Blackfoot Forest do you feel ashamed?

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Marina only watched the man’s struggle with wide eyes, still drifting back with slow unsteady steps, but her mind was elsewhere; far off where the air was salt-scented and warm. The last place she could remember truly being happy. The last time she'd remembered the names of those who had loved her. She only remembered his name, now.

Dutch.

Marina had never truly loved him. She hadn't known him well enough to call it love, the desperate deep-rooted bond she felt to the shadows of children both lost and unborn, a husband forgotten, a wife departed. No, it wasn't love. This grief in her, then, could only be for the briefest glimpse of a soul so beautiful as to leave its everlasting imprint behind her eyelids; for the knowledge of how she knew she could have loved him, if things had been different.

So many nights she had lain restless, imagining what she might tell him, how she might bare her soul and then say: see how we are the same? Maybe then he would understand why she saw his eyes in every sunset, though she tried to tell herself to forget. It was best to forget. Theirs was the love that only could have been, might have been, never would be now that their time had passed. Like every sunset he’d faded into the night, his choices made, and she was certain he never even thought of her now.

Why should he, with enough love around him to last a lifetime? No less than he deserved, but even so Marina could only think bitterly of all that the sea had taken from her. All it had taken, everything but this: the ghost of a beautiful what-if looming over the grotesque corpse of cause-and-effect, an angel with torn wings weeping over the blood. She remembered Dutch only to feel the full tragedy, she was sure:

Remember when you wanted that beauty? Look at you now, all sullied from the inside. Open your eyes now; watch him. Watch him drown, or tear himself from the water to kill you where you stand. Either way, you'll know it's what you deserve.