The first light touched the lagoon like a tentative hand, turning the water from black to molten copper. Bar Beach, which hours earlier had been a shrinking crescent swallowed by angry waves, now stretched wide again—wet sand gleaming, scattered with shells and the pale skeletons of plastic bottles the tide had left behind as apology. The floodwater was gone. Not receded slowly over days, but withdrawn in the final moments of the eclipse, as though the Atlantic itself had exhaled and pulled back its claim.
