I pause for a second, looking down at her.
She looks different like this. Relaxed. The tension she carries during the day is gone completely. I wait just long enough to be sure she stays asleep.
Then I get up.
The axe is by the door where it always is. I grab it and step outside.
The air is cooler outside the shelter. The heat disappears fast after sunset, replaced by wind, salt, and something sharper that clears my head the second it hits my skin.
The ocean moves steadily in the background. Constant enough now that I barely register it anymore.
I walk to the tree and stop in front of it.
The marks catch faintly in the moonlight—years of them carved into the bark. The wood’s worn smooth where my hand can reach, layer after layer cut into it over time. Everything we’ve survived pressed into something that’ll probably outlast us both.
Ryan’s marks are still there if you know where to look. Rougher than mine. Uneven.
Mine start after that. Cleaner. More controlled.
I know the exact place where the change happens.
I raise the axe and make the cut. One strike. Clean and exactly where it’s supposed to be.
Then I step back and look at it.
This is control. Not the obvious kind—not the shelter or the fire or the food. Those things can fail. Storms come through. Supplies run low. Something always shifts.
This doesn’t. This stays exact. Countable. Certain.
I know what day it is. I haven’t lost track.
We’re still here. And I’m still holding everything together.
The tree doesn’t actually fix anything. I know that. But the act of doing it matters anyway. The routine. The certainty of it.
By the marks, Christmas is about three weeks away. Out here, that’s probably as close to exact as anyone could get.
You don’t feel it in the temperature. It shows up in other ways. The light shifts first—the angle, the way it hits the water. Then the air follows, subtle but consistent, carrying something different in off the ocean.
I’ve learned to read it because I had to.
Time works differently here. Not dates. Not calendars. Just patterns—light, position, change. You either learn them, or you lose track completely.
Three weeks.
I think about the pearls.
They’re stored in one of the containers on the yacht, tucked in with everything else we keep dry. Nothing special about where they are. No reason for Charlotte to notice them.
And she hasn’t.
I’ve been collecting them all year.
It wasn’t intentional at first. The first pearl came from an oyster I pulled up near the northern reef. I remember opening it, seeing its shine in my palm, then slipping it into my pocket instead of tossing it aside.
After that, I started looking for them.
Most of them aren’t usable. Wrong shape. Too small. Cracked. Dull. I kept those anyway.
