T hat evening, after we’d returned to the island, we sat by the firepit and snacked on fresh pineapple, while I pretended to play guitar. I wasn’t particularly good—my fingers were too fat for the strings. But I’d been trying for a few years. Lately, I’d been learning some songs by female artists. Simple ballads, like most I knew. Savannah had a beautiful singing voice, whereas I sounded more like a cat and a bufo toad fighting.

I set the guitar down and looked at Alberto, licking his fingers. We grew several dozen pineapple plants on the little island nearly connected to our main one.

We also had two large solar units on that part of our property. In the morning, the panels opened up like flowers, tracked the sun across the sky all day, charging the battery shack, then folded themselves up at night.

The dogs lay with their backs to the fire and their heads away from it. I often thought they did it to maintain night vision, but it was probably just to keep their sensitive noses away from the heat and smoke.

“This is good,” Alberto said. “What is it?”

Savannah gave him a shocked look. “You’ve never had pineapple before?”

“I like apples. But this doesn’t taste anything like an apple.”

“Europeans weren’t the best at naming things,” I offered. “Apples were common in Europe, and the pineapple has a tough, gnarly hide.” I showed him the top, which I’d saved to replant. “Kinda like the bark of a pine tree. So maybe that’s how they got the idea to name it. Columbus, or more likely, one of his crewmen, was the first European to see a pineapple. By the time he arrived, they’d been farmed by Indians across South and Central America and the Caribbean.”

Alberto yawned.

“Are you ready for bed?” Savannah asked. “Or are Jesse’s drawn-out stories that boring?”

“They’re not boring,” he said. “I guess I’m sleepy. But I don’t know what time it is.”

I laughed and he gave me a curious look.

“Out here, there’s no need for a clock,” I told him. “We sleep when we’re tired and eat when we’re hungry.”

“What do you do the rest of the time?”

“We work, little man,” I replied. “But work here is fun. Tomorrow, me and you will go pick up Tank and catch some fish. The freezer is running low.”

“That’s fishing, not work.”

“Didn’t I say that work here is fun?”

He yawned again.

“Come on,” Savannah said, rising from her chair. “Let’s get you to bed.”

“What time will we wake up?”

“When the sun comes up,” I told him. “That’s our clock. Maybe a little before if you want to catch the sunrise.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Will it be like the sunset?”

“Different,” I replied. “But just as magical. Sunset is a time to look back on your day, what you accomplished, and what steps you might have taken to do better. Sunrise is a new beginning. You wipe the slate clean and have the opportunity to fix anything from the previous day.”

I started to get up too, but Savannah patted my shoulder and smiled down at me. “Stay put, Socrates. Contemplate the stars. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m going to get a glass of wine. Would you like a beer?”

“Thanks, but make it two fingers of rum, please.”

They left, with Woden trotting ahead.

Finn rose and came over to me, sniffing around on the ground, looking for a place to sit. He finally plopped down on my left foot and leaned against my leg, watching them go.

“You like Alberto?” I asked him, while gently stroking his head.

He whined and licked his chops.

“It’s gonna be a lot different having a little boy around full-time. I hope you and Woden can keep up with him.”

Savannah returned, carrying a wine glass and a pewter mug with the Gaspar’s Revenge Fishing Charter logo on it. She handed my grog ration to me, then pulled her chair closer and sat down.

I sniffed the rum. The mixture of Caribbean spices and a slight scent of orange peel told me what it was.

“I thought we were saving the Appleton Estate for a special occasion.”

“Nothing wrong with your nose,” she said, clinking her glass to my pewter. “This is a big step in our lives. We’re going to be parents again. Together.”

“Maybe,” I cautioned her, taking a sip. “Just because he didn’t know of any other family doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”

“Have faith, Jesse. God put us on that bridge for a reason.”

I wasn’t about to argue theism with her. I believed in God, but they took things to a whole different level in South Carolina, where she was from. The fact that we were entered in the Seven Mile Bridge Run was because of her desire to be more social in the community. Had we run up in the front with the leaders, we might never have even seen the boat.

