After tossing ideas back and forth, Luca and Alberto began to figure out a plan for finding Giancarlo. They agreed that if Nonna Sofia hadn't seen her youngest son, then it was likely nobody else in the family had, either – none of them seemed to like him much, and Alberto didn't want to talk to any of his aunts or uncles right now, anyway. As far as Alberto could remember, when his father wanted to escape his problems, he went on land to do it, so they had to look there.

That was a problem, because they didn't know anybody on land here – just the people Giancarlo worked with in Portici, ten kilometres away. They were trying to figure out how to get there when Luca suddenly realized that they did know somebody nearby. Somebody who worked only a short walk away from the train station.

Employees of the shipyards began arriving for work around seven in the morning, and when they did, they found the two boys sitting by the gates waiting for them.

"Buongiorno," said the first man to see them, looking down at them with a frown. "Can I help you two?"

Luca yawned again. Alberto tried his best not to, but seeing it made him have to yawn, too. "We're looking for... ugh," he said, as the yawn escaped. "We're looking for Signor Granchio."

Luca nodded. "He works here."

"I'm sure he'll be along, then," the man said. He lit a cigarette and continued on his way.

There were several similar exchanges over the next few minutes, as more and more people began to drift in. When Granchio did arrive, it was in a group with several others, and Alberto was suddenly wide awake at the thought that he might not see them. He jumped to his feet and waved.

"Signor Granchio!" he called out.

Granchio stopped to look at them, and frowned. "What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you," said Alberto. "We need to talk to you."

Luca stood up, rubbing his eyes. Granchio watched him do so with a critical expression.

"Have you been here all night?" he asked.

"Not all night," said Alberto.

"Just most of it," Luca said.

Granchio sighed. "Let me talk to my boss," he said. "Wait right here."

He walked away, leaving Alberto and Luca to sit down on the edge of a low wall again. It seemed to take him a very long time to come back, but eventually he did, and took them to a little cafe a couple of blocks away. This was very busy, serving coffee and pastries to people on their way to work, but Granchio managed to find them a table. He bought them each a little cup of espresso and a sfogliatella, and sat down across from them.

"Why are you looking for me?" he asked.

Alberto had already taken a big bite out of his pastry, and although he'd been told that it was rude to talk with his mouth full, he was too impatient to obey that rule right now. "Have you seen Giancarlo?" he asked, spraying bits of pastry.

"Your father?" asked Granchio. He seemed surprised for a moment, and Alberto wondered if Granchio would correct him. He had a feeling if Aunt Diana heard him use his father's name instead of calling him Dad, he would get a lecture about it. Granchio, however, just shrugged. "Not for months."

That didn't sound right. "You just talked to him the other day," Alberto pointed out.

"Yeah, but you asked if I saw him. That was on the phone," Granchio pointed out. "He hasn't been in touch since then, if that's what you're asking."

Alberto was disappointed, but they had another place to look. "All right. Can you take us to Portici, so we can ask the people at the jewellery shop?"

"How long has your dad been missing?" Granchio wanted to know.

"Nobody's seen him since the day you took us home," said Alberto. "Not even Nonna Sofia."

Granchio shook his head. "I can't take you," he said. "I've got to work today."

"What about another day?" Alberto tried. Luca had put his head down on the table in front of him and his eyes were shut. He wasn't quite asleep, but he wasn't quite awake, either. His espresso was untouched.

"I'm sorry, kid," said Granchio with a sigh, "but I've had my fill of keeping your father out of trouble. I spent half my childhood doing that, and all I ever got out of it was him telling me to shut up. Then, ten minutes later, when he does exactly what I told him not to do, he comes back to me for help! I'm finished with that. I only took you home the other day because I didn't want you getting mixed up in his b... in his nonsense."

Alberto lowered his head. Maybe Granchio was right. Alberto had gotten mixed up in his father's... nonsense... last fall and that had been horrible. He didn't need another experience like that. What if Giancarlo needed help, though? Nonna Sofia had said he had trouble asking for it when he did. It was a trait that unfortunately ran in the Scorfano family.

"Ah, there's your grandmother," said Granchio.

"What?" Alberto turned his head, then scrambled to his feet in surprise as Nonna Sofia came hurrying up to the table, accompanied by a man who looked very much like Alberto's father but was not. Every time Alberto had seen Nonna Sofia out of the water she'd been very fancily dressed, in a hat and gloves as if she were going to a wedding. Today, however, her hair was loose under a kerchief and she was wearing the plaid sundress and grubby apron she did her gardening in. The man following her was slightly better-dressed, in a button-down shirt and sweater vest, but his eyes were sunken from lack of sleep and his hair was uncombed.

