We crossed to the other side of Ocean Blvd, and walked across the grass, heading towards the beach. Then she stopped walking and released her hand.

I stopped also, and looked at her with raised eyebrows.

“Even if there isn’t a Jack, there could be others, right?” she asked, in a way that made it sound like she was bracing herself for something.

I could see that we needed to take things slowly, and, much as I enjoyed the feeling of resting my hand in hers, we probably should keep our distance from one another first.

I gave her a small smile and whispered, “Let’s talk, Aerin.” I half-turned away from her to continue walking towards the beach.

She caught up with me, but rubbed my shoulders against hers as she drew close, and murmured, “I don’t want to walk too far away from you, though.”

Again, my heart lurched.

“Me either,” I answered her.

We decided to pick a spot in a flatter area of the beach, away from other people. Aerin had brought a windbreaker with her, and had laid it down on the sand so that we could sit on it.

I unwrapped my scarf and threw one end of it over her shoulders, while keeping the other end of it over mine.

“This is a big scarf,” she observed with a smile as she lightly held the end that was around her shoulders in place.

“One of those blanket-sized pashminas,” I answered with a light laugh, holding down my own end. The wind continued to blow, and so the scarf billowed around us.

“And I can smell your perfume in it,” she added with a sigh.

I smiled and looked at her. She returned my smile, and, again, made my heart race.

We looked at the busy waters of the ocean

“Do you like the sea?” she asked after a few minutes.

I answered her through a long-ago quote that my father, a sailor, loved to repeat whenever he took me sailing in the Chesapeake Bay, when I was growing up, “I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because, in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change – it’s because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea – whether it is to sail or to watch it – we are going back from whence we came.”