The apology began without a name. I saw your light, it said, and thought it was the house behind you. The next page of the maintenance manual covered routine cleaning. Between those ordinary instructions, the sentence felt like a confession.
Asha checked the keeper's log for a rescue on the same date. There was none. A delivery receipt, however, recorded a visitor turned away at the lower gate. The keeper's daughter remembered a disagreement with her father and a walk up the hill after dark. He had mistaken her torch for a window and never come down to meet her.
She had spent years believing he watched her leave. The note suggested that he later understood his mistake, but it did not establish why he failed to send an apology. Asha let her read it alone beside the tower window.
The daughter requested a copy and left the manual with the archive. Before leaving, she wrote a reply on plain paper. She did not ask anyone to display it. The tower had preserved one side of a conversation by accident; the other side could be kept deliberately, without an audience.