“I swear I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Monica backed away from the box on the shelf.  What was she to do, take the thing her grandmother had given her and throw it into the sea?  Maybe it wasn’t even anything special, maybe it was a shell or something that had gotten worn away creatively by the water.  She could ignore the presence she felt from inside of it.

“The heart of a mermaid is a very dangerous place to be,” her grandmother had once said to her—but that had been years ago, when she had been a young girl.  Surely a warning like that meant nothing now….

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