For Renata

PETER AHEARN HAS RETURNED. He disappeared more than thirty-five years ago from his post as lighthouse keeper on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. But his mind has been ravaged by dementia, and no one knows what happened to him or why until his nephew, Mark Valente, discovers a journal Peter kept during the 1970s. Just when Renata Raposo is beginning to get her life back on track, Mark shows up with Peter’s journal. It chronicles the troubled light keeper’s life of struggle and isolation, his passionate love affair with the beautiful yet tormented young Renata…and an astonishing confession. But Mark is stunned when Renata denies an affair ever took place, and he is left to question whether anything his uncle wrote is true. Now he must connect past to present, and piece together a picture of what really happened decades before. …And he must grapple with his own burgeoning infatuation with the now middle-aged, enigmatic beauty.