Lotus design with red flame and black swirl

The lodger came in October with a sea chest, a bad cough and a habit of walking the rocks at low water. Thomas Vell, the register said. On the third morning he came up the shingle with his sleeves wet to the elbow and a white flower in his cupped hands. Its petals were sharp and edged in black, as if someone had drawn them with a fine pen, and at its heart a coil of red rose like a flame that would not stay still. A thin black stem curled tight around his thumb.

Ada took the flower from him at the kitchen table and did not cut it. The old people in the cove said the lotus grew only in the tidal pool where a body had been lost and never found. It wanted a light to show the sea the way home. Whoever picked it must keep a flame in the window until the water gave back what it held, or the sea would take the next one who came looking. Thomas laughed at that, and then he stopped laughing, because the stem on his thumb had left a black mark that did not wash off.

He kept the lamp lit through the long winter, trimming the wick himself and sleeping in the chair beside the sill. In March the storms dropped away and the sea lay flat as slate. In April the pool on the rocks was empty of anything but weed. Ada climbed the stairs one morning and found the window bare, the lamp cold, and on the ledge a single red bead of wax with a curl of black thread running from it, the way a question mark runs out of a line.