, there was the odd fella who had just been fired and didn’t want to tell his wife, but they were a drop in the bucket. His clients were the parents of children who were being harassed by online intimidation, who had scrambled up enough money to find out who was behind it and bring them to justice. Jerry, who had a seventeen-year-old son himself, gave them a discount as well.

This had bought Jerry the reputation of cheap and cheap, well, it meant not reliable. Jerry knew that it made him look like a scammer, a swindler who would take any money he could get his filthy hands on. But he knew that wasn’t him, and the clients who had used his services knew too. So Jerry kept on getting his bottom-bin clients for bottom-bin prices. He kept taking on the people who desperately needed help and couldn’t afford it anywhere else.

But once in a while, he got someone different. That someone different had walked into his office about a year ago asking him to take on a type of case he didn’t normally agree to. A case with very little leads and a very high probability of failure. She didn’t walk in broken. She walked in with fire in her eyes. Jerry saw it as an opportunity to finally make some real money from someone who could afford it. So he charged her his full fee.

Jerry had some very good news for the different woman who was coming in today, he had finally solved her case. Bianca Morton was looking for her son. A baby boy she gave up for adoption over ten years ago, who would now be eleven. She had been paying him for over a year to find her son. It had been a tough one to crack, Bianca had no clues on his whereabouts and no idea what he looked like now. Jerry spent months aimlessly scouring every corner of the online world and may have never found him if it hadn’t been for his perceptive eye. He had attended a charity event, raising money for foster care families with his son who needed volunteer hours to graduate high school. There, behind a little booth, sitting with another boy and an older woman who must have been his foster parent, was a boy who had all the same features and coloring as the woman who had walked into his office.

Jerry walked up and spoke to the boy, asking him to speak about the information at his booth. He even smiled exactly like Bianca. Jerry had been looking in the wrong place all along. His client’s son hadn’t been adopted—he had been tossed into the foster care system! Why? Well, that he didn’t know, and he wasn’t being paid to figure it out either. From this lead, Jerry easily got the information he didn’t from the boy and his foster mother. Their address.

2

Chapter 2

There was no denying it. Bianca’s life had emphatically shattered into a billion tiny shards. Those shards had then been tossed out into the ocean without a single hope of finding them. Forever lost to the salt and tumultuous waves. There was no putting it back together this time. And for that, she felt eternally grateful. She had, after all, destroyed it herself.

Bianca always loved the crackle of the gravel driveway leading up to the old house sitting on the edge of the sea, even though it was weathered and broken. Potholes had developed in strategic locations and if a driver didn’t know exactly how to maneuver their vehicle, the road could leave them stranded with a flat. She followed the lane in the old red Chevy truck as it curved and winded, leaving the small rocks spilling over into the green forest floor that curled around it. She could smell the distant, drifting scent of the flowers that popped up from beneath the leaves and brought an element of joy to the green serenity. This forest had always looked, to her, like an undisturbed woodland, a perfect bit of nature, where she used to make-believe that fairies might make a home, but Bianca knew now no fairies lived here.

She couldn’t see the house from the main road, heck, she couldn’t even see the house at the halfway point down the kilometer long driveway. Bianca couldn’t see the house until she reached where the gravel trickled off and sprinkled onto the smooth parkway. The trees opened up like clouds in the heavens and just like that, she found herself in an entirely different realm. What those trees opened up to depended on the time of year. If she was lucky, and she was today, it was her favorite time of year and summery, lush greenery led up to the sparkling, turquoise-blue of the ocean and the soft cream-and-coffee-colored sand that was begging to be stepped in.

If it was winter, she was greeted by the lifeless, wistful branches arched gracefully overhead. The seemingly endless white blanket of heavy snow bid her a greeting, reflecting the calm, dim overcast that seemed to perpetually overhang through the long winter. Sometimes this scene felt lonely to Bianca, but mostly, even winter here gave her peace.

But no matter the time of year it was, when those last trees were passed and Bianca was fully enveloped by the forest in that secluded house clearing, she could never miss the red and white of the immeasurable lighthouse. It conquered the landscape. The smaller, two-story home came in a close second. It would have been charming, in a rustic way, had it not been in desperate need of repairs. The old building had been let go for too long and had a sorrowful, abandoned cabin quality, like it used to be beautiful but was now just pitiful.

This paradise of isolation, forever salt-scented, where only the trees and the water spoke, where only birds’ melodic voices cut through the calm air, was once just as serene as it seemed. The lives inside the little house bustled with the joy of a simple life. However, for the past several years, that hadn’t been the case. The property no longer felt like the gentle safe-haven it once was, not to her.

Bianca’s thick, dark brown hair was tied up in a loose bun, reflecting the sun with indiscriminate tints of brass that gave her tresses their dynamic beauty. It wasn’t often let down, but when it was, it hung to her waist, shining in soft waves. It was a hassle for certain, but Bianca never could find the will to give it more than a trim. There was just something comforting about its hidden beauty. She didn’t have the heart to spoil it, even if no one got to see it but her.

Bianca shook her hair free of the bun, but immediately got annoyed when it tickled the sensitive skin of the back of her neck. Bianca sighed and clawed her fingers through it, pulling it back into a low ponytail, just above the nape of her neck. She pulled the mass of hair over her shoulder, and it weaved over her chest. Bianca admired it silently, chastising herself for not having the fortitude to set it free. Beauty; forever hidden.

You got your waves from living next to the ocean. Her mother used to say whenever she had brushed Bianca’s hair as a child. Bianca believed that, even if the sentiment came from her mother.

