After the war ended, Lyra returned to the island, the sun looked like it was setting sideways. It hit the sea with the heaviness of endings. She came home with a folded nurse’s uniform, a steel spine, and news of her husband’s death waiting in the salt-stained hands of her neighbor.

Her husband, Nestor Vlahos, keeper of the island’s lighthouse. Protector of the cliffs, they called him. A man who had once courted her by lighting candles in the shape of constellations on their rooftop in Chora. He believed in stories the rest of them buried under taxes and sea winds—sirens, mostly. Alluring female creatures with salt-burned throats who sang the lonely to death.

Lyra never believed in that. She believed in morphine, field stitches, and the quiet click of bones reset under firelight.

But belief wasn’t always the loudest thing in a house.

Nestor had left her a son, Lysander. Deaf, since birth. Eighteen and made of porcelain and fatigue. He moved like a tide pulled by someone else's moon.

The villagers said it was fate. That he couldn’t hear the sirens and that Nestor had trained him well. That some boys were born to be lighthouses, not men. Lyra didn’t argue, not at first. The war had taken her voice for other battles.

—

It took a week for her to hike the jagged path to the lighthouse and see him there—his ribs counting the minutes, his hands raw from gears and salt. He barely looked at her, except to sign that everything was fine. That he was doing what he must. That Papa would be proud.

Nestor’s journal lay tucked in the desk drawer like a sermon. Pages and pages of ritual: wake at dawn, polish the lens, check the edge of the cliff for shoes. Feed the birds. Don’t ask questions. Protect the island.

Protect the island. The most repetitive phrase in the notebook.

Lyra read until her eyes dried out. There were even notes on how to sleep less. How to eat just enough. How to keep a boy from becoming anything other than what was required.

She saw it, finally. A kind of hypnosis. Not by sirens—but by a father’s will, etched in routine and guilt. It was the same blank obedience she’d seen in boys at the front. The ones who smiled as they marched toward gunfire because someone had told them they must.

She tried, gently, to break him from it. Tried to cook for him, braid his hair like when he was small, play rebetiko records scratched with salt. But he would only blink at her, half-there, and return to his post as if chained. Chained to the memory of his father. Chained to the lighthouse.

She had to take her son back. The lighthouse needed to disappear.

—

Lyra bought sleeping pills from the old widow in the market. Then bought explosives from a fisherman’s son who didn’t ask questions. She fed the pills to her son one night, folded in boiled lentils, and when he drifted to sleep, she kissed his temple like a confession.

At the lighthouse, she placed sticks of dynamite like candles. The cliffs below sang, not in voices but in memory—whispers soaked in seafoam. She heard footsteps on the stone. Saw villagers approaching the cliff with glass eyes. Drawn. Willing.

She turned away. A nurse might have stopped them. But that nurse was broken by the war. What’s left was a mother.

When the lighthouse collapsed behind her in a burst of wind and fire, she felt no victory. Just relief. But the music didn’t stop.

A voice rose from the surf. Nestor’s. He called to her with the ache of unfinished business. For a moment, she stepped forward.

Then she felt Lysander stir on the cart. He turned his head. And she remembered who she was.

An earthquake rattled the island the next day. The villagers called it divine punishment. Others said it was the sea reclaiming something unnatural. They held a vigil, floated paper boats with figs and salt and prayers.

Lyra did not attend.

—

Years passed. She moved inland with her son. A quiet town. Cypress trees and honeycomb in the summers. Lysander kept bees. He smiled in photographs, whole and sun-kissed.

Some nights, the news whispered of suicides back on the island. Of cliffs that pulled like breath.

Lyra poured tea stroking the back of her son’s hand. She didn’t flinch. She had already chosen who to save.