“Tell me one more time why we’re here?” he asked, with a deliberately affect-less tone that belied his growing impatience.

We’re here to find pretty rocks, like we do every year.”

The middle aged couple stood side by side on the stony beach facing the Atlantic Ocean, just below Montauk Lighthouse. Looking out across the vast expanse of shimmering blue, beyond the knee-high waves breaking in front of them and out to the sharp edge of the horizon, where blue sky met the indigo sea, the woman tried to visualize the unimaginable distance between them and the next landfall to the east, Portugal. The man was worrying about traffic on the roads highways.

This was the spot they returned to every summer to commemorate their engagement. Nearly two decades ago, he proposed to her on that beach, bruising his knee on the rocks as he knelt. He joked that he had lured her there for a rock-gathering excursion so he could give her a rock while standing on rocks and surrounded by rocks. He thought the connections he drew were funny and clever, and out of love for him, she chose not to disagree.

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