Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Roane are back, and I’m not one of them.

Oh, I have the right color eyes, and my hair got weird around puberty, dark blonde streaking silver like a Selkie’s. My fingers and toes have been webbed since birth. But I’m half-human, technically, so my magic is weak. Roane see the future? I get distracted by fuzzy daydreams. Roane turn into seals? I get all the clumsiness on land, and none of the power of the sea.

I hoped, once, that my hair changing color meant my luck was changing. But no great feats of magic followed the gray, and last year I started dying those streaks red or purple instead. Dad promised I’d have the sea one day, but I kept getting older, and I kept not becoming a seal, and I figured he screwed up the future.

Until Mom sat me down two months ago and told me an awful story and finished with the revelation that Toby—after she’s done making all the Selkies Roane—can turn me pureblood. I’m probably going to take her up on the offer, but it won’t be today. She just cast a spell that changed Faerie, and the last time I saw her, she looked exhausted.

So for now, my Selkiekin cousins are swimming in the sea, fae for the first time, and I’m as changeling as ever.

I shouldn’t resent them. Having more Roane is better for Faerie, and it’s better for everyone who thought they’d never belong to the sea. But I can’t help it. Too many of my cousins didn’t want to play with me when we were kids because I wasn’t one of them. They bullied me as teenagers because it wasn’t fair that I got to have magic and my mom in charge of the clan. I was a violation of the rules, and a kid born to the world they craved, and I didn’t belong.

Elsa and Nathan and Isidro are taking turns leaping off the dock and turning into seals, and something burns between my ribs. I’m supposed to be the Roane—really, properly Roane. I come by my magic naturally, while the rest of them had to drape the skin of one of my long-dead relatives around their shoulders.

I understand now why Annie recoiled when I argued that changelings should be able to inherit Selkie skins. It was probably stupid of me for not realizing sooner that there was something wrong with the Selkies. I cried in my room when Mom finally told me the truth, and I hated my cousins who orbited jealously around the skins, waiting for one to drop.

But I couldn’t be angry with Mom—not for being a Selkie. I don’t think I could hate what she was more than she already did. And Dad knew about the Selkies when he married her, so I can’t be betraying my species by forgiving her. I might be a hypocrite, for being angry with my cousins in the same breath, but they hate me for what I am. Mom, at least, always tried to make me feel proud of being Roane.

Being Roane probably is something to be proud of. But it’s not really me. I didn’t grow up in the rookery; I’ve never met my Roane parent. I’ve never even met another Roane—someone who was born Roane, I mean.

I thought I had. I thought someone else understood what it was like to be a changeling failing to live up to your heritage. But Annie was never Roane, never part human. She lied my whole life.

She brought me birthday presents and told me stories about fae nobility drama and took me into San Francisco to run around piers and museums. She listened like every word I said mattered, and I never wanted her to go home.

Mom’s heart broke when my sister died, and I grew up trying and failing to fill the hole she left. But Annie didn’t treat me like second place. Sometimes I wished she’d take me far away from Half Moon Bay, and I could start over without the shadow of Mom’s misery.

But Annie is the sea witch, and every Selkie lives inside her grief. Her children all died, and I’m the latest of her descendants, so I guess I’m sort of her replacement kid, too.

I hate that she lied. I hate even more that she stopped, and I can’t ever go back to flinging myself into her arms like it’s nothing. I don’t have anyone left to talk to when the world is burning around the edges, so I do what comes naturally—I run.

I must cross most of the Duchy before I slow down on an unfamiliar sandy pier floating on the water. It’s empty; the only movement is the waves splashing against the planks.

I love the sea—its salty taste, the tiny crabs that scuttle on its shore, the spouts from whales’ blowholes in the distance. I love how sunsets paint the water and storms churn the waves. I love staring into tidepools and watching real seals roll onto the sand. I’ve known how to swim as long as I can remember, and I’ll splash around in the ocean for hours, long past when anyone else has gotten chilly and gone inside.

But the sea, like my father, holds me at a distance. The sea doesn’t love me back.

I stretch out on my stomach, resting my cheek against the wood and closing my eyes. The hooting and hollering is too distant to hear. It’s only me and the lapping water.

I trail my hand off the edge of the pier, tickling the surface of Faerie’s sea. This is the first time I’ve been to the Summerlands. This is the place my father’s from, the place my parents’ met. I should be making the most of my time here, not sulking, but screw it. I don’t want to see Elsa’s smug smile or the pity in Isidro’s eyes.

