I’ve lived on this rock for twenty years. The island is a jagged piece of granite sticking out of the New York bight, and my job is simple: keep the light burning and keep the tourists off the restricted cliffs. I’ve seen every kind of man come and go, but none like Julian Vane.

Vane arrived in a private chopper, wearing a suit that cost more than my house and carrying an air of entitlement that could choke a horse. He was a hedge fund king, a man who believed that everything in the universe had a price tag. He spent his first three days shouting into a satellite phone, treating the island’s raw, prehistoric beauty as a mere backdrop for his quarterly earnings call.

"Look at this place, Elias!" he yelled at me one morning, gesturing to the crashing surf. "It's primitive. It's raw. It's exactly the kind of 'authentic experience' my clients will pay millions for. I'm going to turn this place into a sanctuary for the elite."

I didn't tell him that the island didn't like being owned. I just nodded and went back to my oil cans.

The storm hit on the fourth day. It wasn't a normal storm; it was a wall of water that turned the sky black and the ocean into a churning graveyard. The chopper was gone, swept away in the first ten minutes. Vane’s satellite phone was a useless piece of plastic. For forty-eight hours, we were huddled in the stone base of the lighthouse, listening to the wind scream like a dying god.

When the clouds finally broke, Vane stepped outside. He looked at his ruined suit, his scratched leather shoes, and then at the horizon, where the sea had reclaimed half the island's beach. He started to laugh—a high, thin sound that bordered on hysteria. He tried to command the ocean to recede, to negotiate with the tide, as if he were in a boardroom on Wall Street.

I watched him from the gallery. He looked small. For the first time in his life, Julian Vane was facing something that didn't take checks. He stood there, a shivering little man in a ruined suit, finally understanding that in the eyes of the Atlantic, he was nothing more than a piece of driftwood.

***

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