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When they don’t come back in the night I start getting scared. I walk to the beach, force myself not to run. Fen is among the seals, a shape just like theirs in the dark. She rises, shadowy and almost monsterly with her insect-long limbs, and I think, not for the first time, what complete madness it is that she lives down here and that I let her.

“You’re not supposed to sleep on the beach,” I remind her, but I’m too distracted to press the point.

“They headed south hours ago,” she says, pointing at the horizon. “I’ve been watching for them.” She must see the terror in my face because she says, “It’s okay. They went exploring. They’ll be back.”

Or they are both drowned.

I stay with her on the beach until morning. The sun never completely disappears; even in the deep dark of night there is still a band of warm light along the horizon. We sit on the sand and I think about how cold it is down here, how inhospitable, and as the sun rises I am distraught because this is how my daughter spends her nights, cold and alone among the animals, and how did it go so wrong. I am the monsterly thing. I don’t know how to reach for her, how to hold on.

“Orly said he chose Tasmania,” she says, the first words either of us have spoken in hours.

I nod.

“So is that it then? That’s where we’ll go?”

“What do you think?”

She shrugs. “I don’t mind where.”

“Raff said the same. Orly wants plants. Forests. Trees.”

“What about you?” she asks. “Where do you want to be?”

I don’t know how to explain that I can’t leave, and must. That I can’t be without my children, but that I don’t know where we could possibly go that could ever be like it is here. So I say nothing and she doesn’t understand my silence and the gap between us gets even wider.

“We can’t stay here,” she says.

I am surprised because I’ve never admitted to wanting to stay, but I guess my kids know me better than that.

“Even if the ocean wasn’t rising, we still couldn’t stay here.”

“Why not?” I ask her. “You love it here.”

“I know. But it’s too easy for you to hang on to her.”

I feel my face warm and look away.

“Dad. You’ve gotta let her go. I can’t watch you like this anymore.”

“It’s got nothing to do with you,” I tell my daughter, which is not true, it is cruel in its untruth, but it does what it needs to, it ends the conversation.

Orly makes his way toward us, greeting each of the penguins he passes with a polite, “Good morning, sir. Morning, madam.”

He barrels into me and I hold him against me. His long white hair gets in my face and I absentmindedly start plaiting it for him.

“What did you and Rowan do in the base yesterday?” I ask him.

“Looked for a chemical.”

“What chemical?”

“Can’t remember.”

The kid can remember the entire encyclopedia of botanical scientific names but can’t recall the name of one chemical.

“Did she say what it was for?”

“She said biologists use it to detect copper and iron.”

I have no idea what this could mean but it leaves me uneasy.

We climb the hill to walk along the headland. I am extremely aware of the minutes passing. We keep our eyes glued to the water, to the horizon, to the coastline. Raff knows not to do this. It doesn’t make sense that they’d go exploring, not without telling me. If he goes out to record the whales, he has to be back within an hour or two. This is the only way we’ve been able to make a home here—by checking in with each other constantly, by never worrying each other.

“They’re okay,” Orly says. “They’re coming home.”

“How do you know?” Fen asks him.

“I would know if something had happened. They would have told me by now.”

When at last we see Raff and Rowan appear in the distance my knees almost buckle. The little black Zodiac zooms up from the south, and I can see as they draw closer that Raff is at the helm and he looks fine. Rowan sits beside him. There is surprising relief in me at the sight of her.

They stop, though, before they get to the beach. It takes me only a moment to see why, another moment to watch what happens, and then my heart fails.