It pulls me back to that first week on the island and how long it took us to find food and fresh water. Hunger like that strips everything else away until survival is the only thing left that matters.
“How did you sleep?” Grandad asks.
“Good. Still getting used to being inside and sleeping in a real bed.”
We talk for a while about easy things—the city, the weather, and how Brisbane changed while we were gone.
Then we move on to technology. How everything is connected now. Faster. Instant, almost.
After a moment, he sets his cup down.
“You and Dane… your story is everywhere. The news. Social media. I’ve already had requests for interviews from journalists and documentary producers. Several came through my office yesterday.”
“No.”
Grandad studies me for a moment.
“No interviews. No documentaries. None of it.”
“Dane may feel differently.”
“He won’t.”
I don’t need to think about it. I know exactly how Dane would react to cameras, questions, and strangers dissecting the island and everything that happened there. I know it the same way I know his silences and the look that settles over his face when a decision is already made.
He picks up his cup again. “If you wait, the offers will improve. These things become valuable. There’s real money in it.”
I think about the island, the graves under the trees, the chess game that stretched on for years, the way the light hit the water at certain times. How it looked. How it felt.
None of that translates. At least not in a way that means anything to someone who wasn’t there.
And it doesn’t belong to them. It never will. No amount of money would make me hand it over.
“That’s not something we’d consider.”
He takes that in without reaction, just a small shift in posture.
“You don’t need the money, of course. You and Dane will inherit everything that belonged to Tara and Mitchell. The estate was placed in a trust and preserved. It’s all been managed over the years—the house, the investments.”
My eyes widen.
“You didn’t know.”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
For fourteen years, money hasn’t existed for us. Everything was immediate—food, water, shelter, fire. Nothing beyond that.
“There’s quite a lot. What they left has grown. And then there’s my estate, in time. That will be yours and Dane’s as well. You’ll both be very well provided for.”
We survived fourteen years with nothing—no money, no safety net, no guarantees. Just what we could find, build, or fix. And we made it work. We always did.
But this feels more frightening.
“I kept your family home. It’s been maintained. Ready for you and Dane whenever you decide to go back.”
Something shifts in me at that.Home. With Dane. A place of our own with the doors closed and no one watching.
Exactly what we need.
