The Unique Tape

The ferry runs once a day to Saltmeadow in winter, and it runs whether or not anyone wants to go. Eloise lost the top of her hearing in an accident and got some of it back afterward. The sea never came back right - other people hear it as one thing, a wash, a hush; she hears every layer of it separately, and none of the parts will agree to become a single sound. It took her years to stop calling that a loss.
It is why she is the best audio restorer in the country: a woman who already hears the world in parts can find, in a wash of sound that seems whole to everyone else, the one part that does not belong. Julian Ashworth has hired her to restore his family's reels - thirty years of a house recorded and boxed and left in the dark. He is the last Ashworth on the island. He was seven the night of the fire and remembers almost none of it.
The island remembers all of it, and will not say. There is a coffin that went off that island the wrong way, sealed, and too light for what was supposed to be inside it. There is a grave on the mainland with the wrong name cut into the stone. And on one damaged reel, after a break in the tape, there is a second voice - urgent, unmistakable, and belonging to a woman the family buried under somebody else's name.
Eloise has spent her life finding the part that does not belong. This time it is a person.