"You are not the first," he said, and then offered her water and a story: of a woman who decades earlier had made the island her refuge, of letters folded into envelopes and sent with the hope that they would find someone who knew how to listen. The woman, he said, had loved the sea the way one loves a wound—both source of ruin and of healing. Sirina listened, aware that what she had been chasing was less a person than a shape in memory, a curve toward which many lives had bent.