I don’t know if he actually would have, but I’ve given him small characteristics anyway—the kind of details you invent when you’re trying to shape a person out of almost nothing. Here, he exists as someone who might have liked birds.
Dane stands behind me. After a moment, he crouches and straightens the base of Connor’s marker where the soil has softened. It’s a small thing, done without ceremony, the way he does everything that matters.
He doesn’t say much when we’re here. He just comes and fixes what needs fixing.
“He’d be ten months old now.”
Dane’s hand stills for a beat against the marker, then keeps working, pressing the earth firm around it.
“Yeah,” he says after a second. “Bet he would’ve wanted to come with me everywhere.”
I picture it before I can stop myself. Then I let it go.
We stand there a moment longer before Dane turns and stops.
I know something’s wrong before I understand what it is. There’s a kind of stillness in Dane that only happens when something has caught his full attention, and every instinct in me reacts to it.
I follow his line of sight out toward the water.
The ocean stretches bright and endless beneath the morning sun, unchanged from every other day we’ve stood here staring at it.
Then I see it.
At first my mind refuses to make sense of the shape on the horizon. It catches, rejects it, tries to turn it into something else. A cloud. Light distortion. Anything familiar enough not to hurt.
But it keeps moving.
A ship.
Real. Moving. Coming closer.
“Dane—”
“I see it.”
And then we run.
There’s no discussion. We tear through the trees and across camp, and by the time I fully catch up to what’s happening, Dane’s already at the fire. He throws dried palm fronds on it, and thick black smoke starts pouring upward.
I reach the beach without even remembering crossing the distance between us. My arms are already in the air before I stop moving, waving at the tiny shape on the horizon.
I scream even though the distance is far too great for sound to matter.
“HEY!”
I wave both arms over my head. Harder. Faster.
Behind me, the signal fire climbs higher than I’ve ever seen it, smoke boiling upward in thick black columns against the bright sky.
The ship doesn’t change course.
“Can they see it?” I ask, shielding my eyes against the glare off the water.
“Keep waving,” Dane says, already turning back toward the fire to feed it more fuel. “I’m going to make the smoke bigger.”
My arms burn, but I don’t stop.
The ship is still too far away to make out clearly, but I lock onto it anyway, trying to judge whether it’s really getting bigger or if I only want it to be.
