The moment softens between us, the quiet laughter fading away into something easier, less tense. And we sit like this, a little while, we sit here listening to the water as it laps on the shore. It’s Sable that breaks our wordless silence first.
“What happened to your father?” he asks carefully.
I sigh, not wanting to think much more about it, but I knew he would ask eventually, that my admission would spark even more questions in him. I have buried that truth deep inside of me, even deeper than where I contain my siren. It still hurts, even after all these years. I don’t think it will ever stop hurting.
“He was hanged.”
The words leave my mouth easier than expected. Perhaps time has worn the sharp edges from them, softening their escape. Perhaps I have slowly learned to live with the truth of it.
“I was seven,” I add after a moment. “When my mother left me and told me to wait for him. I waited, but he didn’t come. Fishermen took me to Aurelith, where the royal navy made a spectacle of it.”
Sable stills beside me, but I watch the water instead of him.
“You witnessed it?” he asks, his voice nothing more than a whisper.
“I did,” I answer and swallow down the knot that has formed in my throat. “But I went to the Sea of Renewal after. I begged the sea to take the memory from me, and it did.”
When I turn to look at him, his hands tighten in the sand beside him. His gaze is fixed somewhere out over the water, his jaw set as though he is holding something back.
“I’m sorry you had to carry that alone,” he finally says and exhales slowly through his nose.
“Sometimes I regret it,” I whisper, hugging my knees tighter. “Because it was the last time I saw him. And I let the sea take that memory.”
Sable rubs his thumb across the side of his jaw, a gesture I’ve begun to recognize as one he makes when something unsettles him.
“My father was hanged too,” he says eventually. “You don‘t want to remember it, trust me.”
His head turns towards me reluctantly, as if it costs him a lot to confess this to me. I give him a reassuring smile, one that tells him that what he said is safe with me. That he is safe with me.
He swallows, then watches the sea again.
“What about your mother? Where is she now?”
I sigh. My mother’s story is more complicated, and somehow it cuts deeper than my father’s.
“My swarm abandoned me,” I say, and realize how strange the explanation might sound to an outsider.
“I think she loved me,” I add. “But I was never meant to live in the water with the others. I couldn’t. Without a tail, I would have been vulnerable. And that impacts the safety of the whole swarm. She was forced to leave me in my father’s hands. She had no choice.”
Sable says nothing, but his attention rests fully on me now. A memory of my father and my mother flashes through my mind, him kissing her from a rock near the shore.
“They loved each other,” I say with a smile on my face. “They loved each other dearly. And they loved me.”
“A pirate and a siren...” he says with amusement heavy in his voice, “How scandalous.”
Silence stretches between us again, both of us staring at the water like it might hold the answers to questions neither of us is brave enough to ask out loud.
“You said you understand what it's like to…try not to become a monster.” I start carefully, knowing how fragile the trust we have built between us is.
Sable’s shoulders stiffen beside me.
“Is that…related to the curse?” I whisper, not wanting to upset him. I regret the question the moment it leaves my mouth.
“That’s not something you need to worry about,” he says, and gets up, brushing away the sand from his breaches.
“But you’re—”
“That conversation,” he interrupts me harshly, “is not for tonight.”