She said she used to work with him, the dolphin who had died.

With these words, the guard jerked back, realizing who she was. For some reason, he seemed most alarmed by her belly, kept staring at it.

He didn’t open the gate. He did not tell her what had happened, if Junior had suffered. He would not talk to her anymore.

* * *

In the deeper ocean, approaching the coral reef, the sounds changed. Crabs’ claws scrambling, the alien whirr and pop of fish.

Once in a while, when swimming, she’d hear the clicking or squealing of dolphins in the distance. She’d close her eyes and concentrate on the sound.

* * *

After Tibbet’s letter, there was a month she preferred not to remember. She wasn’t eating much, couldn’t stop sleeping. Awoken, she would blink, wondering why she wasn’t in the pool. Then it would all rush back. Her skin felt thin, the world removed, crystalline and unreal.

One morning, she spotted a short article in a magazine about Blum. Harvard had put him on a leave of absence, but the University of North Carolina had signed him as a guest lecturer.

The article called him controversial, but did not mention the scandal. Instead the piece stated he was performing valuable research with dolphins. She noted that preposition (research with, not research on). She imagined several Kats and Juniors in a small cement tank, circling and circling, waiting for their turn on the operating table.

Her fury saved her. Blum was given new dolphins to experiment on while she was left crying outside the gate, not allowed even to see where Junior had died. She drafted and redrafted a letter to Blum, twelve versions before she found the right argument. She hadn’t been so awake in weeks. Her first paragraph started with formal scientific vocabulary, the type she had not used much with Blum. She pointed out the large furrowed cerebellum, the likely attendant intelligence and consciousness. Her concluding paragraph used his drug words. She said he was experimenting on his guardians without pain relief. He was killing his spirit guides. The letter was eloquent in a way that surprised her.

She copied the final version in her best hand and mailed it. Afterward she ate a triple-decker sandwich and two apples. She found she was famished.

She wrote a second letter to him the next week, and a third the week after. She drafted each letter for days before mailing the final version, one a week. Each letter a reasoned careful argument designed for him in particular, using both science and emotion. The letters gave her a purpose, a channel for her grief. In them, she said what she believed in the most persuasive way she could.

* * *

She could see the coral now in the distance, a multicolored hill rising out of the sand. Fish and fronds swaying. The water dappled and shadowy. Life congregated here. She could snorkel and dive, peering through the coral, glimpsing the fish.