The Lighthouse Road

We should have turned back when the GPS laughed.

Not out loud, but in a digital way—recalculating, recalculating—until the calm British voice gained a brittle edge. “Proceed to the route,” it kept insisting. We were already on the route. The ocean was to our left, breathing. The hedgerows were to our right, closing in.

“Probably lost signal,” Maeve said. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel of the rental, a rhythm that meant she was pretending not to be nervous. “It’s a peninsula. Everything ends somewhere.”

We had set out that morning from Galway with promises: see the cliffs, eat seafood in a village with three vowels in a row, don’t talk about New York. We lasted as long as the first good view.

The lighthouse appeared around a bend like a gravestone: white tower flaking paint, glass empty as a missing tooth, perched on a finger of rock that jabbed the sea. We pulled over, because that’s what you do. We took photos. We said, “wild” and “haunted” and “I could live here” in ways that meant the opposite.

Back in the car, the GPS drew us a tidy blue line that looped inland and rejoined the coast farther on. We followed. The hedgerows parted for sheep and rain. “Proceed to the route,” the voice pleaded. “Turn left. Turn left.” There was no left. When the road offered one, it was a lane that could barely fit a bicycle.

We rejoined the coast road and there it was again: the lighthouse, closer now, like we’d driven in a circle while going straight.

“Okay,” Maeve said. “That’s weird.”

“Old maps?” I offered. “Phantom roads?”

She checked her phone. No bars. “Ghost data.”

We tried a different plan: inland all the way, then down a road a farmer assured us led to a village that “has a pub and the news.” His dog leaned on my leg as if to say don’t. The farmer’s eyes slid away when we described the lighthouse. “Old wreckers used to light false fires there,” he said. “Ships dashed on rocks. People still talk like the light comes on some nights.”

“We’ll be fast,” Maeve said, and he nodded, but not like he believed fast could save anyone.

The inland road cut through fields scored with stone walls, the sky pressed low, the radio sneezing Irish pop between pockets of static. When the sea returned, it was to deliver the same geometry: the road, the cliffs, the lighthouse at the end of a crooked finger.

The third time did something to me. Fear isn’t always loud; sometimes it arrives as competence. I inventoried our water, snacks, fuel. I marked a route on the paper map the rental agent had thrown in as a joke. I felt useful in a way I hadn’t in months.

“We could go look,” Maeve said softly. “If we’re trapped on a loop, the only way out is through.”

Her logic sounded like a dare I’d made once: marry me, move across the ocean, take this life I’ve built and make it ours. She had done all that. We had done all that. And still the city had turned and turned us until we couldn’t tell whether we were in motion or just rerouting in place.

We took the road that led to the lighthouse because there was no other story left to tell.

At the headland, the wind made a sound like ropes snapping. The lighthouse door hung open. The stair was a spiral of rust scabs and salt. We climbed. At the top, the lantern room watched the ocean with blind eyes.

Maeve leaned her forehead against the glass and closed her eyes. In her profile, I could read the lines of all our arguments: the ones about time, and work, and the way my phone was always a third presence. I took her hand. It shook.

“Do you hear that?” she asked.

At first, I heard only wind and the ocean grinding miles into sand. Then, beneath it, a bell. Not from the lighthouse—deader than the moon—but from the car park, thin and insistent, like the bent bell on a bicycle.

“We’re not alone,” I said.

We descended into air that tasted like tin. Outside, the car sat where we’d left it, but the passenger door stood open. Our map was gone.

“Hello?” Maeve called.

The only answer was the bell, closer now. It led us along a path down the cliffs to a cove where waves threw themselves against black rock. On a flat of stone, our map lay open, pinned by a rusted lantern. On the map, a route had been drawn in red ink from the lighthouse along the cliff edge to a notation: DEAD END.

“That’s not ours,” I said. My voice sounded far away.

Maeve lifted the lantern. It was cold. The bell sounded again—behind us this time. We turned as a figure stepped from the grass: a woman in a yellow raincoat faded to straw, hair wild, eyes a color you’d call gray until you saw they were not.

“You keep coming back,” she said. “You keep missing the turn.”

“We’ve never been here,” Maeve said. “We’re tourists.”

The woman smiled like a cliff edge: beautiful, dangerous. “Everyone says that.”

She pointed at the map. “There’s a fork you can’t see. If you go on the road, you’ll loop until your nerves chew through bone. If you take the path, you’ll reach the village before the rain. But the path looks wrong. It looks like a mistake. So most people don’t.”

“Why help us?” I asked.

“Because you asked,” she said simply. “And because it’s almost high tide.”

We followed where she pointed: a crease in the grass, a line that looked like nothing until your feet believed it. We climbed until the lighthouse shrank and the road unspooled inland like a promise finally kept.

At the top of the hill, I turned to wave. The cove was empty. No raincoat, no bell, no woman. The lighthouse watched us without judgment. When we reached the car, the passenger door was closed. The map lay on the seat. The red route had vanished.

We drove inland, and this time the GPS spoke like a friend who’d found the right words. “Turn right,” it said. “Then continue for six kilometers.”

Maeve laughed, sudden and bright, and slid her hand onto my knee. “When we get to the village,” she said, “let’s put our phones away.”

“We can do that,” I said, and didn’t add: let’s keep choosing the path that looks wrong and is right.

In the rearview mirror, the lighthouse blinked once, though the lantern was dead.