Leo thought of the spreadsheet he’d made for this trip. 7:00 AM: Sunrise jog. 8:30 AM: Breakfast (protein). 10:00 AM: Beach reading (self-improvement books only). He’d tried to schedule his own healing, as if grief were a project to be managed.

“Second rule,” Margot said, kicking off her sandals. “At sunset, you don’t watch the sun. You watch the people watching the sun.”

He found a perfect scallop shell, still glossy with salt, and slipped it into his pocket.

Instead, the sky had split open ten minutes after he’d checked in.

“I think I’ll stay another day,” he said.

She was right. A young couple took a hundred photos, each one more staged than the last. A grandfather lifted a toddler onto his shoulders, the child’s laughter carrying across the water. A woman in a straw hat sat alone, sketching the horizon with fierce concentration. And there, farther down, a man about Leo’s age—divorced? widowed? simply alone?—flew a kite shaped like a parrot, his face utterly peaceful.

“What’s the third rule?” he asked.

Leo felt something crack open in his chest—not painfully, but like a window being unjammed after a long winter. Later, when the sun was low and gold, they walked the beach. Not the crowded main stretch near the village, but the wilder northern end near Point of Rocks. The sand was indeed like sugar—white, cool, impossibly soft between his toes. At low tide, tidal pools formed in the ancient rock formations, each one a tiny aquarium of hermit crabs and minnows and starfish the color of raspberries.