By the time Joshua reached them, his lungs were burning and his side felt like something had torn loose inside. He slowed as he approached, hands out, trying to appear calm even though nothing inside him was. The man was tall, broad shouldered, with a dark beard matted against his face and a gash above his left eye that had dried dark brown in the sun. He had one arm wrapped around the woman beside him, holding her up. She was smaller, with wet hair pressed flat against her face and eyes that carried the particular hollowness of someone who had been in the water too long.
"It's alright," Joshua said, breathing hard. "I've got you. Come up out of the water." The man stared at him the way people stare when they have stopped believing that help is real. Then something in his expression broke open and he nodded, moving them both forward through the shallow water toward the sand. Joshua got under the man's free arm and helped them the rest of the way up onto the beach. They collapsed together at the waterline, all three of them, the man and woman leaning against each other and Joshua on one knee beside them catching his breath.
"How long were you in the water?" Joshua asked. The man shook his head slowly. "Since last night. Maybe longer. I lost track." His voice was hoarse and cracked at the edges. "Our boat went down in the storm. We managed to stay together on a piece of the hull until the current brought us here." He paused, looking up at Joshua with raw, exhausted eyes. "Are we the only ones you've found?"
Joshua held the man's gaze for a moment. "So far. Yes." He let the words settle before adding, "I've been here several days myself. My boat went down in the same storm I believe."
The woman lifted her head at that. She had been quiet until now, arms folded tight across herself, staring at the sand. But something in what Joshua said made her look up at him directly for the first time. Her eyes were brown and deeply tired, but sharp underneath the exhaustion.
"Your boat," she said slowly. "What kind of boat?"
Joshua thought for a moment, reaching into the fog of his memory. "A private vessel. Mid sized. White hull." He paused. "I was with my wife." The woman's expression shifted. Not dramatically, not with gasping recognition, but with the careful, reluctant movement of someone deciding whether to say something they have been carrying alone. She glanced at the man beside her. He gave a small nod, barely perceptible.
She turned back to Joshua. "During the storm," she began, her voice quieter now, measured, "before our boat went under, we could see another vessel nearby. It was caught in the same current. We watched it go into the funnel." She stopped, pressing her lips together. "There was a woman on the deck. She was holding onto the rail and then the water took her under." The woman paused again, and Joshua felt every muscle in his body go rigid. "But I want you to know," she continued, and her eyes did not leave his, "I am not certain she did not come back up. The water was violent and we lost sight within seconds. I do not know what happened to her after that."
Joshua sat down fully in the sand. He had not meant to. His legs simply made the decision without him. He stared out at the water for a long moment, the bible pressed against his side, the ring on his hand catching a thin line of sunlight. "Her name is Margaret," he said quietly. The woman nodded once. "I'm Elena," she said. "This is my husband, Daniel." Daniel extended a hand and Joshua took it, gripping it longer than a handshake required. Not out of formality but out of the simple human need to hold onto something solid.
The three of them sat together on the grey sand of Patmos as the afternoon moved around them. The wilderness behind them breathed its strange breath. The water stretched out endlessly before them. And somewhere in the space between what Elena had seen and what she had not, Margaret existed in a state that was neither confirmed nor taken away.
It was the most painful kind of hope Joshua had ever held. But it was hope. And for now, on this island, that was enough.