Return to Water
"Mrs. Calloway spoke my name wrong at the funeral, the syllables falling from her lips like stones dropped in still water."
She studied the ocean from the safe side of glass. She never asked why.
Marine biologist Linnea has spent six years cataloging deep-sea specimens - never touching salt water, never going near the tide. Her adoptive mother Margaret made sure of that.
But Margaret is dead. And in her coastal house, with its locked rooms and the smell of brine and rot, Linnea begins to change.
Something is surfacing. Something that knows her real name.
Margaret's secrets come apart in pieces - evidence of a woman who understood exactly what her daughter was, and spent thirty years making sure she never found out. The ocean is patient. It has been calling since birth. And the body Linnea was raised to ignore is answering.
What it will cost her to listen is everything she was taught to be. What it will cost her to refuse may be worse.
A dark fantasy novella about inheritance, transformation, and the lies mothers tell to keep us human.
For readers of Carmen Maria Machado, VanderMeer's Annihilation, and Han Kang's The Vegetarian - if the sea had teeth.
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