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From the lighthouse, the hill fell away sharply toward the rocky beach far below us. And from there, nothing but the ocean. It was grey and choppy this morning, the wind from last night’s storm lingering, but some days it was as bright and smooth as glass all the way to the distant horizon.

“This isn’t what I was imagining when I thought of a Pacific island,” Eddie said.

I nodded.

It was a common misconception. People thought of palm trees and white sand beaches when they imagined the Pacific, not pine trees and rocks. Dauntless was no Tahiti. It was something else entirely. It was wilder, older, and its winters were unforgiving.

“So, you’re a Nesmith, you said?” Eddie asked.

“That’s right.”

Eddie’s eyes widened. “Are you a descendant of Josiah Nesmith?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But so is half the island.”

I was one of the few people who carried the Nesmith name.

My forefathers had tended to produce entire gaggles of daughters to every son, so the surname wasn’t as prevalent as it might have been.

I was the only Josiah Nesmith left on the island, since Old Joe had passed away last winter.

I was still stuck with the name Red Joe, though, thanks to the colour of my hair.

It had distinguished me from my great-uncle while the old man had been alive.

“It’s a…” Eddie scratched his cheek while Hiccup lolled lovingly at his feet. “It’s a very small population.”

Which was a roundabout way of saying inbred.

Except that didn’t seem to be where Eddie was going at all.

“So, it turns out I have a link to the island as well.” His eyes were bright. “Hawthorne. My great-great-great-whatever-grandfather was George Hawthorne.”

“Ah,” I said.

Mavis was going to be all over this.

“That’s how I got interested in the Dauntless to begin with.

” Eddie wrinkled his nose, making his glasses shift.

“The wreck, the mutiny, all of it. It’s really fascinating.

The museum was closed yesterday, but the lady at the shop said that it should be open today, so I’m going to go and check it out. Have you been?”

Of course I had. There really wasn’t a lot to do on the island; people on Dauntless would go to the opening of a window.

I stopped in at the museum any time it was open just to say hello.

Not because I was especially sociable, but because not saying hello was the sort of slight that was magnified exponentially in a place like this.

Small communities had long memories, and places set aside for people to step into even before they were born.

I was Tall Joe Nesmith’s son, and the direct descendant of the hero Josiah Nesmith.

My name wasn’t just an inheritance, it was a legacy, and it came with expectations attached, and sooner or later—sooner, probably—I’d be expected to shoulder some of those.

“Quite often,” I said. “Mostly just to catch up with John Coldwell, who runs the place. I don’t think I’ve ever really had a look at the exhibits though.”

“Coldwell,” Eddie said with a smile. “That’s another one of those names that keeps cropping up here.”

“There are a few,” I agreed.

“Maybe he’d like to check out my research.” Eddie bent to rub Hiccup’s belly for a moment and then straightened again. “I’ll see you later, Joe. Maybe you could give me a tour of your lighthouse?”

“Okay,” I said, and it wasn’t until I saw Eddie’s cheeky smile and accompanying flush that I realised it might have been a euphemism.

Jesus. Was it?

I went inside and trimmed my beard after Eddie left, just in case.

* * *

L ate in the afternoon, I caught another glimpse of Eddie’s bright red jacket as he climbed the hill from the village, but he didn’t come to the lighthouse.

I didn’t blame him. The weather was turning bad again, another storm on the way.

He probably wanted to get back to his tent before the rain hit.

I did my rounds, then checked the weather station in the yard outside.

The data was automatically transmitted to the Bureau of Meteorology—another thing that had been automated before my tenure at the lighthouse—so all I had to do was check that everything appeared to be in working order and that none of the warning lights were flashing on the electronics.

Hiccup snuffled around my feet for a while and then had an attack of the zooms and ran around the yard like a fat black tornado until she fell to the ground panting, her tongue lolling.

She looked inordinately pleased with herself.

“Idiot,” I said fondly, and her tail thumped.

After last night’s beans on toast, I decided to make something a little more substantial for dinner. I took the beef roast I’d got yesterday out of the fridge and put it in the oven along with some pumpkin and potato. The leftovers would be good for sandwiches for the rest of the week.

While dinner was cooking, I checked my emails.

There was one from Amy. She was in her final year of university now, studying aquaculture at James Cook University.

She’d always said she wanted to study something that would benefit the community, but I half-suspected she might turn out to be one of those young people who left the island seeking bigger opportunities and never returned.

The lure of the outside world was bright.

I’d felt it once. There had been a time when I’d thought I’d never return to Dauntless.

And then my father died.

