Down by the cove where the tide pulls back from the stone wall, there is a dock that never moves even when the bay rises over its pilings. You walk out to the end of the planks carrying a glass jar of seawater and a rusted compass, looking for someone who measures the current.
The keeper of the harbor sits in a salt-bleached shack, surrounded by tide charts pinned with brass tacks. They do not ask how cold the water felt against your ribs, or how long you had to tread before the pier came into view. They only unroll the vellum map, searching for the buoy where the channel narrows, measuring the drift in knots and degrees.
You point to the place where the undertow caught your ankle, where the current pulled sideways while the surface looked calm. The cartographer dips a nib in waterproof ink and draws a thin, dashed line across the bay.
You leave the jar on the counter, watching the silt slowly settle to the bottom of the glass. Outside, the gulls still wheel over the breakwater, and the tide keeps coming in on schedule. Nothing in the harbor has changed its course, except now,somewhere on the master chart, the hidden rock has been marked in ink.
