Then Nia squealed at the bigness of the ocean, and the present came back, and I was a widower with his daughter and a brass urn, sixteen years and a whole lost life away from the young man on the sand.

But he had been real.

That was what the unchanged coastline insisted on.

Whatever the war and the grief had taken, they had not taken the fact that once, here, we had been that happy.

The ocean remembered even if the world had forgotten.

Chapter 23 — Are You Ready