George makes his way toward the rhythm of waves. Each crash marks time in the endless sentence of his mornings. Wind works through his thinned hair—thinned with the same gradual disappearing as his marriage. Standing on the cliff, salt stings his eyes. He feels the particular loneliness that comes with being the only witness at this hour. Just past six. Pale sun stretches across water like a hesitant touch. The kind he used to feel from Claire in their final months.

​

His feet sink into churned sand with a precision become ritual. Each step makes a small divot before the tide erases it, the way waves in the night erase yesterday’s mistakes. He began this pilgrimage four months ago, after Claire left. Somewhere between replacing spoiled milk and driving home, he found himself knee-deep in biting waves, still wearing the checkered pajamas Claire bought him three Christmases ago, when they still believed in small gestures. He let the sea unleash against him for hours, his lips turning the blue of horizon, remembering what it meant to feel something, even if just cold.

​

Today the shore mirrors his mood, unusually gentle. White foam creeps onto beach with tender hesitation, existing in that space between being and dissolving before disappearing into sand. He catches foam with his finger, trying to grasp memory before it, too, floats away into the vast ocean of forgetting. Today, he remembers the lemon cake.

​

✽✽✽

​

Weekday. The specific day lost, but the rain remains vivid—how it painted his office windows in perpetual twilight, transforming corporate landscape into something almost beautiful. Afternoon meeting concluded early, gifting him that particular lightness of unexpected freedom. Claire’s text arrived as he gathered his things: “Shit day at work. Much to tell you.” Words glowing with an urgency he recognized, the kind that made him want to be better, to be the version of himself that could fix things.

​

He detoured to the bakery. Selected lemon cake—her favorite—though he never understood its sharp sweetness. The cake sat beside him in the passenger seat, a proxy for the conversations they used to have driving home, before silence became their shared language.

Later, Claire tells him about the factory. Her wine glass leaves faint rings on tablecloth as she recounts horrors. Thirty women dead. Five-year-old girl working night shifts. The facts arrange themselves between them like pieces of a puzzle neither knows how to complete.

​

“If you’d seen the photos,” Claire says. She’s wearing the silk blouse she bought last week off Amazon. Empty boxes still piled at the door. “God, their faces.”

​

George watches how she holds her glass—delicate, precise, like something might break if she grips too hard. The familiar tightness forms in his chest, that instinct to measure tragedy in statistics, to find safety in numbers.

​

“These things happen more than—” he begins.

​

“Don’t.” Claire’s voice soft, but filling the room. She takes another sip. “Just… don’t.”

​

The silence stretches. George reaches for the lemon cake, still in its white box. Claire pushes back from the table, leaving her half-empty glass. The cake sits untouched, citrus scent settling into spaces where words should have been.

​

✽✽✽

A seagull’s cry pierces morning air. Draws George toward boulders lining shore. Stone formations stand ten, fifteen feet tall, bleached white by sun. At night, teenagers gather, leaving beer cans and cigarette butts. Jagged signatures etched on rocks declare eternal love or foul language—humanity so simple. Between rocks, seagulls nest, their presence marked by sharp droppings that linger in salt air.

​

He settles onto a wooden bench in the small clearing. Lets wave sounds wash over consciousness. When he opens his eyes, she’s there—a girl no older than thirteen. All awkward grace and determined focus. Legs long and gawky. Thick red frames intensifying the serious set of her mouth. Plastic gloves. Methodically filling a trash bag with the detritus of other people’s carelessness.

​

George watches her work with precise attention. Collecting broken glass and cigarette butts with careful dedication. She moves closer, not acknowledging his presence, until her gaze meets his. Her eyes drift to his feet, where a clear plastic straw lies half-buried in sand.

“Can you please hand that to me?” Her voice carries delicate strength.

​

“Yeah, no problem,” George says, bending to retrieve it. As he drops it in her bag, he can’t help asking, “So, you doing this through your school? Service hours?”

​

She shifts the weight of her bag. “No. I am just doing it because it needs to get done.”

​

“Huh.” The simplicity catches him off guard. “Just that not a lot of people do things without some other motive.”

​

The girl’s smile flickers. “I do have a motive. It’s to make this beach clean.”

​

He laughs, the sound carrying more bite than intended. “I see that. You’ve collected a lot already. Well done.”

​

She meets his eyes, really looking at him this time. “I can read your tone. You’re not very subtle.”

​

“Sorry,” he says, gesturing toward boulders. “Just think you’ve got your work cut out for you over there.”

​

“Yeah, the boulders are always a mess. I’m making my way.” She laughs, wiping sweat with the back of her gloved hand.

​

“So you’ve done this before?”

​

The girl’s smile appears briefly. “Every week.”

​

“So every week you clean their mess, knowing they will do it again?”

​

She draws a heart in sand with her toe, slowly erases it. “Yeah.”

​

“Let me guess, doesn’t bother you?”

​

She sighs. “No. It bothers me.”

​

George digs his toes into sand, anchoring himself to something solid. “Yeah, people can be shitty.”

​

“I won’t be that way,” she whispers. Words carrying across space between them, barely audible.

​

He laughs softly, watching seagulls wheel overhead. “You’d be surprised. Priorities change.”

​

“What do you mean?”

​

The question hangs. George thinks about how his own priorities shifted, how the world he once knew became a place he couldn’t begin to understand. Memory of lemon cake lingering bitter on his tongue. “Just mean that you might not be into picking up trash anymore. Might realize there will always be… trash in this world.”

​

“Yeah, I already know that.”

​

“Yes, I’m sure you do,” he replies. “Over time though, it can feel exhausting, like all your efforts aren’t doing enough.”

​

The girl reaches into her bag and pulls out the straw he handed her, holding it like evidence. “Do you know that ninety percent of seabirds consume plastic each year? And that at least half of those birds die by doing so? This straw under your foot is going into my trash bag, which means that in a way we have saved a seagull’s life. I’d say that’s enough to keep doing what I’m doing.”

​

George holds the straw between fingers, studying its hollow length—such a small thing to carry so much consequence. Morning light catches it, for a moment almost beautiful, like sea glass yet to be softened by waves. He thinks of Claire, of all the small choices that accumulate into catastrophe. “Sometimes I think we’re just really good at destroying things,” he says softly, more to himself than to the girl. “Creating problems we can’t fix.”

She doesn’t look up. “Maybe that’s true,” she says, her voice carrying neither judgment nor defense. “But I’m not here to fix everyone else.” She straightens, adjusts her glasses. “I’m just here because this piece of trash”—points to the straw in his hand—“might kill a bird tomorrow. And that bird”—she gestures to a seagull wheeling overhead—“doesn’t care about human hypocrisy.”

​

The simplicity and startling maturity of her answer catches in George’s chest like a fish hook. She is already turning away, her shadow stretching across morning sand, merging with dark spots left by bottle caps and cigarette burns. The straw finds its way into his pocket without him quite deciding to keep it. His voice surprises him, carries farther than intended: “Doesn’t it make you upset that the same bird you saved today might die because of someone else’s trash tomorrow?”

​

The girl keeps her stride and shouts back: “Does it matter?”

​

✽✽✽

​

Next morning, George makes his way down the familiar path. Wind moves through his hair, gentle and constant. At the cliff's edge, he pauses. Watches dark sea reshape itself beneath early light. Just past six. The trash bag in his hands catches wind, makes a soft sound like breathing. Above him, seagulls circle and dive, their shadows crossing his path like thoughts he can’t quite catch. He takes out a plastic bottle from sand and drops it in his bag. Then another. Sun continues its slow climb. Waves keep coming.​​