She yelped and looked down. She half expected to see something clinging to her leg, like seaweed or maybe even a leech, but there was nothing. Just her skin, looking as ordinary as ever.

In fact, it was a little too normal. The bruises on her skin had faded and the cuts were almost healed. Gemma craned her neck, trying to see her back, but she couldn’t.

Her hair was rinsed, and she’d already gone over her skin with a bath sponge, so she decided to end the shower. She had planned to scrub harder, but something weird was going on, and she’d prefer to deal with it when she had clothes on.

When she hung the sponge on the faucet so it could dry, the same way she always did after a shower, she noticed something sticking to it. She picked it out of the sponge and held it up in the light, inspecting it.

It was some kind of large iridescent green scale, too big to belong to the usual small fish she saw in the bay. It had to come from something huge, at least the size of Gemma herself. But it was a color unlike any she’d ever seen on a fish. Admittedly, tropical fish came in all sorts of dazzling colors, but the bay was too far north to get the really pretty fish.

“Gemma?” Alex asked, interrupting her examination of the mysterious scale, and he started knocking on the bathroom door.

“Alex?” Gemma asked in surprise, and she grabbed a towel to wrap around herself, even though Alex was hidden safely on the other side of the door. “What are you doing here?”

“I just…” He trailed off, his voice completely lost through the door.

“What?” Gemma asked.

“I needed to see you.”

“What? Why? Did something happen?”

“No, I…” Alex sighed loudly. “Harper told me you were missing, and I wanted to make sure you were okay. I was giving you time to rest, but I just heard you singing, so I knew you were awake.”

Gemma gave an embarrassed look to the open bathroom window. The shades were drawn, but the sash was up; Alex could’ve easily heard her.

Once she got past her initial shame, she furrowed her brow and turned back to the closed door. “So you just came into my house?” That didn’t sound like something Alex would do at all. He was always polite, almost to a fault.

“No, I knocked first, but you didn’t answer, and then you stopped singing,” Alex explained. “I heard you yelp, and I thought something might be the matter.”

“Oh.” She smiled, realizing he was concerned for her well-being. “I just got out of the shower. Let me get dressed, and then I’ll come out and talk to you.”

Thankfully, Gemma had brought her clothes into the bathroom, and she dressed hurriedly. Alex’s surprise visit nearly made her forget about the bruise on her back, but she remembered after she’d gotten dressed.