Ursilla hesitated. She had heard those stories too: an uncle of hers purportedly married a sealmaid. He was found drowned three years ago, a half-moon of flesh torn from his side, his intestines frothing out in a stinking bouquet, their slicked-grey under the dawn-light not unlike the colour of the ribbons his wife had worn in her hair.

“Let us agree then to distrust one another.”

“Fair enough,” said the selkie. “But I trusted your grandmother, loved her even—”

Ursilla must have made a face for the selkie laughed.

“—not like that, I promise. Either way, for love of her, I will tell you this: if ever you have need for me, weep seven tears into the sea for me, and I shall come to you.”

“Why seven?”

“Why not?” echoed the selkie before he was gone.

Seven years passed before Ursilla called upon the selkie.

“I knew you couldn’t stay away.”

Ursilla smiled grimly through her tears. Her youth had wasted away in those seven years, whittled by her husband’s infidelities, by seven years of him feeding their fortune into whore-houses and the gambling rings, seven years of sleeping alone in a small bed in the shadowed attic, while Duncan caroused and shipwrecked the Balfour name.

“It is neither love nor lust for you that brings me here, but grief.” Ursilla knuckled at her eyes. The wind tore at her hair, loosening her mane from its braids. Had Ursilla asked, the selkie would have told her the truth of things: that she was more beautiful now than she’d been seven years ago. “For love of my grandmother, help me.”

The selkie came closer. He ran his thumb over the cliff of her right cheekbone, gentler than Ursilla had thought him capable, and his touch was like a flame, burning the ache of those seven years from her.

“What would you have me do?” said the selkie. “I could drown your husband. That would be an easy task.”

“I promised no harm would come to him so long as I lived.”

“You wouldn’t be doing the drowning.”

“But I would be the reason for his drowning.”

“And so what if you are? A promise to a wastrel means nothing.”

“All promises matter,” said Ursilla. “Or none of them do.”

The selkie nodded. “A divorce then. Unless you promised you would never leave him.”

He chuckled as he read his answer in the bitter upturn of Ursilla’s full mouth.

“You’re difficult.”

“So I am told.”

Ursilla’s breath plumed white through the air. She had been cold before but now, pressed to the selkie, it didn’t seem so bad. She had heard stories of how kindly a death in the frost was, how the pain melted into a drowsy warmth. If that would be her escape from this ill-fated marriage, perhaps, it wouldn’t be so bad.

“What do you want more than anything else?” said the selkie after a companionable forever.