She had always known she wanted to live near the ocean. It was not a casual preference, not a fleeting whim, not something she had seen in a magazine and decided sounded nice. It was a deep, almost cellular longing that had been with her since childhood summers spent on her grandmother's porch, listening to the waves crash against the shore and feeling the salt wind on her skin. She had built her life around this vision. She chose her career in a field that could be done remotely, deliberately, so that when the time came, she would not be tethered to a particular city. She saved for a down payment on a modest coastal home, a little cottage with a porch where she could hear the ocean at night. She oriented her entire future toward the sea the way a plant orients itself toward the sun. It was not negotiable. It was who she was.