“I found something we could do,” she tells Taylor, who comes down into the cabin. “You know how Sandusky had those lighthouses all over downtown that were painted by different local artists?”

“My grandma bought one at an auction,” Taylor says. “The artist painted it in kind of a van Gogh style.”

“Norfolk’s thing is mermaids, and there’s this place where you can buy and decorate your own mermaid on a smaller scale,” Willa explains. “And part of the money they make goes to benefit the arts in the Norfolk area.”

She clicks on the gallery pages so Taylor can see sample photos of Red Hat Society mermaids, military-themed mermaids, seasonal mermaids, and even Disney princess mermaids.

“This is it,” Taylor say, excitement building in her voice. “This is the answer to the clue.”

“Wait. Really?”

“When we were little, like five or six, we would spend hours pretending to be mythical creatures,” Taylor says. “Most of the time I would be a fairy, but Finley always wanted to be a mermaid.”

Willa is stabbed with jealousy that Taylor’s history with Finley goes back farther than her own. She feels left out of this clue—the way she’d felt left out with Captain Norm—even though Finley never promised that every clue was meant for both of them. Her smile is forced as she says, “Then we should make Finley a mermaid.”

The next day, they ride their bikes to the Mermaid Factory, where they join a group decorating session. Along with Willa and Taylor, there are three elderly women in town for their upcoming sixtieth class reunion. They joke and laugh a lot, and Willa can’t help wondering if she and Taylor and Finley would have been like that when they were old. Would they have forgiven old hurts? Would they have remained friends?

“I’m going to paint a mermaid that looks like Queen Elsa,” says a little voice beside Willa, snapping her out of her thoughts.

“No, I am,” a second voice says. “Mommy, tell her I get to paint Queen Elsa.”

The two little girls are sisters on vacation from Michigan with their parents, and their mother looks frazzled before the actual decorating has even begun. “You both can paint Elsa.”

The last of their group is a young newlywed couple from Florida, who are taking a honeymoon road trip up the East Coast. He doesn’t seem super thrilled about decorating a mermaid, but he watches his wife choose paint and glitter with a raw, unguarded expression Willa has never seen. The kind of love her mother deserves.

Most of the members of the group choose to decorate small ceramic figures mounted on stands, but Willa and Taylor opt for a larger wooden mermaid they can hang on the wall of the boat.