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Impatient, Lena said, "I don't care how hard it was. You should have told me! How did this happen? How could a ... a mermaid be my mother?"

Her dad folded his arms and leaned heavily on the table. "I need to start at the beginning. I don't know how else to tell you. I first saw her ... Melusina was ... is ... her real name ... when I was surfing at Magic's." He smiled to himself. "I thought I was losing my mind. At first I thought she was an otter, or a sea lion. It's pretty common for them to swim up next to you in the water."

I know, thought Lena.

"But I looked closer, and I could see her face. Her beautiful face." He fell quiet again.

Lena waited.

"I was surfing with my buddies, so I didn't want to say anything to them. They would have thought I was insane, anyway. But also ... I didn't want them to see her, if she was real."

Lena recognized the sentiment. It was the reason she had never even told her best friends about seeing a mermaid.

"I guess she saw me, too. She disappeared into the waves, then came up a little farther away. But she didn't swim away." He smiled again, and closed his eyes, the better to see into the past. "She looked right at me, and she didn't seem scared. We stared at each other for a long time, and we ... I think we were falling in love even then." He opened his eyes. "Then one of my buddies called out to me, and she ducked under the waves. I waited to see if she would come back, but she didn't."

"So when did you see her again?"

"Well, I became kind of obsessed. I was just sure I was going to see her again. I started going back to Magic's by myself."

Sounds familiar, thought Lena.

"And she came back?"

"She did. I really think it was love at first sight. For both of us. I wanted to see her again, but she wanted to see me, too. She was the one taking the risks—coming close to shore too many times, allowing a human to see her."

"Then what happened?"

"We started talking." He laughed. "Just your average boy-meets-mermaids tory."

Lena looked at the mirror in front of her, which reflected back a face composed of features from her father, the human surfer, and her mother, the rebel mermaid.

"We used to meet at Shipwreck Rocks and just talk. Well, first she had to learn English, but she learned so quickly! It was more like she could read my mind than I taught her the language. We asked each other questions, and we laughed. It was so wonderful. Every time I saw her, I fell deeper in love. And it was the same for her. After a few weeks, though, we realized that we didn't want to spend the rest of our lives apart." Her dad's words poured out, a dam of memories finally released. "I asked Lucy to marry me." He looked at the wedding ring on his left hand, a different one than he had worn all those years ago. "And she said yes."

"So she came on land?"

"Not at first. I wanted to ask her father for her hand in marriage." He shrugged. "Old school, I know. But it seemed like the right thing to do. So she took me beneath the surface with her."

"How did she do that?"

"She sheltered me under her cloak."

Lena stared in confusion. "But ... how did you breathe?"

Her dad gave her a wry smile. "Heck if I know. It was magic, Lena—I can't explain it. She put some kind of, I don't know, enchantment on the cloak."

"What was it like? How do they live?"

"I don't know. I never made it to the village. All I know about their world is what Lucy told me."

"But what happened? Did you get to ask her father for her hand?"

"No, I—" He shoved his hand through his hair. "I didn't get the chance."

Lena started to ask him another question, then saw the way his face had hardened. She waited.

After a moment, he began to talk. "That was the day I got a concussion. I always told people I got hit on my head by my board. But it was more complicated than that. It wasn't a surfing accident; it—" He scrubbed both hands through his hair, as if to scatter the memories. "I don't really want to talk about what happened. But I did