I Sell What the Fog Won't Forget

A lighthouse keeper with a bootlegger's ledger for a memory notices the fog rolling in thicker every night the harbor town commits a crime it wants forgotten. When she presses her palm to the lens room's brass housing, the mist gives back sound: a strangled confession, a payoff whispered on the pier, the exact words a drowned smuggler used before he went under. A private investigator hunting that smuggler's killer starts paying her in cash and secrets for what the fog remembers, and she starts selling it. The town's harbormaster, whose alibi lives inside that same bank of fog, offers her enough money to skip the county if she burns the logbook where she's been transcribing every stolen memory. She has three nights before the fog swallows the one memory that would clear an innocent man's name for good.