Afterward, a young woman came up to me — a survivor, one of the twenty-seven, grown now — and touched a matching scar near her own shoulder.

“Do you ever wish yours were gone?” she asked.

I looked out at the ocean, calm under the morning sun, and thought about the question honestly before I answered it.

I recognized her, though she had been a child the last time I saw her and was a woman now.

She had been one of the twenty-seven.

I did not know which scar was which, whether hers came from that last terrible night or one of the many nights before it, and it did not matter.