He’d offered to bring her, he reminded himself. He’d made the effort. It was Caddie who had said no, who had rejected his extended hand just as she’d rejected his dinner the night before. But he’d decided to let that go. There was no point in having an argument. Obviously, she had been trying to upset him (he found it impossible to believe she could simply have forgotten), and if he let her believe that she had, she would just do it again. It was better, he thought, to ignore her, as Carol had forced him to do when Caddie was an infant and she cried for long periods of time, seemingly for no reason. “Just let her work it out,” Carol had said, while Ben, his nerves tight from hearing his daughter wail in the next room, had wanted to run and snatch her up. He’d secretly accused Carol of heartlessness, even when, after an hour or less, a quick check on Caddie proved that she was indeed sleeping peacefully.

He would leave her alone now, too, he’d decided. Let her work it out on her own. Whatever “it” was. Apart from a wholesale hatred of him, he couldn’t think of anything specific that would make her so determined to upset him. Then again, he’d never been very good at understanding the unspoken needs of other people. He always assumed that they would tell him what they wanted and was repeatedly surprised when, more often than not, they left it to him to guess.

A sudden tugging on his fin made him turn his head. Angela was looking into his face, her eyes wide with excitement. She motioned to him to follow her, then turned and swam off. When she stopped, pointing into a crack in the rock, Ben followed her finger to see what she’d been so anxious to show him.

A tiny red face looked back at him. It was attached to a thin body perhaps a foot long. The creature’s tail was curled, and it peered up at Ben with an expression of utter surprise. The gills on either side of its neck fluttered as it breathed.

Angela held up her hands, asking him what the animal was. Ben held his hand out, the fingers flat together and turned vertically, and made the sinuous motion that represented an eel. Angela responded with a look of disdain that clearly indicated that she knew full well that it was an eel. Ben then held his hands together, the palms a short distance apart. It’s a baby, he telegraphed at her.