And why should I care about getting to know my father’s home? It’s not like he ever bothered to get to know me. Even the handful of letters he magically sent when I was a kid never had instructions about how to send anything back. I was so happy to get them at the time, but the platitudes and vague statements about the future slowly lost their shine. He wishes he could meet me, but he can’t. He’s excited for our paths to cross, but they probably won’t until I’m all grown.

Convenient.

The sea is cool under my fingers. The sky is an impossible violet, and I wish, with a wanting that squeezes my ribcage, that I belonged here. That I could swim under the Summerlands moons, and no one would question me.

I might not belong, but there isn’t anyone here. I lift my head, jerking it around to confirm that the coast is clear, before rolling off the sandy pier and into the water.

My splash feels louder than it is. I surface with a toss of my hair and backstroke away from the docks. Another burst of energy, and I’m throwing myself backwards, flipping feet over head, hair streaming out in the water. My sundress will take ages to dry, but at least I can say I swam in the Summerlands’ sea.

I suck in a deep breath and dive, popping my ears and squinting into the too clear waters, ignoring the burn. If only I could breathe here, I would dive all the way under these ships, race past the homes under the surface. Swim and swim until I was exhausted.

I kick a little deeper, my lungs starting to ache, and something races inside me, like a trickle of cold water shooting through my blood. The water sharpens, flashes of fish and flickers of sunlight on seaweed abruptly easy to pick out.

I kick again, and it isn’t two legs wriggling, it’s one heavy motion that sends me rocketing forward, tangling myself in the seaweed. The seas are warmer than they’ve ever been, the seas are cradling me, because for the first time—for no reason I can understand, other than maybe my heart was too close to breaking—they’ve accepted me. For the first time, I’m a seal in the waters.

For the first time, I’m truly Roane.

For maybe an hour—although who’s keeping track of time underwater—I can’t stop flipping around rocks, kicking circles around Cephali and Cetacae, barking up at the Summerlands’ moons. Eventually, my body burns, and I focus on finding my way back to the Selkie quarter before my magic is entirely exhausted, and I’m a human drifting far away from the rest of my clan.

I make it to one of the nearby docks and bob in the water, ignored by the other seals. It occurs to me belatedly that since I don’t know how I turned into a seal, I don’t know how to turn back. But panic cracks through me for only a heartbeat before the world fuzzes again, and my limbs are long and stringy, and I’m spitting out the water I can’t breathe in.

I’m naked, of course. That always happens to new Selkies—there’s a lot of that happening on the docks now, with the new Roane. Nudity isn’t as big a deal with the Selkie clans as it is with humans—seals are naturally naked, after all. But I don’t really want my cousins asking invasive questions about why I’m skinny dipping with the rest of them, so I scrabble for my magic, twisting an illusory bathing suit over my skin.

My head aches, but I don’t need it to last long. I haul myself out of the water, sprint to the main house for visiting Ryans, and race upstairs to the room I miraculously managed to avoid sharing. (It was less of a miracle, and more the room being a walk-in closet with a spare mattress dropped on the floor, but I’ll take it.)

It takes twice as long as usual to put on actual clothes—I keep fumbling and dropping them, too giddy to focus on what my hands are doing. I did it, I did it, and without Toby changing my blood. The “turning into a seal” part of my magic was buried inside me all along, and I found it myself.

I’m bursting to tell someone, but it’s not like I have friends in the clan. When Gillian showed up, I hoped that would change, since she didn’t grow up with a Selkiekin’s biases. But most days, either she’s busy learning magic from Mom, or she’s not in the mood to hang out.

And she might not have the usual hang ups, but she has a lot of resentment towards Faerie. She’s not someone who would celebrate me being more magical, and it would feel weird if she was the first person I told.

Really, I have to find Mom. She’s the one person I know will be happy for me, even if she has to force herself to remember what happy feels like.

The main living room is empty when I come downstairs. In the kitchen, Craig’s making a sandwich. He’s one of the many Selkies whose eyes are green now—and splitting the skins meant his human partner and son could become part of Faerie, too.

He’s alright. Selkies are nicer to me than Selkiekin, even if they look at me with pity. Or maybe the expression was always guilt, and I didn’t know enough about my own family’s history to realize.

“Have you seen Mom?” I ask.

“Not recently.” Craig layers salami onto his bread, squinting. “But I only just came in.”

“Got it.”

