“Hello?” Emmi’s voice was curt and shrill.

“We found her.”

“Thank God,” Emmi said, her voice breaking. Linnea heard Emmi shout out, “They found her! Linnea and John found her!”

In a few short sentences, Linnea gave directions to where they were. “We’ll meet you in the parking lot at Breach Inlet. And, Emmi, bring a blanket.”

She tucked her phone back in her pocket and took a few steps closer to John and Flo. He’d succeeded in calming her down. She was no longer screaming, but she still trembled visibly from the cold.

“Well, hey there, Flo,” John crooned, smiling. He was crouched to walk hunchbacked under the curve of the bridge’s foundation. “It’s me. John. You remember my handsome face?”

Flo lowered her hand and peered into his face. Her head tilted, the light casting shadows on the sharp cheekbones of her thin face.

“Brett?” she said in a weak, tremulous voice.

Linnea brought her hand to cover her mouth. Brett. Flo thought John was Brett Beauchamps, Cara’s first husband.

Brett had been Flo’s knight in shining armor, as he had been Lovie’s before her. He was always on call for the old woman living alone, to run an errand, fix a broken pipe, lift anything heavy, and to bring home a pound of shrimp from the dock when asked. It dawned on Linnea: that was why Flo had always asked for John, preferring him to help her over Emmi. In her dementia, Flo had mistaken John for Brett.

Linnea watched John reach out and gently remove the soggy sandwich from Flo’s hand, tossing it behind him into the darkness. He began speaking so softly Linnea couldn’t make out the words, but she watched him reach out once again, and this time Flo let him take hold of her hand. He gently guided the old woman away from the graffiti-covered wall.

Tears filled Linnea’s eyes as she kept a light on the pair. John was very much like Brett, she thought. Both were tall and broad-shouldered, and their hair was tawny brown. But they didn’t look alike. It was more their gentlemanly manner that was similar, their kindness, and their lowcountry charm that gave them an ease in the landscape they were born and raised in. Flo, for all that she’d lost in her mental faculties, saw the truth clearly.

Linnea had loved her uncle Brett. He’d been her teacher when she’d come as a child to Isle of Palms in the summers with Cooper to spend weeks in the sun and surf. And later he’d been her mentor, when Linnea was a teenager and worked summers on his tour boats that cruised the Intracoastal. Brett had shared with her his love of all things wild, not just the popular dolphins and sea turtles. He’d revealed to her the beauty of the cordgrass waving in the last rays of sunlight on any given day; the history and medical importance of horseshoe crabs, calling them our living dinosaurs; the humor in a fiddler crab waving his one oversize claw to impress a mate.