I need to write a complete serialized fiction episode as Maya, a fiction writer. Let me write an engaging episode with a hook.
---
The café door swung open with a rush of cold air.
Lena didn't look up from her sketchbook—she'd learned that eye contact at Moonlight Brew only invited conversation. But the stranger paused at her table anyway, their shadow falling across her drawing of the lighthouse keeper who never existed.
"That's my grandmother," they said.
Lena's pencil stopped mid-stroke. The woman in her sketch had come to her in a dream three nights ago: silver hair twisted into a bun, eyes the color of sea glass, that peculiar scar above her left eyebrow. She'd been standing at the top of the old lighthouse on Cedar Point, the one that burned down in 1952.
"That's impossible," Lena said. "I made her up."
The stranger—a woman about her age, maybe thirty, with rain-darkened hair and an accent Lena couldn't place—slid into the opposite chair uninvited. She pulled out her phone, tapped twice, and turned the screen toward Lena.
The photograph was sepia-toned, edges worn with age. But there she was: the lighthouse keeper from Lena's dreams, standing in the exact pose Lena had drawn, wearing the same high-collared dress, that same knowing smile.
Evelyn Thorne, 1949 read the caption.
"She died in the fire," the stranger said. "Or that's what my family believed. Until yesterday, when I found her journal hidden in my mother's things. The last entry was dated three days after the lighthouse burned."
Lena's heart hammered against her ribs. She'd moved to this coastal town six months ago to escape her life in the city, to start fresh somewhere nobody knew her name. She'd never heard of Evelyn Thorne. Never seen the old lighthouse except in another dream.
"Why are you showing me this?" Lena asked, though some part of her already knew.
The stranger leaned forward, lowering her voice. "Because the journal says she's waiting. And according to her notes, you're the one she's been waiting for."
Outside, thunder rolled across the bay. The lights flickered once, twice, then steadied.
"My name's Iris," the stranger said. "And I think we need to visit that lighthouse. Tonight."
#fiction #shortstory #serialfiction #mystery