Chapter 3

He found the second one in a town further down the coast, a waitress named Lucia Marchetti who poured his wine without being asked and laughed easily at things that weren't especially funny.

"You don't look like a sailor," she said, wiping down the bar in front of him on a slow Tuesday night.

"What does a sailor look like?"

"Rougher. Louder. You're very," she searched for the word, "careful."

"I've been called worse."

"I didn't say it was bad." She refilled his glass without being asked. "Allora, what do you even do out there for months at a time?"

"Wait, mostly," Dario said. "You'd be surprised how much of the sea is just waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"I'll let you know when I find out."

He was more careful this time than he had been with Bianca, varying his hunting ground, telling himself that Bianca's failure, the swiftness with which her body had been found, the currents that had carried her further than he'd planned, had been a lesson rather than a warning. He courted Lucia for three weeks before she agreed to see the cove he'd told her about, a private, beautiful place hardly anyone knew existed.

Lucia did not believe him about the tail. Not at first, not even standing in front of it in the tiled room with the trapdoor already bolted above her.

"This is insane," she said, laughing in the particular high, frightened way of someone still hoping the whole thing might resolve into a joke if she just stayed calm enough. "This is actually insane, Dario. You know that, right? You know how this looks?"

"I know how it looks to someone who doesn't understand it yet." He set the tail down with the same careful reverence he'd shown the first one. "I thought you, of all people, might understand faster. You work the water every summer. You told me yourself you feel more like yourself on a boat than anywhere on land."

"That's not, " she stopped, recalibrated, tried a different door. "That's not the same thing, and you know it isn't."

"Isn't it, though."

She was smarter than Bianca had been about it, or perhaps only luckier in what she chose to try. For the first several days she gave him almost nothing to be disappointed by, agreed readily, put the tail on the second night without being asked twice, moved through the shallow pool with a compliance so total that Dario found himself, for one unguarded evening, almost happy.

"You're not fighting it," he said, kneeling at the pool's edge with the camera lowered, genuinely puzzled. "Bianca fought it. Why aren't you fighting it?"

"Because you're going to let me out faster if I don't," Lucia said, evenly, treading water with her bound legs as best she could. "That's how this works, isn't it? I give you what you want, you give me my life back."

Something in his face went very still. "That's not, " he started, and then didn't finish, because some part of him, distant and unwelcome, recognized the sentence for exactly the transaction it was, and did not like what it revealed about the shape of what he'd built.

It did not save her, in the end, the way she had gambled it might. If anything, her calm unsettled him faster than Bianca's terror ever had, because terror, at least, looked to him like something he could still shape into devotion given enough time, while Lucia's flat, careful compliance looked, the longer he watched it, like something closer to contempt wearing a costume of its own.

"You don't believe any of this," he said to her, on the eleventh night, standing outside the bars with his hands very still at his sides. "You've been performing for me this whole time. Haven't you."

"I don't know what you want me to say to that.

"The truth would be a start."

"The truth," Lucia said, and something in her, worn down finally past the point of strategy, cracked open into something more honest than she'd let herself be since the trapdoor first closed. "The truth is I think you are a very sad, very sick man who has convinced himself that hurting people is the same thing as loving them. And I think somewhere underneath all of it, you already know that. I think that's why nothing I do is ever going to be enough for you. It was never about me being right. It was always going to end here."

He did not answer her that night. He came back the next morning and did not speak at all, only set down the tray and left, and Lucia understood, watching the trapdoor close, that she had traded whatever slim chance her calm might have bought her for the brief, costly satisfaction of being honest with him one final time.

What happened over the days that followed is not something this story will describe in detail, for the same reason Bianca's final days were left in the dark rather than lit up for a stranger's inspection. It is enough to know that Lucia Marchetti's body was recovered nine days after she was last seen serving wine on a slow Tuesday night, that Dario wrote Marina on the tag before he let her go into the water, and that he told himself, calmly, the way he told himself most things, that she too had not been what he needed, and that he would simply have to keep looking, the way a man keeps looking for anything he has convinced himself the world owes him.

By the time he folded both tails into the locked cabinet upstairs, beside the others he hadn't yet used, Dario Serra had no living mermaid in the tiled room beneath his house, and had begun, again, to watch the seafront in the evenings, patient as the tide, waiting to be given a third name to write.