Daisy and Ellie are on the back porch, laughing. Daisy’s been a Selkie for a while, perpetually in her mid-twenties, while Ellie’s hair is deep gray. They look like mother and daughter rather than sisters, but Ellie’s Roane too, now. I don’t know if immortality can make her young again, but it’ll stop the march of time. Daisy won’t have to lose her sister to inevitability.

Shame curdles in my stomach. My cousins’ new magic is keeping families together. I shouldn’t have let myself resent them, no matter how mean any of them have been. What sort of person does that make me? What sort of Roane?

“Have you seen Mom?” I ask, but they both shake their heads.

“Have you tried her room?” Daisy asks.

“Not yet.” I should have tried there first, but I wanted to hope that Mom wasn’t drowning in blanother bottle of liquor.

Unfortunately, some things never change.

I step back inside, as the front door slams open like a shot. I sprint into the living room, and the sea witch is in the doorway, surging into our house like a wave you can’t escape.

“Diva.” She has coal dark eyes and sickly pale skin and doesn’t look at all like Annie. “Where is your mother?”

“I don’t know.” I cling to the back of the armchair, and I can’t tell her to leave, this terrifying woman who I trusted, who never told me the truth. “If she’s in her room, I can let her know you’re here.”

If you don’t take your hands off me right now, I will have to remove them from your body as a warning to everyone watching us.

Her eyes fix behind me, on the upstairs hall. “Her room’s up there?”

“Yes, but—” I shouldn’t say anything, I shouldn’t, but a lifetime of playing personal assistant to my mom, declaring who can come see her and who has to wait, isn’t repressed easily. “Even if she’s in, she might not be up for visitors.”

“She doesn’t have a choice right now,” the sea witch says, exhausted rather than angry. She storms upstairs, and some scrap of courage makes me chase after her. Mom knew Annie was the sea witch this whole time, and that should mean she knows how to deal with her, but my skin crawls at the thought of Mom, drunk and disoriented, alone with someone so ancient and dripping in power.

The sea witch—Annie—bursts into Mom’s room without knocking, and I scramble up behind her. “I said I’d let you know she was here, but she just barged in, and I couldn’t stop her, and—”

Mom is sobbing like the world has ended.

She doesn’t cry like that. She scrubs her tears whenever I walk in and makes a poor attempt at a smile. She talks too loud and stumbles down the hall, each step a thud, but she doesn’t cry like nothing will ever be okay again. Not where anyone can see.

“Mom?” Everything narrows to a point, and I crash past the sea witch, I don’t care, and kneel in front of her. Something awful must have happened, someone must have died, and I can’t breathe. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

Who could make her cry like this?

There’s other people in the room, fog-like and distant. I’m not really seeing them until someone says, “She’s your mother?” like it’s a scandal.

“Yes?” I say, whirling around. Toby’s here, pale as sea foam, but it was a girl my age with brown hair and Roane green eyes who spoke. She must be from one of the other clans. “You have to tell me what’s going on, you have to explain.”

No one looks at me. No one moves. I grab Mom’s hand, and I’m trying not to scream when the girl turns to the sea witch. “Annie, tell her. Tell her who I am. Tell me.”

“Diva.” Annie says, in a whisper that slithers across the room. “This is Elspeth Ryan. Your half-sister.”

My heart is beating too hard. I want to shake my head, tell her no, I can’t have a sister.

But of course I can.

The empty bakery. The man who ran far away because he didn’t want to face me. Because he didn’t want to face Mom. The sea witch is a liar, but I’ve never met my dad beyond a handful of letters. I don’t have reason to trust him either.

I don’t want to cry, not here, but tears always come too easily for me, and the room blurs.

“That isn’t what I named her,” Mom says, raw and hoarse, and the world freezes. I can’t have a secret half-sister through Mom, I’d know about it.

“I know.” Annie sounds just as miserable. “You named her after me.”

My stomach drops. She can’t mean…

“You named her after me.” Mom stares at Annie with a desperation I don’t understand, and all those rumors I’ve ignored crash down on my head—stories about Mom and Annie and a terrible affair that I never asked either of them about because I didn’t want it to be true. “She’s my daughter.”

“Yes.”

Mom’s voice breaks. “She’s Lilianne.”

“But Lilianne’s dead,” I blurt out, because my sister is dead has been part of my story since I was eight years old, and Mom was crying on Samhain night. She’s the reason Mom is never okay, is never going to be okay.

“I thought she was.” Mom pulls me close, squeezing me too tight. “I held the body the night haunts left and buried her in the sea, and it was all a trick. Annie never stopped lying to me.”

