She resurfaced with her hands full of weeds and barnacles. She tossed them into the raft, and we pulled her in.

“There’s a whole . . . ecosystem . . . on the bottom of this raft,” she gasped. “Barnacles. Sargasso. I saw fish, but they scattered . . . too fast . . . They’re living off what’s growing on the bottom.”

“That’s good, right?” I asked. “The fish? Maybe we could catch one?”

“Yeah . . .” She nodded, still panting. “But . . . that’s what the sharks are after, too.”

* * *

Now, Annabelle, I must share one more thing, and then I will rest. The writing takes a lot out of me. Processing thought. Thinking about anything besides water and food. I helped Geri pump air into the repaired tubing. It took us an hour. Then both of us fell back under the canopy. Even that simple act was draining.

Still. Last night, in a moment of grace, we witnessed something otherworldly. It was after midnight. As I slept, I felt a sensation through my closed lids, as if someone had turned on the lights. I heard a gasp, and I opened my eyes to witness an utterly amazing sight.

The entire sea was aglow.

Patches below the surface were illuminating the water like a million small light bulbs, casting a Disneyland bluish white all the way to the horizon. The ocean was dead calm, as if it had parked itself in place, and the effect was like looking at a massive sheet of glowing glass. It was so beautiful that I wondered if my life had ended and this was what came next.

“What is it?” Jean Philippe whispered.

“Dinoflagellates,” Geri said. “They’re like plankton. They glow if they’re disturbed.” She paused. “They’re not supposed to be this far out.”

“In all my life,” Jean Philippe marveled, “I never see anything like this.”

I glanced at the Lord. Little Alice was asleep next to him. Wake up, child, I wanted to say. See something astonishing before we die.

I didn’t. In fact, I barely moved. I couldn’t. I kept staring at the glowing sea, awestruck. At that moment, I sensed my insignificance more than at any other moment in my life. It takes so much to make you feel big in this world. It only takes an ocean to make you feel tiny.

“Benji,” Jean Philippe whispered to me. “Do you think the Lord created this?”

“Our Lord?” I whispered, nodding backward.

“Yes.”

“No, Jean Philippe. I don’t think he created this.”

I saw the blue light reflecting in his pupils.

“Something must have.”

“Something,” I said.

“Something magnificent,” he added. He smiled. The raft rocked gently in the water.

The next morning, Jean Philippe was gone.

Land

LeFleur and Commissioner Sprague watched the man in the blue blazer approach the orange raft. LeFleur shifted his shoes in the sand. There was no way this guy knew about the notebook, right?