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Story: Wild Dark Shore

It takes more than a week to get the ship packed. They watch from their lighthouse as helicopters lifting pallets of cargo fly back and forth. The long black hose of a pump sits on the surface of the water and reaches all the way from the ship to the fuel tanks, siphoning what remains of their precious diesel. The island is ransacked.

stands with her dad. Mostly the four of them are together, but for a few moments this afternoon it is just and Dom in the kitchen of their home. He leans on the table Rowan restored for them, the only thing they have claimed from the island for themselves, the only thing he has decided to take with them wherever they go. has noticed Dom likes to have a hand touching it whenever he is near.

She takes her father’s free hand. Feels him hold on tightly.

“We’ll find another place,” she tells him. “And we’ll love it just as much.”

He looks down at her, and she up at him. Grief has aged him a thousand years. But he says, “Tell me, darlin’.”

“Tell you what?” she asks.

“Anything. Everything.”

She leans into him.

Dom, Raff, , and Orly walk together to the mountain behind their lighthouse. is frightened of what they will find but they need to do this, they need to see, and so as they crawl up over the mound of earth and look, they are rewarded with the sight of a baby albatross in its nest, and both its parents picking tenderly at its fluffy feathers. The chick, against all odds, has hatched and survived the storm.

They sit and watch for hours.

“Rowan really wanted to see this,” Orly says. It’s the only thing any of them says.

When they go, when they sail away, the Salt family stand at the aft of the ship and watch Shearwater disappear into the horizon. The last thing they see is the tip of their lighthouse, rising into the sky. feels a moment of panic, she runs to the railing and could almost fling herself over, she doesn’t want to go, she hasn’t said goodbye, not properly.

But they are here in the water, following the ship. Her seals, diving in and out of the waves, their fins lifted in farewell.