"Alberto! Alberto!" Nonna Sofia dropped her purse on the table and pulled him close for a hug. "Oh, my goodness, you scared us so badly! Carlotta woke up and you two were just gone. I've had everybody scouring the bay for you!" She held him out at arm's length. "Where were you trying to go?"

"Home," said Alberto. "Portorosso."

"Why?" Nonna Sofia asked. "Why would you sneak out in the middle of the night like that?"

Alberto stared at her. This didn't make sense. Why had she gone looking for him? That was something Massimo would do... but Massimo liked Alberto, and Alberto was pretty sure his father's relatives didn't. He looked at Luca, who had finally sat up to drink his espresso, then back at his grandmother. "Aren't you mad at me?"

"I'm furious!" she said, although she didn't look it. "Do you know how worried we were? Why did you do that?"

"I... um..." now that Alberto was put on the spot, he was embarrassed to explain. Clearly he'd screwed up again, but this time he wasn't sure how.

The man, meanwhile, patted Luca on the shoulder and then shook Granchio's hand. "Thanks for calling," he said. Alberto recognized his voice – that was Uncle Leonardo. What was he doing here? Shouldn't he be angry with Alberto, too?

"No problem, Leo," Granchio replied.

Alberto realized something. "You called them?"

"Yeah. After I told my boss I needed a minute with you, I phoned your grandmother," Granchio admitted. "I figured if you'd been here all night, then somebody had probably missed you by now."

"We certainly did," said Nonna Sofia. "Come along, boys. Let's go back to my place and we can get this all sorted out. Thank you once again, dear," she added to Granchio. "I'll owe you a favour."

"It's no trouble, Zia Sofia, no trouble," Signor Granchio said. "I've got to get to work now."

He went off to do so, and Alberto and Luca grabbed their pastries and let Nonna Sofia and Uncle Leonardo lead them down to a disused stone quay which, thanks to an overhanging walkway, made a very well-hidden place to get back into the water. As they swam out to Procida, still with all their clothes on, Sofia kept looking back over her shoulder as if to make sure the boys were still there. Uncle Leonardo brought up the rear, to keep them from wandering off.

"Oh, Sofia!" a female sea monster called out, waving as she popped out of some coral and swam closer to greet the group. She was purple, like Alberto or like Sofia herself, and Alberto vaguely remembered her being one of the relatives on the Gabbiano side of the family. "You found them!"

"Yes, we did. Thank you so much, Veronica," Sofia replied.

"Wonderful, I'll let people know," Veronica promised. "You boys certainly gave everybody a scare!" She shook her head, then swam off to deliver the message.

"I told you we should have waited until morning," Luca said softly to his friend.

At the island they climbed the staircase cut into the cliff up to Nonna Sofia's house, and found several other relatives gathered there, along with Carlotta and Celia. When they entered the kitchen, Carlotta had both elbows on the table and her face in her hands. She looked up when her daughter tugged on her sleeve, then scrambled to her feet and came to hug Luca and Alberto both at once.

"I'm so glad you're okay!" she said. "I went in to check on you, and you were just gone! Where did you go?" Her hair was in her face and her eyes were rimmed in red – she'd been crying just as much, maybe more, than she had the previous night when she thought Celia was in danger.

"We were going home," said Alberto. "I mean... everybody here hates me."

Carlotta stared at him as if he'd spoken a foreign language.

"Oh, no!" Nonna Sofia exclaimed. "Why would you think we hate you?"

How did she not know? "Well, because of what we did to Flavia," he said. "And to Celia."

"Alberto, I told you," said Carlotta, giving him a shake. "You made a mistake, but you didn't know, and you promised not to do it again, so it's fine. I know I got very upset, but that's because I thought Celia was in danger. I don't hate you."

She sounded like she meant it. Alberto turned to look at Nonna Sofia and Uncle Leonardo, and found both of them nodding.

"We're your family, Alberto," said Nonna Sofia gently. "You can have as many second chances as you need."

They weren't mad about Celia then. "What about Flavia?" Alberto asked.

Uncle Leonardo looked over his shoulder.

