Charlotte stared at the distant point on the horizon into which Dan had disappeared. Her eyes were starting to burn from the glare on the water and, she suspected, from not blinking enough, but she had no desire to turn away.
The sound of arguing voices floated down the beach to her. She didn't want to be part of the heated discussion over who the next passengers would be, and at any rate she didn't expect anybody would particularly want her to participate. It had been Dan who tried to ingratiate himself with that lot, despite how suspicious they all were and how little prone to granting the benefit of the doubt.
Charlotte herself was little prone to asking for such a benefit. She had been surprised at Dan for taking the lead on that point. He was a good-hearted man, she knew, but she hadn't suspected that when it came to a time of crisis he would be so successful at overriding his natural social inhibitions.
She didn't feel quite safe here without him. Which was ridiculous. She would have laughed if it hadn't been so long since she lost sight of the boat.
On impulse, she turned from the water and found Dan's shelter. She knew where he kept his journal and she had a sudden irrational fear that one of them would find it, paw through it, invade him.
The book was worn with use, the pages swollen with ink. It was heavier than it looked. Charlotte traced the creases in the cover, glanced up at the frustratingly empty ocean, and suddenly needed to feel like he was coming back. She sat down just outside his shelter and opened the journal.
She couldn't make heads or tails of most of it, of course. Dan wrote like he talked, or at least how he explained: all the information at once in a torrent that inundated the uninitiated. For a while, back when they were new passengers on the freighter, she had to ask him to stop and repeat himself half a dozen times for every ten minutes he spoke. She was used to his way of talking now, a bit, but the writing threw her off. The symbols and glyphs and calculations might have meant something to other physics geniuses, but they didn't help her at all.
She stopped trying to read through the journal from the beginning and instead began leafing through looking for Dharma symbols, and especially for the place he'd turned to when he was telling her about the Orchid. Then, on the middle of a page, scrawled in jarringly red letters: "IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG, DESMOND HUME WILL BE MY CONSTANT."
It struck a familiar chord in her brain, and she gazed at the sea in contemplation until she remembered a deckside conversation with Dan about mental time travel of sorts. Frankly, she had thought he was pulling her leg, but had decided not to call him on it because he seemed so fragile.
She smiled at the memory of how he insisted on entering the Staff station ahead of her. Funny how brave he'd gotten on the island.
For that matter, funny how she let him go first instead of telling him off for exhibiting male chauvinistic tendencies. Maybe he was right about this place.
That was a train of thought for another time. She needed to recall the principle of the constant.
If she recalled properly, it was something like an anchor, something that grounded a person who started shifting back and forth from one perception of time to another. None of it made much sense to her.
But she knew someone it did make sense to. And hopefully she'd be seeing him coming back any minute now. She turned back into the shelter, rummaged around for a pen, and flipped to an empty page of Dan's journal.
She was capping the pen when somebody on the beach called out. Up and running before she knew it, she was there to help Dan pull the boat out of the surf. The second it was fully beached, he grabbed her wrist.
"What time do you have?" He brought his watch arm next to hers. "Wow…."
People were already surrounding them. Six jumped into the boat.
"Ready? Good," Dan said, and swung a leg over the boat's side. Before he could finish stepping in, Charlotte grasped his arm so abruptly that he lost his balance. He stumbled back out of the boat and she caught him by the shoulders, steadying him until he regained his footing.
"Next trip, Charlotte," he promised.
"I don't need to go now," she said. "Not so long as you're coming back."
"I'll be back. What's wrong?"
"If anything happens to Desmond," she said urgently, "I'll be it. Your constant."
"Wha—" His eyes traveled to the journal in her left hand. "You read it?"
"Yeah. You can yell at me when all this is over." She opened the journal to the last page with writing on it. Her writing.
"I don't understand."
"It's a sort of chronology," she explained. "These are the places and the times I spent most of my life. These are the places you can find me, if…."
Charlotte couldn't finish, but as she met his eyes she knew she didn't need to. She held out the journal.
He took it, his expression a confused mix of wonder and hesitancy. "I'm not sure that's quite how…" he began, and then he stopped and shook his head as if he had changed his mind about something. "What should I tell you…if I see you?"
She took a half step forward and kissed him on the cheek. He blushed crimson.
"I don't…I don't think that…that you would react well to that," he sputtered.
"That was for luck," she said. "For what to say…ask me if I remember where I buried my time capsule."
"Where did you bury it?"
"I can't for the life of me remember. But nobody else knew about it. And anyway, maybe I'll remember then, and you can come back and tell me."
"Two birds with one stone," Dan joked feebly. He glanced back at the boat.
"Go," she said. "I'll be waiting."
"I'll try not to disappoint you." He smiled at her and took his seat by the rudder.
Charlotte watched until the boat disappeared for the second time, then moved to see if she could help the others with any preparations for departure. She didn't need to stare at the horizon until Dan returned again. His last words had calmed her fears for him.
After all, he had never disappointed her yet.