Lina Baptiste has made a career out of building light where there is none. At thirty-one, the Montréal lighting designer is great at specifying gels, coaxing old fixtures back to life, and pretending her coming-out didn't scramble every circuit in her careful life. When a family dinner in Laval ends in frosty silence and a client ghosts her after a viral post about being bi, she bolts east for a contract that sounds like salvation: restoring the Seven Sisters Lens, a nineteenth-century Fresnel masterpiece, for the Maritime Light & Signal Archive in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.
Her first day goes catastrophically bright. Lina nudges a crate at the wrong angle and micro-scratches a priceless prism—right in front of Cal Whittemore, the archive's gruff marine electrician with forearms like mooring ropes, a rescue mutt named Buoy, and the sort of half-smile that looks like trouble. Cal thinks artists are chaos with receipts; Lina thinks he labels everything so he never has to feel it. Then a supplier snafu sends them on a salvage trip up the coast to Fogo Island for replacement glass. A nor'easter strands them at the Great Auk Inn, one room, space heater humming, battery lanterns painting their shadows on cedar walls. Between dog snores and a thermos of rum coffee, stories spill: the woman Lina loved and left, the boat Cal walked away from, the niece he's learning how to raise.
Back in Lunenburg, their spark is impossible to dim, but the optics get messy. Strangers assume straight, friends at the Tern bar crack jokes that land like stones, and a museum donor suggests toning down the bi flag enamel pin on Lina's lapel. Cal wants to be the kind of steady that doesn't erase her, but every misread glance tightens the knot between them. As Nocturne Halifax approaches, Lina drafts a radical restoration—re-assembling the Seven Sisters so the beam splits into a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree compass of color across the harbor, a map of choices instead of a single line. When the night comes, the Bluenose II cuts through a halo of violet and teal, her mother's voice softens over the phone, and Cal shows up with a handmade light maze that turns people toward the parts of themselves they keep shelving. Lina has to decide if the brightest path is the one she can walk in public, hand in hand, without dimming any piece of who she is.
