Finally he eased to a stop and clicked off the motor.

Silence enveloped them instantly, broken only by the waves crashing on the black rocks below. Matthew dug through the bag on his three-wheeler and pulled out a pair of binoculars. “Come on.”

He walked ahead of her, his feet steady on the rough, rocky terrain. Twice Leni almost fell as rock gave way beneath her feet, but Matthew was like a mountain goat, perfectly at home.

He led her to a clearing perched like a scooped hand above the sea. There were two handmade wooden chairs positioned to face the trees. Matthew plopped down in one and indicated the other for her.

Leni dropped her backpack onto the grass and sat down, waiting as Matthew peered through the binoculars, and scanned the trees. “There they are.” He handed her the binoculars, pointed to a stand of trees. “That’s Lucy and Ricky. My mom named ’em.”

Leni peered through the binoculars. At first all she saw was trees, trees, and more trees as she panned slowly from left to right, and then, a flash of white.

She eased back to the left a few degrees.

A pair of bald eagles perched on a bathtub-sized nest built high in the trees. One of the birds was feeding a trio of eaglets who jostled and lurched, beaks up, to get the regurgitated food. Leni could hear their squabbling, squawking cries over the crash of water below.

“Wow,” Leni said. She would have pulled her Polaroid out of her backpack (she never went anywhere without it), but the eagles were too far away for the clunky camera to capture.

“They’ve been coming back here to lay eggs for as long as I can remember. Mom first brought me here when I was little. You should see them making the nest. It’s amazing. And they mate for life. I wonder what Ricky would do if something happened to Lucy. My mom says that nest weighs almost a ton. I’ve watched eaglets leave that nest my whole life.”

“Wow,” Leni said again, smiling as one of the eaglets flapped its wings and tried to climb up over its siblings.

“We haven’t come out here in a long time, though.”

Leni heard something in Matthew’s voice. She lowered the binoculars and looked at him. “You and your mom?”

He nodded. “Since she and Dad split up, it’s been hard. Maybe it’s ’cuz my sister, Alyeska, moved to Fairbanks to go to college. I miss her.”

“You guys must be close.”

“Yeah. She’s cool. You’d like her. She thinks she wants to live in a city, but no way it will last. She’ll be back. Dad says we both have to go to college so we know all our options. He’s kind of pushy about it, actually. I don’t need college to tell me what I want to be.”

“You already know?”