Sometime later, he paused in his daily sandwich-making duties and ponder the thought.
He had spoken it aloud to Fenchurch, back when she existed, when the two of them had been sitting on a hilltop, staring at the stars and enjoying one another's company.
"A friend of mine did this for fifteen years."
Only his friend had done it alone, and he he'd been doing it in an endeavor to get home. Or, at least, closer to home than earth was.
And he hadn't had the company of a wonderfully strange woman with him. He hadn't had anybody. He wondered if his friend had done it every night when he first arrived, sat with his towel and his little blinking thumb and stared in perfect silence at the stars.
And then what? Arthur knew he couldn't have done it every night for fifteen years. He and Ford had actually spent some of those long nights together, getting gleefully drunk either in a duo or with a group of extended friends.
He pondered when Ford stopped going every night, waiting for his ship to come.
And then he cut his thumb with his knife and promptly forgot about the whole thing.