Two other men had died with him, when their fishing boat had gone down—one of them was my best friend Will Harper’s dad.

It had been a dark day in the island’s history.

I’d come back for Amy, who’d been barely fifteen when it happened, and then got the job as the lighthouse keeper when Peter Corporal’s old knees could no longer carry him up to the lantern room.

Now I was twenty-eight years old, and this was my life.

I wouldn’t say I was dissatisfied with it—Dauntless Island was in my blood—but I’d be lying if I said I never missed the bustle and hum of the mainland.

And I’d really be lying if I said I never got lonely.

I wasn’t the most socially outgoing bloke, but at least on the mainland there’d been a fair to middling chance I’d meet someone.

I’d had better odds there than here on Dauntless.

Cute guys didn’t just wander up to the lighthouse every day.

Well, one had yesterday.

I thought of Eddie Hawthorne. Asking for a tour of my lighthouse was a euphemism, wasn’t it?

I was very much out of practice, and maybe that—combined with a serious case of wishful thinking—had caused me to misinterpret Eddie’s comment.

It had been a long time since I’d had to figure out whether someone was flirting.

The only living creature who flirted with me these days was Hiccup, and she was just whoring herself out for roast pumpkin.

She stared at me adoringly as I ate.

After dinner, I did my final rounds before returning to the cottage. The TV reception was terrible again because of the storm rolling in, so I scanned the living room bookshelf instead. I found the familiar book and settled down on the couch to read.

It was a history of Dauntless Island. The HMS Dauntless —one of many ships to carry the name—had been sent to the Pacific to expand the empire, or intimidate the French, or to claim new territories without asking the people who already lived in them, or whatever it was naval ships did back in 1832.

Despite its original orders, at some point it had received new instructions—to attempt to locate any survivors from the wreck of the Antigone , a passenger ship that had been lost en route to New Zealand.

The surviving passengers had in fact been located and were in the process of being transported to New South Wales when the Dauntless struck rocks and foundered off the island that now bore its name.

The descendants of those soldiers, sailors, and civilians had become the residents of Dauntless Island, but those first few years had been bloody.

George Hawthorne, the captain of the Dauntless , had been overthrown by mutineers led by Josiah Nesmith and, legend had it, hanged on the very spot the lighthouse now stood.

George Hawthorne had been a dictatorial arsehole by all accounts, and by the time another naval ship stopped in a few years later, the islanders were settled very happily into their new home.

Two hundred years after that, we were still proud of our mutiny, and of the way we’d thumbed our noses at authority ever since.

Dauntless Island was technically a territory of Australia, but a fiercely independent spirit ran through the islanders.

We were proud of who we were and where we’d come from, but I sometimes wondered if there was fear behind that pride.

Fear that our way of life was dying out now that the world was smaller than ever, and more and more younger people might choose the mainland over the island.

If Dad hadn’t died, if I hadn’t had to come back for Amy, would I have come back at all? I didn’t like to admit it, but sometimes I thought that no, I wouldn’t have. On Dauntless, I was Red Joe Nesmith, but on the mainland I could have been anyone at all, even nobody special.

I flipped through the well-thumbed pages of the book, picking out details I remembered and relearning those I’d forgotten.

Familiar names jumped off the page at me: Nesmith, Coldwell, Corporal, Finch, Barnes, Hooper, Harper, Williams, and Dinsmore.

Those names were the backbone of the island.

Other names weren’t: Hawthorne, who’d been hanged by the mutineers, but also Jessup and Foley and Pritchard, men who’d died of disease or in accidents before they’d had children to continue their lines.

Their names were memorialised on a brass plaque in the small island church.

Outside, the storm picked up. The wind howled, and rain pelted against the roof.

Hiccup whined, standing up and staring at me intently.

“What?” I asked her. “You need to go out? In this weather?”

She whined again.

I sighed and set my book aside. I stood, and Hiccup darted into the kitchen and barked at the back door, her hackles up.

My skin prickled with unease. “What? What is it?”

I opened the door and peered out into the darkness.

A sudden crack of lightning illuminated the world, and my heart skipped a beat as I saw the figure looming towards me. And then I saw that red jacket.

“Eddie?” I called out. “Is that you?”

Eddie stumbled towards me. His jacket was unzipped, and he was soaked to the skin and holding one hand to his head. Lightning flashed again, and I saw the blood streaming down the side of his face.

“Jesus! Eddie!” I darted out into the rain to meet him. He must have left his tent for some reason and taken a fall. The steep hillside could be treacherous in the rain.

“Joe!” Eddie staggered towards me. “Help me!”

Then he pitched forward, and I barely caught him before he hit the ground.