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"Where was Lucy?"

"She ... she wasn't there."

Lena made herself pause and take a breath. She could see that her dad was getting agitated, and even though dozens of questions jumbled around in her mind, fighting to be first out of her mouth, she forced herself to wait.

After a long moment, her dad seemed to compose himself, and Lena ventured, "So you were alone when you woke up. And you said you don't want to talk about that part. But eventually Lucy joined you, right? Otherwise I wouldn't be sitting here now." She smiled. "I guess you were irresistible."

To her relief, her dad smiled, too.

"So what happened?" said Lena.

"I went back to Magic's," he said. "As soon as I could. But I didn't see her for a long time. Well ... it was really only about a week. It seemed like a long time to me. I started being afraid that I would never see her again." His gaze drifted away. After a moment, he said so quietly that Lena almost missed it, "That felt like dying." He closed his eyes, turning away from the memory. "She finally made it back, though."

"Thank goodness," breathed Lena.

He nodded. "Thank goodness. That was when she told me about the other uses of her sealskin cloak."

"Sealskin?" Lena was horrified. "They kill seals to make their cloaks?"

"No, no! Seals are their companions. Otters and dolphins, too. Mer-folk would never harm them. The pelts are collected after a seal dies."

"Oh."

"In order for them to come on land, mer-folk need to wear a sealskin cloak for protection." Her dad reached for a paper napkin and a pen. Lena knew he felt better when he could explain things by writing them down. "It has a kind of hood, which the mermaid—or merman—can pull over her head." He sketched a crude drawing of a cloak. "If a human sees them swimming, they think they're just seeing a seal." He added a seal's face under the hood of the cloak. "Once a mermaid comes ashore, she can take off her cloak, but she has to be very careful not to lose it, or she can't return to the sea." He drew waves, and a fairly good rendition of Shipwreck Rocks.

Lena stared down at his drawing. "You said she found the cloak. So ... that means you must have hidden it from her."

Her dad nodded. "She wanted me to. She wanted to live on land, as a human. With me." He smiled, shrugging a little, as if to say, Me ... can you believe it? "If I hid her cloak, she would have to stay, and the light of the full moon would split her tail into legs. She would still be able to go in the water, but she would have legs."

You must not have hidden it very well, thought Lena, but she managed to hold the words back. "What happened then?"

"Lucy told me to hide her cloak so that she could never find it. If she found it, we both knew that she would forget everything immediately, and return to the sea."

"Why didn't you just get rid of it?"

"We were afraid to. Sealskin cloaks are talismanic. They protect the wearer from harm when they travel between sea and land. What if your mother got sick living on land, among humans? What if she needed to return to the sea? We couldn't risk getting rid of the cloak."

Lena sighed. "And she found it."

"Yes."

"How?" Lena fought to keep her voice level.

"I'm not sure. I came home, and you were asleep in your bed, and she was gone. I looked for the cloak, and it wasn't there." Her dad stopped talking, and the silence that replaced his voice was terrible.

CHAPTER 29

Lena's dad seemed to shut down after that.

The shock of finding Lena with the mirror, the image of his lost wife floating up from its depths, the revelation of so many old secrets ... all seemed to drain his spirit. Lena felt like she was looking at a hollowed-out version of her father.

"Please don't stop, Dad," she begged. "I need to know everything."

"I know you do, honey," he said. But he stayed quiet.

The longer he stayed quiet, the edgier Lena became. Finally she burst out, "How could you lie to me all these years?"

He put his hand over his eyes. "I never lied to you, Lena."

"What?!"

"I