The trawling nets were in, the flash-freezing factory mercifully shuttered, all shifts locked behind the rust-stained barracks bars, in the smell of sea-sick vomit and misery. Even the strongest stomachs lurched and churned with the ship. At times, the Sea Wolf was almost sideways in the waves.

“She doesn’t handle the weather well,” Son said from his hammock next to Eiko. “She is heavy with her catch, and her load is poorly stowed.”

Since the day Son had shielded Eiko from Bjarte’s anger on the processing floor, Eiko and Son had become friends. They had hooked their hammocks up next to one another, playing cards with a stained deck in the off hours, sharing stories.

Partly, the friendship was a result of Eiko’s new determination to care more. There was a time when he would have kept to himself. A time when even someone coming to his aid would not have been enough for him to begin confiding in that person. But now his determination to care had begun to feel almost religious.

That didn’t mean it felt real to him—not yet. He still felt that distance, that detachment. But he was groping toward it, toward something genuine. Fellow feeling, or whatever one might call it: he had no word for what it was. He was forcing himself to connect, to feel, to identify with others. Because people had to matter. They had to. If they did not matter, it meant he did not matter.

And so Eiko was learning to listen. Was practicing listening. And he practiced on Son. Son had been a fisherman on his home archipelago of Con Dao. Small local vessels. Mostly illegally poaching in the national park. He came to regret that life only when he began working as a dive instructor. Son was born on the island and was filled with a nostalgic love for his home—its forests and mangroves, its coral reefs and turtle sanctuaries—all of it under constant threat from overfishing. His work as a dive instructor had changed him, turned him into a true ecological warrior. He and his boss, a man named Lawrence, had spent hours after their regular dives cutting trash fishing nets from his native corals and working with scientists to document Con Dao’s dwindling biodiversity while the desperate commercial fishing fleets launched raid after raid on the fringes of the national park that protected the archipelago. Eiko admired this about Son: he had seen a problem, and he had done something about it.

He had cared.

It was a level of passion totally foreign to Eiko. Son had lived for a cause. He regaled Eiko with horror stories: dugongs washed up on the beach, hacked to death by boat propellers, endangered turtles netted and chopped up for the tourist trade, their eggs sold by the hundreds.