A young man went into Lake Superior off the rocks below the Greenstone Light. The town called it a drowning for thirty-five years. Nell has known better since she was seventeen. She is 52 now, a geologist who built a careful career two states south of that water, reading stone the safe way, with instruments that cannot reach back. She returns to Kivela only because her mother is dead and somebody has to see to the light. Waiting for her: Astrid's workshop, her tinned blends of birch and chamomile, her one-eyed cat, and a notebook in her mother's upright hand that explains, 35 years late, why a frightened woman drove her own daughter away from the gift instead of teaching it to her. The women of Nell's family can read rock. Nothing so useful as fortunes.

A stone keeps what happened beside it, and it will show a Korhonen woman what, never who. Nell learned that in October of 1991, when a stone gave her two figures on the black shelf below the point, and hands going out, and no lake in it anywhere. She was frightened silent, and she left, and stayed gone. Then her daughter arrives with the same gift, waking in her, reckless and unguarded, reaching further than she can hold. Refusing will not protect the girl. It will abandon her. So Nell picks the gift up on purpose, and reads, and finds Walter at the end of it: seventy-eight years old, beloved, the man who kept the marina open and paid for the church furnace, who wanted this point and the copper under it and could not be told no. A reading is not evidence.

A stone will not testify. Before a town gives up the comfortable version, the truth has to be anchored in something a county office will accept, and Walter knows what is in the house. He comes for it on the night of the first November gale, and Nell reaches deeper into a stone than she has ever dared, and pays. What waits at the end of this is not a verdict.