He tried not to look, but it was like his eyeballs were made of metal, and she was made of magnets. She was as pretty as always. She was wearing a sundress, and her hair was piled high on her head in some kind of updo that looked so precarious it kind of made him uneasy. He didn’t like the in-between-ness of it. It was done up but about to fall down. He missed the tidy braid of her youth. He wanted—

“Chief?”

He swung his attention to Olivia. She was pointing in front of them. The band had moved on, and there was a noticeable gap between it and them. Right. He hit the gas a little too hard—what was the matter with him?—and Olivia inhaled sharply as the car vroomed forward. He got himself back into the snail’s pace required by the parade.

There was going to be no avoiding Evie. No avoiding the fact that this wasn’t the first time he’d been in the Mermaid Parade and Evie had been on the sidelines. Except that time, he’d been trying to be seen. Performing a very public betrayal. Today, by contrast, he would like nothing more than for a sinkhole to open up and swallow him whole.

As they drew closer, he could see that all the beauty he’d been admiring from farther back contrasted with her demeanor. Should he take comfort in the fact that she didn’t look like she wanted to be here any more than he did? Her lips were pursed, and she was looking off to the side, like although her body was in attendance, she was determined her mind would be somewhere else. Probably lost in one of her fairy tales.

They were closing in on her. His body—his entire being—was seized with an overwhelming desire to flee. He glanced behind him. They were being followed by the big marquee float, the one transporting this year’s mer-king and mer-queen. The king was Karl Andersen, as always. Everyone always voted for Karl since the whole parade had been his idea twenty years ago. The queen changed from year to year. It was usually a high school girl, the contest functioning almost like an extracurricular homecoming queen competition. But this year the queen—the reluctant queen—was Maya. She was sitting on her clamshell throne rolling her eyes, with her signature Converse high-tops clearly visible beneath her tail. As part of their ongoing war, Law had masterminded a write-in campaign to get her elected to the coveted post, purely because he knew it would annoy her. Though Maya normally did not shy away from the spotlight, she hated anything that smacked of “letting Law win,” whatever that meant.

Sawyer swung his attention back to the band. The majorettes were dressed as mermaids, too, and they twirled batons made to look like tridents.