“Oh, Scooter,” I breathe. “These were from my last boat trip with my mom and dad.” I rifle through the rocks, admiring each one. “My dad anchored near Oval Beach on a beautiful summer day. School had started for both Nate and Evan, but I had so many unused vacation days and saw how gorgeous it was going to be in Saugatuck. I swam around the shoreline all day, while my mom and dad sipped on glasses of rosé, and picked out rocks.” I hold one up that is shaped like a heart, and my eyes fill with tears. “I remember screaming when I found this one. I crawled out of the water and handed it to my parents. I said, ‘Your love will live forever here.’ They toasted, and we sat in the boat watching people walking the beach. It was one of those perfect summer days where, from the boat, the beach looked draped in gauze.”

I run my hands over the smooth stone shaped like a heart. “Thank you,” I say. “For finding these. For doing all the work. For offering to captain.” I stop. “For everything.”

“You’re welcome,” he says in a husky breath. “But I’m not done. I found something else.” Scooter returns to his desk and pulls something from it, which he quickly hides behind his back. He walks over to me and says, “Shut your eyes.”

“This is getting weird now,” I laugh.

“Shut your eyes,” he repeats, before adding with a laugh, “and shut up for a second.”

I shut my eyes, and I can feel something being placed around my neck. When I open my eyes, a stone necklace is draped over my sweater.

“Remember?” Scooter asks.

I lift the necklace. A series of small adder stones—little gray ones with naturally occurring holes in them—surround a little lightning stone, perfectly smooth and round, crossed with white lines, that has been wired onto a thin leather band.

I look at Scooter, my eyes wide. “You made this for me,” I say. “You gave it to me the last day we worked together on the chain ferry. I forgot all about this.”

“Obviously,” Scooter says. He means to say it jokingly, offhandedly, but it comes across in a more serious tone.

“I must have taken it off before I went swimming one day and just left it on the boat,” I say.

“A long time ago,” he adds.

I study the necklace and stones. “I never asked, but when—how—did you do this?”

“Every time we finished work and would run down Mt. Baldhead to Lake Michigan to go swimming, you’d go rock hunting,” he says. “If there were a stone you put back down, or dropped, or said wasn’t big enough, I picked it up.” Scooter stops and shuts his eyes as if remembering, a huge smile lighting his face. “I thought you should take a piece of Saugatuck—of us—to college with you.”