This is the seventh and final story in the collection Ripples.

An old man's routine walk along the beach in search of shells is interrupted by a young girl who questions his unusual ritual.

His wife had not really cared for collecting shells. She would stop and admire them on the sand, but she never kept them. A native of the Carolina coast, she had explained to him once that a shell was beautiful because of what it was—a home. Some creature had formed the calcified armor as a way to survive, to protect itself from all the predators and caprices of life in the ocean. It was for this reason that she always left them as they lay. They belong to the beach, to the sand and sun and waves. To the place where their architects were born and had perished. 

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Books available on Amazon:
Ripples
Judas Wept