Chapter 16: The File

I don't remember the swim back.

I remember the dock light.

He was sitting under it with his legs over the edge and Biscuit asleep against his hip.

It was four in the morning.

He hadn't gone to bed.

I came up at the ladder and couldn't climb it.

My tail wouldn't go. I hung on the bottom rung and couldn't make my body decide to be legs.

Jasper came down the ladder into the water in his jeans.

He didn't ask anything.

He got an arm under me and held me against the rungs until my legs came back on their own.

Then he carried me up.

He wrapped me in the navy blanket on the houseboat floor.

Then he sat behind me against the bed and pulled me back against his chest.

Biscuit put his head in my lap.

"Tell me when you want to," Jasper said.

I told him at sunrise.

It took until the gulls came in, and I did not skip any of it.

He listened all the way to the end.

He didn't say anything about Vespera.

He just put two fingers on my cheek, light, and drew them down.

My mother's good night.

I'd shown him that sign once, on the barge, and he hadn't copied it.

I cried until I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was afternoon, and the houseboat smelled like vanilla.

The smell was coming across the water from Ida's kitchen.

Jasper was at the folding table with coffee, pretending to read the ledger.

"Ida's baking," I said.

"Ida's baking."

"Why?"

He turned a page he hadn't read.

"It's your birthday."

I sat up.

"I don't have a birthday. Sea folk don't count."

"You put one on a marriage license. I wrote it down myself."

The date on the license.

The night I got legs.

The night the Lady Margaret went down.

Five years ago today.

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