Aletha
"It begins with a shipyard..." And she would have followed him taken her ship the one she had yet to buy across the ocean with billowing blue sails and they met halfway or would have but she sat at home waiting for the urge to pass because she'd no idea because she'd never learned how to sail and it was raining. She watched the men go out fishing come back with a glistening, slippery catch some of them. One brought her a necklace of pearls found in the fish's gullet he said if she would believe him. She wouldn't accept his gift with its strings so she traded for it a mirror she'd been given by a mermaid when she was six. He didn't believe her either but it was true. And she waited until the urge passed to sail not because it was a brief longing it lasted just because she knew now if she left, she'd never find him while her sisters married settled down and raised salt-scented children the boys playing with fish bones and seaweed in the dark. Her eldest nephew came barefoot running he saw a ship on the horizon running as though he recognized it her eyes recognized it from years before he was born So she brushed her hair with the mermaid's comb and went to court because there was a tower there and she could watch heart pounding as we always do as her true love returned