I stared at him, wondering what it was that Bear had really said, because there was no way that he had actually expressed interest in doing what was best for me. “What about Amir?” I asked. “Did you see him?”
Doctor Clark nodded and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a smooth gray stone of the sort that Amir and I spent hours stacking on the beach. “Amir asked me to give you this. He thought you might want a piece of home while you stay here. He said it might help you to believe that he doesn’t think you should travel until your infection is fully under control. I don’t know why a stone would convince you to take your health seriously, but there you have it.”
I turned the stone in my hand. It was warm from the doctor’s pocket, but I imagined the warmth that I felt was from Amir’s hand.
“Why don’t you at least stay until my husband returns from his fishing trip later today?” Rosalie asked. “We’ll have a car then and if you still want to leave, I’ll drive you myself.”
I nodded. Once Doctor Clark left, Rosalie took the seat across from me. Emma returned from wherever she had wandered off to and dropped herself with a sigh in the chair beside mine.
“Are you staying?” she asked.
“Just for the day.”
“Do we have time for a game of Monopoly?”
Rosalie gave a wry laugh. “Watch out,” she warned. “Emma is a Monopoly shark.”
I told Emma that she would have to teach me.
She nodded eagerly and sprang from her seat. “I’ll go set it up by the fire.” She hurried into the house.
The day seemed to be growing colder rather than warmer. I wondered whether Rosalie had any hot chocolate. I still held inmy hand the stone from Amir. There were two lines that criss-crossed the gray surface. I traced them with my finger.
“Is that a stone from your property?” Rosalie asked.
I nodded. “It’s from our beach. Well, it’s not reallyourbeach. We don’t own it. But we’re the only ones who are ever there because the only access is from our land. I guess you could arrive by sea, but so far no one has.”
“No other merrows?”
I smiled and shook my head.
“It seems magical,” Rosalie said, “this Horseshoe Cliff.”
Horseshoe Cliff felt as much a part of me as my own mind, so for elegant Rosalie Langford to say that it was magical... it felt as though she were saying thatIwas magical.
“I guess itismagical,” I said. “So much is hidden in plain sight.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, take the beach. It’s beautiful when the tide is high, but if you wait for the tide to retreat, you discover an entire garden—an entire secret world—exists below. The sea looks blue or green or gray, but hidden within it are sea anemone in every color of the sunset, and dark red grapestone seaweed, and pink Haliclona sea sponge, sunflower sea stars, black snails...” I trailed off, lost in the memories of Amir and me barefoot, crouched beside a tide pool, silently exploring small, hidden worlds.
“Can I ask you something?”
I blinked at Rosalie, working to orient myself back at the table on the patio and not on the beach at Horseshoe Cliff. The look on her face made me nervous. I was sure that shewas going to ask me again about Bear. I knew that she did not believe my explanation of the screams that had sent her running to my room in the middle of the night.
“Why did you and Amir really come here?” she asked.
“Oh.” My relief was quickly displaced by embarrassment. “We weren’t going to steal anything.”
“No?”
My ears burned. “No!” My anger was unjustified, but I could not subdue it. “We were only curious.”
“You were... ‘curious’?”
“I’d never seen a house as big as this one, with that huge gate. I just wanted to see what it looked like. I wasn’t going to take anything.”
“So... you were going to look in the windows?”
