Chapter 3

Three in the morning. I got up to find painkillers and ran straight into the handler, still keeping watch by the pool, quietly tidying up.

He knew Marcia had bought this fish mostly to harvest the merpearl for my migraines.

When he saw the pills in my hand, he hesitated, then ventured carefully:

"Mr. Henson, why don't I go ahead and take the merpearl to cure you?"

I swallowed the pills and waved him off.

"Forget it. Taking the pearl has to hurt him plenty."

"Besides, I already said I'd let him go back to the sea. Bad to go back on my word."

There was another reason I didn't say out loud.

I was afraid this overgrown seafood would start blubbering again, crying that I was bullying him while Marcia was away.

Sea creatures already have bigger voices than people.

Let him wail all night, and I could kiss sleep goodbye.

I was still thinking that when I noticed the pool had gone wrong somehow, too quiet.

I looked over. The fish pool was empty.

"Where's that seafood?"

Something dropped in my chest as I caught the handler's shifty look.

Like a schoolboy who'd done something wrong, he pointed a finger toward the shadows in the corner.

"Mr. Henson, I'm not trying to go against you on purpose."

"But he didn't grow any new scales, and today he smashed into the glass again and tore his skin open."

"I had to fish him out and disinfect him first, or he'd have died. And then forget the merpearl, we wouldn't even have a whole fish left..."

Only then did I breathe out, and I told him again and again it was fine.

The handler Marcia had hired had over a decade of experience.

Running into a stinking fish like this one counted as the biggest Waterloo of his career.

But as long as the fish didn't die, it wasn't a big deal.

Still, I couldn't just dust off my hands and go back to bed, leaving the handler alone to clean up the mess.

But I never once imagined that in this life I'd be crouched on the floor in the dead of night, dabbing antiseptic on a fish.

By the time we finished the tenth bottle, I was tired enough to start swearing.

At the bottom of it all, everything these past few days was the fault of Marcia's foolish little mouth.

I yanked out my phone, ready to call her.

I wanted to tell her to get back here fast and break up with this big idiot fish to his face, or I'd raise hell.

Turned out her phone was off.

I was about to fire off a barrage of messages when the handler suddenly looked at me, his face grave:

"Mr. Henson, this fish seems to be... pregnant."