“We’ll do the best we can,” I assured her.

“I know. You never do anything halfway.”

“Where’s Woden?”

“Sleeping beside Alberto’s bed,” she replied. “They were both very tired.”

“Yeah, this one’s making my foot go to sleep,” I said, looking down at Finn, now snoozing with his rump still on my foot.

She was silent for a moment. Then she looked me squarely in the eye. “Are you going to tell me what happened last night?”

I knew that she already knew.

“Chyrel’s laptop was still open when I came to bed this morning,” I said by way of a reply.

“Is that all there is to it?”

“You know everything that happened. What more is there for me to tell you?”

She looked down at her glass, swirled the wine a moment, then took a sip before replying. “I knew what you did when I married you, Jesse. I knew the kind of man you were when I first met you and you rescued me and Char from those men at Dockside. Those men last night got what they deserved if you ask me.” She paused and looked up at me. “I want to know what you felt when you pulled the trigger.”

I couldn’t help it and grinned over at her. “I felt recoil.”

She punched me in the shoulder. “You know what I mean.”

I gazed into her eyes. “How did you feel on Hoffman’s Cay?”

“It made me physically ill,” she replied. “Not at the moment, but later.”

“Me too,” I admitted, gazing into the flames. “The first time was on my second deployment to Lebanon. I killed a terrorist from five hundred yards away. That night in the barracks, I threw up thinking about it.”

“Did it get easier?”

I thought about it for a moment. Taking a life was something that should never become easy. At least not for a person with morals. I considered what we’d done the previous night as saving innocent lives more than the taking of lives.

“Some,” I said, searching for words. “But not a whole lot. People like those we killed last night aren’t like you and me. Yes, I feel some remorse for what we did, but I’d do it all over again. People like them kill without remorse and there’s only one way to stop them.”

“I don’t fault you,” she said softly. “Or DJ and Tony. I just worry how it will affect you.”

“Well, you won’t have to worry about that after next week. This old cowboy’s hanging up his guns.”

“Somehow, I don’t think so,” she said.

“Being captain of a ship like Ambrosia will be a full-time job and then some.”

“Well, I know you, Jesse McDermitt. You’re a hands-on kind of man.”

“I promise I’ll—”

“Please don’t make a promise you can’t keep,” she interrupted.

“I’ll do my best,” I said, realizing she was probably right.

She looked up at the sky. “It’s a beautiful night. Let’s go down to the pier.”

“I like that idea,” I said with a grin, knowing her penchant for making love under the stars.

We walked hand-in-hand toward the pier extending past our house on the south side of the island. After grabbing a couple of big beach towels from the locker under the stairs, I spread them at the end of the pier, and we sat with our feet dangling in the water, then lay back to look up at the stars. By then, our night vision had returned, and we could see millions of them.

Savannah sighed contentedly. “Every time I look up at the night sky, I’m reminded how small and insignificant we are.”

“Two people, out of more than seven billion Earth inhabitants,” I said. “And it’s just one planet in a vast solar system that’s a miniscule part of a galaxy twirling through infinite space with millions of other galaxies.”

She turned her head toward me. “Does anything we do really make a difference?”

I thought back to an event that had happened right before my parents died and I’d gone to live with Mam and Pap.

“When I was little,” I began, looking up at the stars, “Mom and Dad took me sailing in a boat he and Pap had built. It was Christmas and Dad was leaving for Vietnam shortly after that. We’d gone ashore at Cape Sable to walk the beach, and we came across thousands of sand dollars. Some were alive and piled up at the water’s edge, but the tide was going out and many were dying on the beach. Mom used her shirt as a basket and carried dozens at a time out to deeper water. Me and Dad helped, though he’d said it was impossible to save them all. I’ll never forget what Mom told him. She stood facing Dad, in water up to her waist, picked one sand dollar out of her shirt and held it up to us, saying, ‘What we do can’t save the world. But it means the world to this one sand dollar.’ Then she put it in the water, along with dozens more in her shirt.”

“I would have loved knowing them,” Savannah said, then rolled onto her side and kissed me.