19. Charlotte Gallagher
Charlotte Gallagher
We visit Connor’s grave every morning. Not for long—sometimes only a few minutes—but we go. It’s become part of the day, the way rituals do, quietly and without discussion, until one morning it’s simply there, and it would feel wrong to leave it undone.
“Morning, my beautiful boy.”
Talking to him doesn’t feel strange anymore. It did at first, when every word felt misplaced. I stopped worrying about saying the right thing. Now I talk to him the way I do with the others—simply, about ordinary things.
“The tide’ll be low this afternoon. Your dad thinks the western reef might open up. The birds have been loud all morning. You would’ve liked that, I think.”
I don’t know if he actually would have, but I’ve given him small characteristics anyway—the kind of details you invent when you’re trying to shape a person out of almost nothing. Here, he exists as someone who might have liked birds.
Dane stands behind me. After a moment, he crouches and straightens the base of Connor’s marker where the soil has softened. It’s a small thing, done without ceremony, the way he does everything that matters.
He doesn’t say much when we’re here. He just comes and fixes what needs fixing.
“He’d be ten months old now.”
Dane’s hand stills for a beat against the marker, then keeps working, pressing the earth firm around it.
“Yeah,” he says after a second. “Bet he would’ve wanted to come with me everywhere.”
I picture it before I can stop myself. Then I let it go.
We stand there a moment longer before Dane turns and stops.
I know something’s wrong before I understand what it is. There’s a kind of stillness in Dane that only happens when something has caught his full attention, and every instinct in me reacts to it.
I follow his line of sight out toward the water.
The ocean stretches bright and endless beneath the morning sun, unchanged from every other day we’ve stood here staring at it.
Then I see it.
At first my mind refuses to make sense of the shape on the horizon. It catches, rejects it, tries to turn it into something else. A cloud. Light distortion. Anything familiar enough not to hurt.
But it keeps moving.
A ship.
Real. Moving. Coming closer.
“Dane—”
“I see it.”
And then we run.
There’s no discussion. We tear through the trees and across camp, and by the time I fully catch up to what’s happening, Dane’s already at the fire. He throws dried palm fronds on it, and thick black smoke starts pouring upward.
I reach the beach without even remembering crossing the distance between us. My arms are already in the air before I stop moving, waving at the tiny shape on the horizon.
I scream even though the distance is far too great for sound to matter.
“HEY!”
I wave both arms over my head. Harder. Faster.
Behind me, the signal fire climbs higher than I’ve ever seen it, smoke boiling upward in thick black columns against the bright sky.
The ship doesn’t change course.
“Can they see it?” I ask, shielding my eyes against the glare off the water.
“Keep waving,” Dane says, already turning back toward the fire to feed it more fuel. “I’m going to make the smoke bigger.”
My arms burn, but I don’t stop.
The ship is still too far away to make out clearly, but I lock onto it anyway, trying to judge whether it’s really getting bigger or if I only want it to be.
“Dane—”
“It’s turning, Char. It’s turning toward us.”
I stop moving. My arms fall back to my sides, and something inside my chest turns unsteady—not just relief, not just excitement. Something sharper than that. Harder to hold onto.
“They see us.”
Dane’s hand settles against the middle of my back. “Yeah, they do.”
We stand there together watching the ship grow larger against the horizon. It takes longer than it should. The ocean distorts distance, keeping things suspended at the edge of certainty for too long. I know that, and it still feels unbearable waiting through it.
Little by little, the shape sharpens into something real.
A fishing boat.
I can make out movement on the deck now. People.
This should feel uncomplicated. Pure relief. Pure excitement.
It doesn’t.
It feels like something opening and ending at the same time.
This is what we’ve been waiting for all these years, whether either of us admitted it out loud or not. The possibility that one day something would finally pass close enough to see us.
And now it’s happening.
And all I can think is: this changes everything.
Everything we built here. The routines. The isolation. The strange complete little world that slowly narrowed until it was only the two of us inside it.
My entire life exists on this island, and whatever comes next is going to take it away.
Dane stays focused on the boat, tracking its movement toward shore, already thinking ahead to things I can’t even process yet. I watch him for a second instead, the full weight of everything we’ve built here settling heavily inside me all at once.
Then a smaller boat drops from the side of the vessel.
It hits the water hard and immediately starts toward us.
“What if—” I stop, trying to force the thought into words. “What if they’re like the ones from the yacht?”
He doesn’t look away from the approaching boat. “They might be.”
No hesitation. No false reassurance.
My chest tightens hard enough to hurt. “Then what do we do?”
“We find out.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
The boat’s close enough now that I can start making out details. The shapes of the people inside it. The way they move.
“They could hurt us.”
That makes him turn toward me. “I’ll kill them before I let them touch you.”
“You can’t control everything.”
Dane’s spent years surviving by trying to stay ahead of every possible outcome, forcing order onto anything that could be managed. But some things don’t bend, no matter how hard he tries to hold them still.
Then he looks back toward the water. “I’ll protect you. I always have.”
He says it without drama. Without needing me to believe him. Like it’s simply a fact that’s already been proven over and over again.
I stand beside him and watch the boat come in.
There are three of them. They move up the beach cautiously, not quite sure what they’re walking into. And I see the moment it shifts—when they get close enough to really see us. A quick glance between them. A recalibration.
