Old Ivar sat on an upturned dinghy, mending a net with a thick needle carved from whale bone. The air smelled of salt, rotting fish, and cold water. In front of him, at the new pier, a twenty-year-old who’d come from the city for summer break fussed around his yacht-dazzling white, slick, flawless. Its name was Serenity.

The kid found a tiny scratch in the perfect lacquer, barely the size of a fingernail. He groaned, rubbed it with a velvet cloth, and nearly burst into tears.

Ivar watched in silence, shaking his head. At last he rasped across the water:

“So, did your little shell earn her first battle scar?”

The city boy flinched.

“What scar? She’s ruined! The whole look is gone.”

Ivar chuckled into his gray beard and slapped the hull of his own boat. The old skiff was called Eva. The wood, darkened by time and brine, was riddled with hundreds of scars, dents, and gouges. One plank carried a crude lead patch.

“See this?” Ivar tapped a deep groove near the bow with a knotty finger. “That’s from kissing the rocks off Devil’s Point. Barely crawled out. But I hauled in the three biggest tuna of the season. The whole village feasted.”

He ran his palm down to the patch.

“And this one-a gift from the patrol cutter. I was poaching in foreign waters, foolish and young. Had to run when they started shooting. Lucky I lived.”

The kid looked back and forth between his tiny scratch and Eva’s battered hull. He said nothing.

“Why’d you buy that boat, kid?” Ivar asked quietly, returning to the net. “To dust it and brag about how smooth she is? Or to take her to sea?”

“To… to sail, of course,” the city boy muttered.

“Then listen.” Ivar nodded toward the little scrape. “That’s not damage. That’s the opening line of her first story. Without them your Serenity is just dead plastic. Pretty, sure-but dead.”

The old man cinched a knot, bit the line clean, and glanced at the sky, where clouds were already massing.

“Storm’s coming,” he said. “A real one.”