“In a storm. I was trying to go south, but the storm got too intense, so I grabbed on to an ice floe . . .” She told him the story quietly. But the miracle, Luce thought, was that he was listening, thinking about what she was saying to him. Not about the past at all. “How did you wind up here? Oh, I was so sure you were dead.”

“Oh, that. Storm, too. Eight days alone in a lifeboat after the High and Mighty cracked up. If it hadn’t rained so much, thirst would have done me in for certain. But then the lifeboat smashed to bits on the rocks right here, and they . . . those voice things were ready to pounce. Like, maybe they’d pulled me here somehow. Oh, baby doll.” His old pet name for her. Luce could hardly believe it, and she squeezed his hand.

“We need to get you out of here, Dad, okay? We can build a raft.” She needed to be honest with him, Luce thought. “It’s going to be dangerous. Trying to tow you back to shore. If there’s a storm or something I could keep you from drowning, at least for as long as I could swim myself. But you’d get hypothermia . . .”

He didn’t seem interested in this part, though. Luce looked up at him and saw that he was still thinking about something else. “You say you can’t leave the water? Luce . . .”

Luce had been so preoccupied with simply getting him to recognize her that she hadn’t thought about how awful the truth might be for him. She kept her voice as gentle as possible. “I can’t ever leave the water again.” What if she could, though? But that was probably too much to hope for, and he had to know. “Dad, I’m not human anymore. I can’t have the kind of life . . . a human girl would.”

“But then . . . if you’re living in the ocean . . .” He laughed, in a bleak, shocked way. “How am I supposed to bring you up?”

“You can’t.” Luce saw the grief rising in his face, but she plunged ahead anyway. “You need to think about . . . doing what you want to do. You can’t bring me up. I can’t live with you.” Unless . . . But no, almost certainly no. It would be much too cruel to give him false hopes now. She considered for a moment. “I can’t even grow up.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” There was a hint of growling in his voice now.

“I changed on my fourteenth birthday. We—mermaids don’t get any older, ever. I’m going to be fourteen forever, and I can’t grow up at all.”

“But”—he stared at her again. “Lucette? You’re not dead, are you?”