1On her tenth birthday, Sophie sealed a letter inside a green bottle and threw it from the pier.
2The letter asked whoever found it to write back and describe the place where the bottle came ashore.
3Her father helped her push it into the waves, though he gently warned that the currents rarely carried bottles anywhere interesting.
4Weeks passed, then months, then a whole year, and eventually Sophie almost forgot about the bottle, as children usually do.
5Nearly twenty years later, while she was working as a marine biologist, a cream envelope arrived with an unfamiliar foreign stamp.
6Inside was her own childish letter, brown and fragile now, together with a photograph of an old wooden fishing boat.
7The finder, an elderly fisherman from a tiny northern island, wrote that the bottle had reached his beach the previous winter.
8He had kept it on his shelf all winter, he admitted, unsure whether anyone would still remember it.
9He ended by saying that finding her letter had given an old man a reason to check the tides.
10Sophie flew to the island that summer, and the fisherman walked her along the grey beach where her bottle had landed.
11Before she left, he gave her the bottle back, cleaned and polished, with a new letter of his own folded inside.
12It said the sea had kept his answer waiting, and he was glad she had finally come for it.