Her hair eventually made its own way back over her shoulder. It flowed along in the wind with her as she walked in the sand, moving slowly and pushing her toes in deep with each step she took. She squinted bright green eyes against the intense sunlight, and her deep olive skin soaked it in like an oil, massaging and softening her from the inside. It was a beautiful day, the warm sunshine made it so. Crisp, calm sunbeams spilled over the ocean and the soft breeze sang a song against the trees, but inside, Bianca felt only turmoil.

She held something in her hand. A small piece of glittering metal, corroded with speckles of copper rust. Bianca couldn’t look at it, she turned it over and over in her palm. She had found it on the beach the night before; it shone in the moonlight against the pale sand beneath it. A piece of the lighthouse, she examined the tall building from the beach, but she couldn’t tell where it had broken off from. The metal’s decomposition sawed through it at both ends, the paint chips disclosed its cause of death as neglect.

It was falling apart, literally. Her lighthouse was giving up on her. Her home was fading to beyond repair, Bianca was letting it go too far. She had let all of this go too far. This was a critical reminder of reality, a significant consequence for her actions. A warning.

Bianca looked up at the lighthouse, mesmerized as she always had been by it, but the giant building didn’t seem to fondly gaze down at her like it used to. Instead, the red lantern room at the top seemed to look at her like a big angry eyeball, judging her. She shuddered.

Bianca could see the foundation cracks forming, the metal rusting, and windows in dire need of a wipe down. The lantern room at the very top floor had been dark for so long, Bianca wasn’t even sure it worked anymore. The incredible structure had been built long ago to inform those on the water of the large, jagged rocks lurking just beneath the surface of the water beneath the cliff on which the lighthouse stood next to Bianca’s beach. They were impossible to see at night, and difficult to spot even during the day. They could take down any large vessel that attempted to sail over them. After her grandfather, the last keeper of the lighthouse, had passed, Bianca had buoys placed over the rocks. It was normally enough, but a few times, in the dead of night, Bianca had awoken to a wrecked boat on her beach that hadn’t spotted the buoys and had cruised over the rocks. No one was ever hurt, but the guilt of thinking that someone could have been always eaten at Bianca. The lighthouse would have circumvented those situations, and yet, she couldn’t even bring herself to climb the steps to the lantern room.

It didn’t feel like just a building to Bianca. Her grandfather had taken care of it like a child. Like it was a living, breathing being. It called Bianca; it pleaded with her to come inside and tend to it. The colour of the tower was barely white anymore, grime and rust clung to it, turning it to a brown-ivory. The lantern room’s paint faded from brilliant, dynamic red to a depressed, alabaster salmon, asking her to please help bring it back to life.

Bianca couldn’t answer the call. She just couldn’t. Not yet. She had neglected the proud lighthouse so badly and for so long. It was her responsibility to tend to it and all these years she had made the wrong choices, brought the wrong people into her life and it had been nothing but chaos ever since she had been left in charge of this property.

However, all that was about to change. The piece of the lighthouse in her hand was exactly the slap in the face that she needed. What was she doing? Destroying the little slice of heaven she had? The one piece of her family she had left, the piece her grandfather had worked his entire life to maintain so he could pass it over to her. A gold nugget of love that Bianca was spitting on.

But no more. Bianca’s compliance had gone to meet its maker a year ago when she walked into the private investigator’s office and used every bit of money she had to hire him to find her son.

It took him that entire year, which was good, because it took her that year to build up the courage for her next step. And last night she had taken it. She kicked out Trevor, and she had done it for good this time, she was sure. That one little piece of metal and a very large piece of information had given her back her self-respect. She exiled the man who had been controlling her life for eleven years. The man who had taken over the property tried to take it from her. He had tried so hard, but the one thing Bianca was proud of was that she had never let him convince her to sell it. Bianca squeezed her eyes shut as she thought of him, the man she didn’t want to give anymore of her thoughts to.

It was beautiful for a long while. Trevor took care of the house, he cooked, he cleaned, he cleaned a lot, he fixed little things like squeaky doors and burnt out lightbulbs. For quite a few years it was fun. Bianca had fallen for him, she loved him deeply and she wanted nothing more than to please him, repay him for what he had done for her. They joked together, laughed together, walked on the beach, had movie nights and looked at stars from beneath the lighthouse. They did all the normal things that couples do, and Bianca felt happy. Afterall, she wasn’t alone. He proposed to her on their two-year anniversary, and they got married in the courthouse the very next week. After that, things changed.

The years had passed quickly. The more Bianca tried to salvage things with him, the worse the situation became. She hadn’t realized she had wasted so much time until it was already gone. Until a year ago, something clicked in her brain, something that told her to find her son. Bianca wasn’t sure what she was going to do when she found him, but he was the only piece of family she had left, her only goal was to be a part of his life.

Looking back on it, she had always thought that there had been good times, that there was a reason she stayed with him and wanted so badly to love him, but it was all a mask. A circus show. A manipulation and guise to conceal how bad things had truly been. Hot and cold, and back and forth their arguments blew through the walls of the house on countless occasions.

Bianca threw him out and let him back in over and over. A steady rhythm, it began to feel like a reliable pattern. A rotation of indignation. The passion that once lived in the bedroom turned into a war of words, clashing over and over, until there was no more love-making, only vehement anger. A cycle of boiling altercations, followed by Trevor’s persistent beseeching, supplemented with Bianca’s culpability for letting it go on for so long. A toxic, spinning whirlpool.

It was a continuous circle fueled by the deep trepidation of being alone. She kept trying to cut