“Found this in Mom’s old things,” Marcus said, voice rough. “She wrote a letter. Said you used to sing me a song about a sea-monster named Cassie. Said I loved it so much, I’d make you tell it every night before bed.”

Harlan stood. He didn’t speak of magic or skulls or the deep. He simply opened his arms, and his son stepped into them.

I wish my son would remember that I loved him more than I loved being right.

Tonight, Harlan rowed his skiff past the buoys, past the safe channels, into the throat of the lagoon where the water turned black and still. He tied a single lantern to the bow. Then, with a prayer his own father had taught him— Mother Sea, do not hold me —he slipped over the side.

The tide was low, a rare gift of moonlight on the mudflats of Mangrove Haven. For seventy-three years, Old Man Harlan had read that water like a script. He knew where the snapper hid, where the barracuda patrolled, and—most secret of all—where the Cassie lay dreaming.

The Cassie rose like a frozen forest. Each trunk was a pillar of petrified wood, wound with silver coral and anemones that breathed like sleeping lungs. Schools of luminous jellyfish drifted through the branches, casting a soft, pulsing light. It was not a wreck. It was a temple.