“I lied,” Annie says, and she doesn’t sound sorry at all. “There are powerful people out there who would destroy your sister if they could, and I needed to keep her safe.”

She’s Lilianne. This girl I’ve never met, who looks like a Roane, is Mom’s dead daughter and my dead sister, and she’s not dead at all. And Annie knew that all along.

“You took her?” I stare. “And pretended she was dead?”

“It was necessary.”

“It was necessary for them to mourn me?” the girl—Elspeth, my sister—snaps.

“You know what’s at stake.” A wild, marshy smell chokes the room, and Annie hasn’t gotten any taller, but it feels like she’s looming over Elspeth. “You know why your parentage always has to be a secret.”

Your parentage.

You named her after me.

“So it’s true.” I choke out. “About you and Mom.”

Mom breathes in, sharp. “How do you know about that?”

“Family? People gossip.” I don’t know if Nathan thought that telling me Lilianne came from Mom cheating on her girlfriend would make me feel better or worse. Not that I really believed him. Annie never implied she dated Mom, and she wasn’t weird about talking to me. She wasn’t even weird when I mentioned Lilianne. I told myself Nathan was pranking me, to see how gullible I was.

(Except late at night, I wondered if Lilianne was Mom and Dad’s first try at a kid, if Mom lied to me about how they met. It’s not like Mom ever talked about Lilianne’s father, even when I asked.)

But then Annie declared herself as the sea witch, and I knew it couldn’t be true. Mom couldn’t have dated one of the Firstborn. She definitely couldn’t have cheated on one.

“They shouldn’t have gossiped about this in front of you,” Mom says.

“I’m not a little kid.” I wriggle away from her too-tight grip. “I don’t need to be sheltered—especially not from something like this! You should have told me about Annie.”

“I couldn’t tell you who she really was.” Mom hides her face in her hands. “She bound me, she binds all the clan leaders. And if I told you we were together when I got pregnant, you’d think the same thing the rest of the clan does. That I cheated on my girlfriend.”

It’s terrifying to think of Annie as Mom’s girlfriend. It’s even worse—a devastating kind of horror that tugs at my insides—to see the sea witch as Mom’s girlfriend. The woman with the power to drown us all.

“If you didn’t cheat on her,” I say, and the impossible truth is pounding in my chest, but I don’t know if I can say it. “Then Lilianne is—”

“—my daughter. Yes,” Annie says, so quiet I barely hear.

“How?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t my magic, and it wasn’t my choice, and after all these years, I can only guess that it was one of those curveballs Faerie likes to throw. Your mother should never have gotten pregnant when we were together, but she did.”

Mom and Annie had a daughter—have a daughter—and she’s my dead sister, and she’s alive. The girl who is and isn’t Lilianne is staring at Annie like nothing makes sense anymore, and I feel exactly the same.

“And you knew Lilianne was hers,” I say to Mom.

“Annie admitted it after your grandfather died,” she says, so tired. “I couldn’t tell anyone else, I couldn’t clear my name, but I knew.”

So Annie let everyone go around calling Mom a cheater this whole time. It stings that Mom kept secrets from me, but that betrayal—on top of my sister being secretly alive—sears through me. Annie didn’t care about any of us.

“We can clear your name now. We can tell everyone the truth,” I say, but the words are barely out of my mouth, when Annie snaps her fingers, and I’m caught in a whirlwind of rushing air. We all are.

“By the root and the branch, I bind you,” Annie says, deep and low. I can’t move, I can’t do anything but yelp as something tight that I can’t see settles on my shoulders. “By the leaf and the vine, I bind you. Never will you speak of Elspeth’s blood parentage, except if you are solely in the presence of those who already know that she is my daughter and the daughter of Elizabeth Ryan. By rowan and oak and ash and thorn, I bind you.”

The wind vanishes, and my hands go to my throat. She’s the sea witch, but part of me still looked at Annie and saw a friend—until she flung magic at us like it was nothing. Until she stole our voices.

I can’t believe I ever wanted her to take me away.

“I told Tybalt I’d explain everything later,” Toby says. I’m still not sure why she’s here, but Annie’s glaring at her, which probably means she’s done something right. “He’ll know something’s wrong if I can’t tell him.”

Annie snaps her fingers again and recites a nearly identical binding, adding in an exception for Tybalt. Her eyes don’t move from Toby. “Happy?”

“No,” Toby says.

“Neither am I.”

“You’ve never bound me before.” Elspeth squeezes her hands into fists. “Nine years I’ve known you’re my mother, and you never used magic to keep my silence.”

