Alex should have gone to bed. Should have surrendered to sleep and hoped tomorrow would hurt less.
Instead, he grabbed his flashlight and headed for the eastern shore.
The turtle nest.
The path was familiar, his feet finding the way without conscious thought. The jungle sounds surrounded him—night birds calling, insects humming, the distant crash of waves against the reef.
He emerged onto the beach and trained his flashlight on the sand, careful to keep the beam indirect. Disturbing a hatching nest with bright light could disorient the babies, send them scurrying toward the wrong destination.
At first, nothing looked different. The same subtle depression in the sand. The same undisturbed surface that had greeted him every night for weeks.
Then he saw it.
Movement.
Barely perceptible—a slight shifting, a disturbance in the sand that could have been wind if there'd been any wind to speak of.
Alex's heart stuttered. He clicked off the flashlight, letting his eyes adjust to the moonlight, and crouched at a safe distance from the nest.
Another shift. Then another.
And then a tiny flipper broke the surface.
Oh God.
They were hatching.
He watched, barely breathing, as the first head emerged—impossibly small, barely the size of his thumb. The baby sea turtle blinked in the moonlight, oriented itself, and began scrambling toward the water with single-minded determination.
Behind it, another emerged. Then two more. Then a dozen, bursting from the sand like living popcorn, a chaos of tiny flippers and determined little faces.
Alex had seen this before. Twice, in his career. Both times, he'd cried.
He was crying now.
But this time, the tears weren't just about the turtles.
She should be here.
This was supposedto be ours.
He’d told her about this moment with reverence, shared his passion for these creatures that had survived for over a hundred million years. And now the moment was happening, and she was on a plane, flying back to California.
Because he'd been too much of a coward to give her a reason to stay.
The turtles kept coming—twenty, thirty, more than he could count. They poured from the nest in waves, each one pausing just long enough to orient itself before making the desperate sprint for the sea.
They didn't hesitate.
That was the thing about sea turtles. They emerged from darkness into an unfamiliar world full of predators and obstacles and impossible odds, and they didn't hesitate. They didn't calculate the risks or build walls or convince themselves that the ocean was too dangerous to attempt.
They just went.
Instinct drove them forward, the same magnetic pull that had guided their species for millennia. The call of something essential, something worth risking everything for.
How do they know?he'd wondered as a child, watching that first aquarium video with his mother.
"They just do,"she'd said, her hand warm in his."Some things, you don't think about. You just feel them. And then you have to be brave enough to follow."
