He had not brought me there to see the ocean.

He had brought me there because it was the last place he had ever stood with my mother, in the days before everything fell apart, and because he wanted, before he died, to stand in that spot one more time, not alone as he had been for twenty years, but with his daughter beside him at last.

I had thought I was granting a wish.

I had been walking, without knowing it, straight into the oldest and most tender part of his long plan.