So she didn’t always know Annie was her mother? But if she didn’t know until now that Mom is her mother…things still aren’t making sense, and I slump against Mom’s shoulder. There’s no stable ground here, nothing safe for me to cling to, but at least Mom is a familiar instability.

“Maybe I should have,” Annie says. “Maybe I should have warded the ship you were supposed to be on up and down, so you couldn’t dream of swimming back for the Convocation.”

“You sound like Amandine,” Toby cuts in. “She likes to keep her kids contained, too. Did you take notes from her, about keeping your daughter in the dark about her own parents?”

Annie’s eyes burn black as night, and I want to yell at Toby to run. “You should have stayed out of this.”

“I don’t think so. Parents with missing children are exactly my business.”

“Everything I did was to protect my daughter,” Annie snarls, and how did I ever feel safe with her? How was she so good at hiding the horror under her smiles? “In case you’d forgotten, all my other daughters were slaughtered like animals, and my sister would do the same to Elspeth given half a chance.”

I flinch. I’ve had nightmares these past months about spears in the sea. Slaughtered like animals ringing in my ears isn’t going to help.

“I know,” Toby says. “Losing another child would destroy you. But did you think about what losing a child would do to Liz?”

Annie argues back, but I’m not really listening. Toby can’t know how bad it’s been, how much Mom has mourned, but her words still scrape against my heart. Mom never ever got over losing her baby, and nothing helped. She clung so tightly, always there when I was little—and then she drifted away, disappearing into her room and one drink after the next. She’s either terrified of losing me, or she barely remembers I exist.

“You didn’t have to pretend I died,” Elspeth says, and I’d agree if I could, but I can’t seem to speak.

Annie shakes her head. “No loose ends. No quests to find you. Nothing to draw attention.”

“No loose ends except me.” Mom wipes at her eyes, her voice so bitter. “But a woman insisting her baby is a magical miracle is either a liar or crazy.”

Annie blinks, and her eyes aren’t dark and stormy anymore, but she still doesn’t look right. Her face is almost familiar, but it’s not my cousin’s. “There wasn’t another way.”

“Because this way worked out so well for you.” Elspeth laughs, vaguely hysterical. “No one ever found out your secrets.”

“You weren’t supposed to be here.”

“You weren’t supposed to lie to me.”

Annie’s skin drains of color until she’s too pale to even pretend to be human. “Lying to your children to protect them is part of being a parent. Even Titania’s own magic couldn’t touch that.”

“Just because you can lie doesn’t mean you should!” Elspeth shouts. “You’re so afraid of anything bad happening to me that you become the bad things. You keep me stuck in this tiny part of the Summerlands. You give me nightmares about being flayed alive for months. You tell me all my siblings are dead, when you know I have a sister.”

Annie steps back. “All your siblings from me are dead. That’s the point.”

“And the other side of my family doesn’t matter?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you decided that. You decided that when you stole me from them and never told me they existed. And I’m done.”

“Elspeth….”

“I’m done with you lying to me. I’m done with you deciding what’s best for me.”

Annie reaches out her arms, but Elspeth dodges around her, backing towards the door.

“And I’m done having this same conversation, over and over again, and nothing changing.” Elspeth looks at me—it might be the first time she’s properly looked at me—and I don’t understand what her expression is supposed to mean. “I’m sorry, but I can’t—”

“I love you,” Annie says, so soft. “More than anything and anyone still breathing.”

She stares back, defiant. “And that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

“Elspeth—”

But my sister is already out the door and running. She’s Lilianne, and she’s gone again, and I don’t know where she’s going or how to find her again. I don’t even know how she got here. Did she come to the Duchy of Ships to see the Roane reborn?

I’m staring at the door, still stunned into silence, when Annie whirls on Toby.

“You won’t forgive me for this, I know,” Toby says. I don’t know how she manages to sound so calm. “But I don’t know if I can forgive you, so I guess that makes us even.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Mom says. She’s crying again, and I don’t know what to do. “You found my baby. I never even knew she was missing, and you found her.”

I look at Toby, her presence in the room suddenly making more sense. “You were the one who found her?”

“It was less finding, and more putting the pieces together,” she says.

“What pieces?” I ask.

“Her resemblance to the Roane, magically and otherwise, her refusal to let me touch her blood, some things the husband of one of the clan leaders said about Liz’s past, a good bit of guesswork.” Toby pauses. “To be fair, I didn’t guess right at first.”

“So you met her here?”

