I sit in the alpine chair with the letter in my hands and the lake in front of me. The evening is settling in, the light going golden across the water.
The story is different now.
And I know it.
CHAPTER 10
MUIR
The cottage doorcloses behind me. One room, a kitchenette, a bathroom that requires strategic maneuvering. I've been renting it week to week since I arrived, and it still doesn't feel like mine.
I sit in the single chair by the window. The cushion is worn, the springs complaining under my weight. I stand. The floor creaks. I sit again.
My legs won't stop moving. My hands open and close on the armrests. There's a current running under my skin, electric and insistent, and nowhere for it to go.
The empanada Liana sent sits heavy in my stomach—the only thing I've eaten since lunch. My body is running on fumes and something sharper than hunger. There's a diner two blocks over. I could walk there. Burn off whatever this is.
I'm halfway to the door when it hits.
A pull. Low in my chest, wrapping around my heart like a fist andtugging.
My breath stops.
Cora.
I'm out the door. The night air is cool on my face, sharp in my lungs. My feet find the path through the pines without thought—the shortcut, the narrow trail that leads to the established neighborhood where her house sits overlooking the water. I'm walking fast, then faster.
Then I'm running.
The pull tightens with every step. A hook lodged behind my sternum, reeling me in. My heart pounds. My breath comes hard. The path blurs.
Her house appears through the trees—the alpine chairs on the porch, the dock stretching into dark water.
And there, in the lake, I see her.
She's singing.
Raw. Unfiltered. Her voice moves through the water and the air like a living thing, resonant and aching and impossibly beautiful. The sound of a sirena who has stopped holding anything back.
She's in full form. The indigo of her tail catches the moonlight, veins of gold running through the scales. Her black hair floats around her like ink in water. Her eyes are luminous green, fixed on nothing, lost in whatever she's singing.
My sealskin is on. I'm diving.
The water takes me cold and clean. The shift happens before I'm three feet under—my legs fusing, my body elongating, the human softening into sleek amphibious form. Seal-eyed, better-hearing, the dark no longer dark.
I find her in seconds.
She turns when I approach, her song cutting off mid-note. For a heartbeat, we just look at each other, suspended in the underwater dark, the moonlight filtering down in pale columns around us.
Then she's in my arms.
“I have to say something,” she says.
“Say it.”
“What you did—leaving the way you did, with seemingly no explanation, no—” She stops. “I built a story. About who you were and what it meant and why you could. I needed the story to be clean because the messy version was unbearable.”
Her voice is very steady. The steadiness costs her something; I can hear the cost in it. “And the story I had was he felt nothing, and that story—I built on that story for four years. The professional composure and the arm's-length thing and the very careful not-caring I have been doing since you walked back onto this dock.” A pause. “And then the journal. And then the letter.” She looks at me. “I have no words for what it is to find out the story you built was wrong. It's not relief. It's something heavier than that.”