“Papa, what’s that?”

The little girl’s face is smudged and her knees are scabbed from playing with her brothers. A tiny flower, like a small white star, has tangled in her hair.

The man, whose shadow darkens the sand and whose face is hidden beneath the brim of his captain’s hat, sits with sleeves rolled up and elbows propped on a barrel. All around him rise curving boards and lengths of bent steel– the ribs of a ship, being built slowly on the shore. His hands, which are large and therefore clumsy with the delicate thing he holds between his fingers, fumble at an elusive glint that shimmers sharply in the afternoon sun.

“Papa...what is it?”

And now the little girl stands on her tiptoes, braces herself on the palms of her small hands, and climbs onto her father’s knee. She sways, regains her balance, and then stares intently at the object which has so captured her father’s attention. One arm, browned by the sun on the sea and seamed with scars, quickly moves to prevent the child from falling; the other sweeps across a sweaty forehead.

The child is five, this year. Her eyes are the exact shade of an ocean storm, but in them he sees nothing now but the peaceful certainty of the young. He smiles at her, as she blinks at him and wrings the heavy pendant that hangs from her neck. She does this, he has noticed, whenever she is curious, or possessed by some strong emotion. She has asked him, several times now, where this necklace has come from, and why she must wear it always. He has never answered her. He has always waited, with a secret panic in his heart, for the child to fall asleep– for the exhaustion of a happy day on the beach to gain control, for her questions to dissolve in the air as her breathing slows into a cadence very similar to that of a ship on a gentle sea.

She is staring at him intently. He wonders if she bears her mother’s heart as well as her face, if she shares her father’s will of steel in addition to the color of his hair.

“Well, Annie. And what are ye doing here?” He smiles at her fondly, betraying nothing, and the grin she returns to him is as bright as a pearl. He settles her in his lap and they sit, father and daughter, on a barrel half buried in the sand.

The little girl giggles now, trying to pry the secret treasure from her father’s grasp. He laughs, hides it first in one fist, and then in the other, until she has grown dizzy with laughing and guesswork and sunlight– until she has quite forgotten what it is she been so ardently seeking. She leans against her father’s chest, shuts her eyes. She is enveloped in the smoky scent that clings always to her father’s clothes– a scent she will later recognize as the smell of danger.

“Little Annie, ye’ve got yer mother’s eyes, ye know that?” And he lifts her up, tickling her with his beard. “Yer mother’s eyes! Ah. Tell me, love, can ye fight with the best of ‘em?”

“Aye! I can fight with the best of ‘em, Papa! I can beat Luke real good! ‘Cept Jesse bit me so I had to run ‘way. It’s no fair, isn’t it, Papa?”

“Not fair at all, love.”

Her necklace hangs on a chain that seems too delicate to hold such weight. And as he studies the intricacies of its design, he momentarily slips away into his memories. Absently, he sets her down, sends her off to play. Faintly, he can hear her bare feet scattering the sand as she runs off down the beach. In a minute, the jubilant crowing of his sons; in another minute, three splashes one after the other as bodies slide into the cool water of the cove, escaping the summer heat.

Later he will wake in his bed, and in his mind will hang the shadows of a promise once made, a promise soon broken. Later he will hear the creak of his door, the sound of those small feet padding across wood worn smooth. Later, she will come to him, the tears bright in her eyes that somehow mirror storms, that somehow hold the light of the moon as it shines through the window. He will soothe her frantic fears, listen with patience to the visions of a child tormented hour after hour with nightmares of fire and faces hidden behind dark hoods, the breaking of glass, of drowning in fog. He will wait, feel her limbs relax, her muscles grow slack as though they had previously been wound tight as a spring. The tracks of tears will be fresh on her face, still with its baby roundness. And he will unclasp her necklace as she sleeps, undo the careful clockwork by the light of a guttering candle, until her destiny lies dismantled and scattered on a battered writing desk. He will change her fate with his own two hands.

But that is the part that she never sees, for that is precisely the moment that she wakes.