The yacht has mostly settled now. The storm passed while we were inside this room becoming different people.
“He’s beautiful,” she says.
I look at him again. At his tiny face. His impossibly small hands.
“He is.”
A tear slips down her cheek as she looks at him. “He looks like you.”
Something twists painfully in my chest. I can’t even tell if she’s right. He’s too small. Too unfinished. But I nod anyway.
She lifts her eyes back to mine. Wet with tears, but steady somehow through all of this. “We didn’t pick a name.”
“No.”
“I want to give him one.”
“Okay.” My throat feels tight enough to split open. “You choose.”
She looks back down at him after that. “I think Connor.”
“Connor,” I repeat softly. Saying it out loud makes him feel real in a completely different way. “Hi, Connor.”
A small broken sound leaves her then, and she presses her mouth carefully against the top of his head.
I wrap one arm around her shoulders, and she folds against me while still holding him close. We stay there together in the dim cabin as morning slowly brightens around us.
I don’t notice when I start crying. At some point, whatever I was using to hold myself together just gives way quietly under the weight of all this.
We spend the morning with him. Neither of us says much. Words won’t change anything.
But eventually something shifts in the silence between us. Something quiet and understood without needing to be spoken aloud.
We can’t keep him here forever.
“He should be with the others,” she says.
“Yes.”
She adjusts her hold on him once more, gathering him closer against her chest, and I see it immediately in the care of the movement—she’s not ready to let go yet. Not until she absolutely has to.
We leave the yacht in silence.
She carries Connor the entire way back, wrapped carefully against her, one arm curved protectively around him exactly the way it’s been since I placed him in her arms. I stay close beside her in case she reaches for me, but she doesn’t.
Not yet.
The walk feels longer than it actually is.
When the clearing finally comes into view, the markers appear slowly beneath the trees. Dad. Tara. Ryan. Jameson. Lined together along the inland edge of camp where we’ve kept the ground cleared and tended over the years like anything important here deserves to be.
Charlotte stops at the edge of the clearing.
“All of them gone.”
After a moment, she steps forward.
I start digging without saying anything. The ground’s softer after the storm, easier to break apart than usual. Still, every shovelful feels wrong.
