The muscles in Nick’s back rose and crested with the waves that seeped across the sand toward her toes: one force. He picked up half of a gray clamshell run through with slashes of milk and slate. He ran his finger across the top, his thumb curved along the bottom, rubbing it, and reached for her hand. A shrimp boat sounded its echoing horn across the sea. His thumb was larger than the inside of the shell, caressing its center.

“Here, feel this. Look.” His voice was deep.

“It’s beautiful. Really beautiful.” She wanted to touch his hand, not the shell.

“The other half is lost.” He placed her index finger on the edge of the shell where the lost half had broken off.

She ran the toes of her right foot through a pile of shells, many halves and shattered pieces. “All of these have lost the other half.”

“But this one is so . . . perfect.”

She looked up at him, away from the sand line she’d exposed between the sea’s broken dishes. She touched his face, the rough growth of beard that appeared two hours after he shaved. Her legs were liquid and moving as the ocean itself.

“This shell is still whole, with no match,” he said.

A blurred fin flashed in her peripheral vision, and she turned to the sea. “Look, a dolphin.” A smaller fin broke through the waves and dipped back down as if pulled by an unseen force. “And a baby, too. Look.”

Her lover of nature did not glance toward the sea. He was the one who had taught her about noticing each nuance, each gift of nature. He stared at the shell.

“It has a match somewhere. It could be anywhere—another ocean, another sound, crushed to sand, or even worse . . . at the bottom of the deepest part of the sea, in the dark, while this one made it to the surface.”

She felt the arrow of aloneness that she’d often felt before he’d entered her life, before his copper eyes had looked down at her.

“See.” He looked at her now and the isolation she’d felt before him faded, but was still palpable below her exposed skin. He touched her. “See how lucky we are. One of us could still be searching, looking, lost . . . crushed. But we’re not, we’re connected here—” He took her hand and placed it on the cuticle-hard joint of the clam.

“Yes.”