He moved through the lane like a bell after it’s been struck: ringing and not ringing at the same time. Disturbed by small things—the snap of a branch, the distant laughter of gulls—he steadied himself against a low wall, the hem of his coat wet from the spray. Killala had taught him how to mend nets and smooth grief; it hadn’t taught him how to stop thinking in the second-person when the bottle opened.
“Night tomorrow,” he whispered, tasting the syllables like a dare. The town answered with the clink of glasses and the muffled music from O’Hara’s bar. Drunk on other people’s voices, the night folded around him. Memory moved in uneven steps: a face, a phrase, a fight, a funeral hymn that never quite finished.
The crate with SNIS-615 groaned as a truck passed, and for a heartbeat the numbers rearranged themselves into a year he’d wanted to forget. The lighthouse blinked—one slow, impartial pulse—and the single flower in Night Tomorrow leaned closer to the light. He thought about uprooting it, about taking it with him to somewhere that wasn’t Killala, somewhere that promised a different catalog number and a less predictable grief.