“She sort of elbowed her way into my murder investigation yesterday.”

“Your what?” I stare.

“I told you about Isla,” Mom says.

“Daisy told me about Isla. But she didn’t say Toby was investigating. Did my sister get involved because she can see the future?”

I might not have real visions, but changelings are all different, and Elspeth is the direct daughter of the sea witch. Maybe that makes her magic more powerful.

“No, not because—” Toby squints, like she’s turning something over in her mind. “Actually maybe a bit? But mainly because she found Isla’s body, and she’s heir to the Duchy of Ships.”

Mom’s hand squeezes my shoulder too tight, and the air punches out of my body.

“Oberon’s balls,” Mom mutters. “Toby, did you really have to…”

“What?” Toby blinks.

“She’s the heir to the Duchy of Ships,” I repeat.

“Diva…” Mom says.

I duck away from Mom, standing shakily. “So she lives on the Duchy of Ships. She’s lived on the Duchy of Ships this whole time?”

“Yes.” Mom isn’t looking at me. “The Captain raised her.”

“She’s the Captain’s daughter? The one everyone’s been talking about?” The stories have swept through the Duchy, and I’m not sure what’s true and what’s an exaggeration, but there was some sort of challenge by Amphitrite’s daughter, and a Merrow ended up dead.

That girl is my sister, too.

I thought the Captain cared about Selkies because she helped divide the skins and killed the man who killed Isla, even though he was one of her own descendants. But if she helped take my sister from Mom, there’s nothing kind about that.

And Mom was here, right in front of the Captain, over seventeen years ago. If my sister was here her whole life…

“So you were here, and Elspeth was here, and you didn’t even know. She was right there, and the Captain kept her a secret.”

And she’s not the only one.

“Pete didn’t know who your mother was, Diva,” the sea witch says wearily. “She only realized after Liz left, since she didn’t give her real name until the end.”

“So she recognized my name.” Mom takes a shaky breath. “Did she know?”

“She knew where Elspeth came from.”

“And that you took her from me?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry,” Toby cuts in. “I feel like I’m missing something. Liz has been here before?”

The room goes very, very quiet, and I think of the letters Dad sent. He said he cared, but that he couldn’t raise me. But it’s easy to lie when you’re the only one who can see the future.

“Mom met Dad here.” I blink hard, but it doesn’t stop the tears from falling. “They got married here, and Mom got pregnant with me here, and all that time, Dad must have known.”

“That’s…” Toby shakes her head. “Maeve’s tits, I didn’t know your dad was involved in all this, too.”

“I don’t know that he is,” Annie says, but she’s a liar. “I’ve never spoken to him, and Pete never told anyone about Elspeth’s parentage.”

“He still lives here,” I argue. “I thought he must have moved away, since he told Mom we’re not meant to meet until I’m older, but he still has the bakery. He just left for the week. He’s avoiding me.”

Annie makes a pained noise. “He must have his reasons, Diva. I don’t know all the futures my descendants see.”

“Just because he has reasons doesn’t mean they’re good ones.” I cross my arms. “He must know my sister.”

“As the Captain’s daughter, yes. They know each other.”

“And he Sees the future. Mom, you said he knew who you were the moment you met.”

“He knew I would be the mother of his child. But that doesn’t mean…..” Mom trails off, not even trying to finish the excuse.

“Do you think he knew? About Elspeth?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re hiding something.”

Mom squeezes her eyes shut. “He was the one who told me not to give my real name while I was on the Duchy of Ships. Why would he do that, unless he knew the Captain would recognize it?” She opens her eyes, and she looks like she might cry again. “I’m sorry. Diva, I’m so sorry.”

“Was any of what he said true?” I try to sound like I don’t care one way or the other about the answer, but I fail miserably. I jerk my arm across my eyes.

“I don’t know.” Mom reaches out both her hands, as if she wants to pull me close again. As if squeezing me tight will make everything okay. “Diva, I—”

I back away. I’m breathing too fast, and my eyes won’t stop blurring, and I almost trip as I stumble towards the door.

Annie’s a liar, and Mom is miserable, and Toby’s trying to be nice, but she doesn’t understand what my family is like. I have a sister I’ve never met, and Dad must have known. He must have wanted to keep Lilianne secret more than he wanted to meet me, just like Mom misses Lilianne more than she loves me, just like Annie cares about her secret daughter more than she ever cared about me.

The joy of the sea welcoming me is so far away. I should have known it was too good to last.

“I’m going to my room,” I say and run.