Page 90 of When We Believed in Mermaids

I open the door and jump out. I’m not sure if I really want the entire truth. The prospect fills me with a sense of hollow anxiety. I look up toward the vivid blue sky and suddenly sense a host of half-known things lurking in gray darkness at the edges of my mind. My arms break out in gooseflesh, even though a soft breeze soughs over us as we walk toward the house. I rub my arms, trying to calm myself. “What is this place?”

“Sapphire House. It was built by a famous New Zealand actress from the thirties, Veronica Parker. She was murdered here.”

“That’s not creepy or anything.”

My sister, whose name feels strange on my tongue, stops before we get to the door and points back the way we came. In the distance is the ocean, in between a vast spread of the city. “At night, it sparkles all the way to the coastline.”

“Great. So you have a mansion and a family and nothing bad to bother you.”

“I deserve every single ounce of that. But can we do this part first? Please?”

I take a breath. Nod once.

She turns to the front door and unlocks it, and I follow her inside to the cool interior, which is just like the shots I saw on TV, only more amazing because of the scale. The foyer is round, opening to several rooms and a staircase that leads upward, and everything, everything is Art Deco. “Wow.”

“I know. C’mon.”

I follow her into a long room that faces the sea, a green sea tossing all the way to the horizon. A wide lawn spreads between the house and what is probably a cliff, and I’m drawn outside through the glass doors to the grass. A very soft wind rustles over my skin, lifts my hair. I capture it and look up to the back of the house, where balconies line the entire upper floor.

“Holy shit,” I say. “It’s gorgeous.”

“I’ve been flipping houses since 2004. I started down in Hamilton. When I met Simon, he lived in Auckland, and he convinced me to move up here with him. The market is insane here, as bad as or worse than the Bay Area, and I’ve done very well.”

“This is a flip?”

“Not exactly.” She tucks her hands in her back pockets. She’s as slim as ever, and just as flat-chested, and her hair suits her. “I’ve kind of been in love with the house and the story of it pretty much since I got here. We used to live over there a bit, and I could see it from our living room, shining up here on the hill. When the sun rises, it washes the whole thing pink, and it looks like a...” She pauses, looks at me, then back to the house. “A mermaid house.”

I cross my arms.

“Simon’s family has been in Auckland for a long time. They came with some of the first settlers, so he knows everyone and everything that’s happening, and they’ve been ‘dabbling’”—she puts the word in air quotes—“in real estate for a century. When the owner died, Simon snapped it up.”

“Because you love it.”

Simply, she turns to me and says, “Yes.”

I can only look at her for a moment, then look back up to the house. “I saw pictures of your family and you when I found out your name. He clearly adores you.”

“We have a good life, Kit. Much better than I deserve. But it’s real and true. We’ve built a world together. We have children, and now I’m going to make this house over for all of us.”

I look toward the sea, back to the right where a tall line of tree ferns make a scallop of the sky. “But it’s all built on a lie, right?”

She bows her head. Nods.

“I don’t know why you think that bringing me here would change how I feel right now!” The carefully contained emotions are restless beneath my skin, deep in my abdomen, there at the base of my skull. “You landed on your feet. Great! How does that change the fact that you faked your own death? You let us believe that you were dead!”

“I know, I—”

“No, you don’t know,Josie. We had a memorial service for you!”

“Oh, I bet that was very well attended! Did you hire homeless guys to come in and cry or something? Because the only people left when I supposedly died were you and Mom. You hated me, and I hated her, so—who exactly was there to mourn me, Kit?”

“I never hated you! You hated yourself.” I refuse to let the tears fall, but they’re thick in my throat. “And believe me, I mourned you!”

“Did you?” The words are skeptical. “Really? Even after I cleared out your entire apartment?”

“I was furious, but I didn’t hate you.”

“I tried calling you. You never picked up.”