Chapter 6 — Robert Remembers Sunrise at the Pier
Robert had quietly listened from across the room.
Then something bothered him.
“What year was this?”
Melissa answered:
“1995.”
“August?”
She looked surprised.
“Yes.”
Robert stared toward the ocean.
“Linda and I were here.”
Jason looked at him.
“At this resort?”
Robert nodded.
It had been their tenth wedding anniversary.
Linda loved sunrise.
Robert hated waking early.
But she dragged him to Seabrook’s old wooden pier every morning.
“Do you remember Mark?” Jason asked.
Robert shook his head.
“Not by name.”
Then:
“But I remember somebody.”
On their final morning, Robert and Linda reached the pier before six.
A young man was already there.
Marina uniform.
Small duffel bag beside him.
He kept checking the resort path.
Again and again.
Linda joked privately that he looked like someone waiting for a movie scene to begin.
Sunrise came.
The young man stayed.
Robert and Linda left almost an hour later.
He was still there.
Melissa covered her mouth.
“Mark.”
Robert nodded slowly.
“Maybe.”
It wasn’t proof by itself.
But there might be proof somewhere else.
Linda had taken photographs constantly.
Robert still had every album.
Including the Seabrook trip.
“At home?” Jason asked.
Robert smiled faintly.
“In my car.”
He had brought one old album with him because he planned to sit on the beach that evening and revisit their anniversary photographs.
Robert retrieved it.
They turned through faded pictures.
Linda beneath a striped umbrella.
Robert pretending to enjoy kayaking.
The old resort lobby.
Then sunrise.
Robert stopped.
In the background of one photograph, leaning against the pier railing…
stood a young marina employee.
Melissa immediately whispered:
“That’s him.”
The handwritten time beneath Linda’s photograph read:
6:48 A.M.
Mark had been there.
He had waited.