We’re not what they expected.
I can only imagine what we look like to them—underweight, sun-darkened, worn into this place. Barefoot. Clothes patched and remade so many times they barely resemble what they started as. Nothing about us says temporary.
“G’day,” the first one says. Older. Weathered. His voice carries a soft Polynesian lilt. His eyes move between us, taking us in. “You two been here long, yeah?”
Hearing someone new—someone outside of us—feels strange in a way I wasn’t ready for.
Beside me, Dane shifts subtly forward without seeming to think about it, placing himself slightly between the men and me on the beach like instinct alone moved him there.
“Years,” Dane says.
The man studies him. Then me. Then back again.
“Yeah?” one of the younger ones says, quicker, lighter. “How many years we talkin’?”
“Hard to say exactly. We think it’s been about fourteen years. We’ve kept count, but probably not perfectly.”
“Fourteen years?” the younger man repeats.
They pause, and I watch the realization move through them in real time. Whatever they expected to find out here, it wasn’t this.
“This is my wife, Charlotte,” Dane says, gesturing toward me. “I’m Dane Gallagher.”
My wife.
I don’t react outwardly, but I feel the weight of it settle somewhere deep inside me. Hearing him say it out loud to other people after all these years feels strangely intimate, like something private crossing into the outside world for the first time.
The men react too. Just slightly. A flicker of confusion. A quick glance exchanged between the younger ones before they smooth it away.
“We’ll call this in,” the older man says. “Let the authorities know we found you. Someone’ll be lookin’.”
“Not likely,” Dane says. “Not after this long.”
The man nods once. “We’ll sort it. You’re safe now.” His eyes move between us. “Either of you hurt?”
“No,” Dane says immediately.
I think of Connor beneath the trees.
“No,” I say.
They wait while we go back through camp gathering what matters.
Dane moves through the shelter with the same calm efficiency he applies to everything, taking only what’s important. I follow him, collecting the things we already know we can’t leave behind.
The pearls.
I pick up the container and feel the weight of it settle into my palm, and suddenly I’m back on Christmas morning with him promising me a future neither of us understood yet. The meaning attached to them doesn’t feel hypothetical anymore.
Nearby, Dane wraps the small wooden carvings he’d been working on while I was pregnant—a turtle, a fish, a dolphin. Simple shapes carved by hand.
They were meant for Connor. And they’re the only pieces of him we can physically carry with us.
For a moment we both just stand there at camp, taking everything in one last time. The shelter walls Dane rebuilt over and over. The fire pit. The careful order of things. All the small systems and routines that somehow stopped feeling temporary and became a life.
It’s a strange thing to want to leave a place for so long and then, when the moment finally comes, feel part of yourself resisting it.
Eventually, we’re ready.
“We have to say goodbye to them.”
Dane nods once and turns toward the men waiting at the edge of camp. “We just need another minute before we go,” he says. “Our family’s buried up there.”
The older man nods. “Yeah, take your time.”
We walk toward the graves together.
I look at the line of markers and feel the full weight of time all at once. Fourteen years reduced to names carved into wood, each one marking a version of our family that ended here.
Dane stops beside me.
“I don’t know how to leave him.” My voice breaks halfway through the sentence despite trying to keep it steady.
Dane is quiet for a second.
“We’re not leaving him, Char. We’ll come back when we can.”
I look at him. “Promise me.”
“We’ll find a way,” he says. “I promise.”
I crouch slowly beside Connor’s grave and press my hand flat against the earth in front of his marker.
“We’re leaving,” I whisper to him. “But we’ll come back.”
My throat tightens painfully.
“You’re not alone. You’re with them.” My voice slips apart completely after that. “I love you. That doesn’t change. It doesn’t matter where I am.”
I stay there another few seconds with my hand against the ground before finally forcing myself to stand again. My legs shake underneath me.
Dane’s hand settles against the middle of my back, and I lean into it before straightening again. I don’t look back as we return to the beach.
The boat is called the Marlin Star. As soon as I step on board, the smell hits—diesel and fish.
There are five people.
Too many.
They don’t stare, not openly, but their eyes keep coming back to us. Quick looks that linger just a little too long. One of the younger ones starts to say something, then stops when the older man shifts beside him. He looks down instead, hands busy with nothing.
Dane stays close. Close enough that I always know where he is. When someone passes too near, his hand brushes my arm.
It’s automatic.
The older man presses a mug into my hands. Someone else sets food down beside me—bread, something from a tin.
“Eat. You’re too thin,” he says.
I nod and take a bite.
“We’ll take you into New Caledonia,” he says. “Couple of days if the weather holds. Longer if it turns.”
I sit with the mug in my hands and look back.
The island is already shrinking.
The tree line softens first, edges blurring until detail gives way to shape, then to something less certain. I keep watching, trying to hold onto it, not wanting to miss the moment it disappears.
It gets smaller. Smaller.
A line.
Then nothing.
I don’t realize I’m crying until the horizon fractures and everything goes out of focus.
Dane’s hand settles at the back of my neck, steady and familiar.
“I should be happy.” My voice doesn’t sound right. “We’re going home. I should be—”
“I know.”
And he does.
“We’ll come back for him,” he says. “For all of them. We’ll bring them home one day. I promise.”
I don’t answer. I just lean into him and keep looking at the place where the island was until there’s nothing left to see.