“Jesus, Luce.” Dorian had never sounded so snide before. “I do.”

For a few moments they just stared at each other, deep blue light cradling them on all sides. Luce felt the first tear gliding across her cheek. Was he actually breaking up with her?

Dorian sighed, loudly, and started clambering off the boulder, his toes scrambling for the few jags on its side. He thudded down onto the pebbles as Luce watched miserably, wondering if he’d simply turn and leave. Instead he sat down cross-legged near the water’s edge. “I really love you, Luce.” He sounded more resigned than tender, though.

“Then why are you doing this to me?” Her voice broke, and she fought to hold back tears. She couldn’t escape the feeling that he was just looking for excuses to resent her, and that proved he’d never truly forgiven her at all.

“Doing what to you? You’re the one who ran off and abandoned me in the middle of nowhere. You’re the one who almost went and got killed in like three different ways yesterday, and you expect me to be okay with that? I’m not. And now you’re so excited about this new mermaid that you don’t care how I feel at all, and you haven’t asked me one question about anything in my life.”

That was so unfair, Luce thought, when he’d kept insisting that she had to finish the story. But still . . .

“What happened with you, then? Besides having to row back, I mean.”

“That guy Ben Ellison came to see me,” Dorian announced, and Luce gazed at him in confusion. “The FBI guy, remember? From Anchorage. He had breakfast today at our house. I saw him for a while after school, too. And Lindy started talking about how I’m always going off on these long walks alone, staying out late, and how she worries about me.”

Luce couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You talked to the FBI?”

“What do you think I did? I didn’t tell him anything about you. We just talked about other stuff. Like, he knows a lot about art, way more than anybody else around here, anyway. He’s actually really nice, Luce.” He grinned at her in an awful, pinched way. “I can’t wait for you to meet him.”

“Dorian!” Somehow everything he was saying today felt unbelievably cruel to her, even if it was mostly reasonable enough on the surface.

“And I’m thinking of starting a band. There’s this guy in my school who plays keyboards, and he’s kind of not terrible. He says he knows some other people around here, too.”

“What are you going to do, then?” Luce was overcome by bitterness, and she couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “Sing?”