A smaller man, with dark hair slicked back, approached them. That must have been Uncle Giorgio, because with him was Flavia. While both her fathers were in human clothes, she was still wearing a seagrass tunic, with a wet towel draped around her shoulders and tucked behind her gills to keep them damp. When Alberto's eyes met hers, she quickly dropped her gaze and scowled at her flippers on the floor.

Nonna Sofia put a hand on Alberto's shoulder. "Go ahead," she said gently.

For a moment Alberto didn't know what she was talking about – then he remembered Nonna Sofia had told him to apologize. She wanted him to do it right now? He wasn't ready, though. He'd been so worried about going home that he done any thinking about what to say. Now Flavia was right there and she at least definitely hated him, but she would hate him even worse if he stalled.

"Uh," he said. "Flavia? I'm sorry. I didn't... we thought you were just scared to get out of the water like Luca used to be, and we thought we'd show you it was all right. We didn't know you don't Change."

"Even if we did," Luca added, "it wouldn't have been right to do that without your permission. We'll never do it again."

Alberto nodded, and turned at Nonna Sofia for approval. Was that okay? Was that what she wanted him to do? She wasn't looking back at him, though – she was waiting for Flavia. Everybody was waiting for Flavia, and Flavia was still looking at her feet, uncomfortable with the scrutiny. That was another thing Flavia had in common with him, Alberto thought – they were both used to being the centre of attention for all the wrong reasons.

"Angelfish?" asked Uncle Leonardo.

"Thank you for apologizing," Flavia said. Her voice was very soft, almost a whisper.

"Are we forgiven?" Luca asked hopefully.

Flavia continued staring at the floor. "I wanna go home."

Uncle Giorgio nodded, and escorted Flavia out of the room into the garden to return to the ocean. She did not look back.

Alberto pulled a chair over and sat down in it, his shoulders slumped. He looked at Luca, and found his friend disappointed, too. They hadn't really expected Flavia to forgive them, but it was still upsetting that she hadn't.

"I'll have a talk to her," Uncle Leonardo offered. "Maybe she'll be willing to give you a second chance, too."

"I'm sorry, Alberto," said Sofia. "Flavia's been treated very badly by some of her cousins and she probably doesn't put a lot of trust in apologies anymore. But you'll always get another chance from me. Your father was afraid I'd be angry with him when he finally got home but he'll always get a second chance, too." She filled the kettle to make tea. "You haven't heard from him, have you? No, of course you haven't it was only yesterday I asked you last. I'm sorry." She set the kettle on the stove.

"Are you worried about him?" Alberto asked.

"Of course I am – I'm his mother," Nonna Sofia said. "He hasn't run off like this one since I got him home last year. I don't suppose you've seen him, Leo?"

Uncle Leonardo shook his head.

Nonna Sofia looked over her shoulder at her other guests. "Carlotta, dear, would you like me to keep the boys for today? You look exhausted."

"That would be lovely if it's all right with Alberto and Luca," said Carlotta.

Alberto winced. She'd probably been up all night, too – and it was all his fault.

Sofia gave Carlotta a hug, and then Carlotta in turn embraced each of the boys once again before asking them to be good for Nonna Sofia. She even kissed Alberto's forehead, which astonished him.

"I'll make a proper supper tonight," she promised. "Any requests?"

Alberto shook his head. He didn't feel like he ought to ask for anything when he'd upset everybody so badly.

"His favourite food is Trenette al Pesto," Luca volunteered. "That's what his Uncle Massimo makes."

"I'll look for a recipe," said Carlotta.

Once she'd gone, Uncle Leonardo sat down to finish his cup of tea before going home, and Nonna Sofia began cleaning up. "Anything in particular you'd like to do today?" she asked the boys. "I know you were already on the island yesterday, but there's plenty to do here. Have you been to the library, Luca?"

"Luca yawned. "I... thank you, Madame, but I don't think I could stay awake."

"Oh, yes, you were up all night, too," said Nonna Sofia. "There's an empty bedroom upstairs, if you'd like to take a nap. It's on the right. Do you need a place to sleep, too, Alberto?"

"I... no," Alberto decided. He was tired, but there was a reason he'd been awake all night. "Can we go... I mean, can I go to Portici? If nobody here has seen my father, I want to ask if anyone there has."

Uncle Leonardo put his teacup on the counter. "Thanks, Ma. See you later," he said.

"Have a good day, dear. Tell Flavia she's welcome back anytime," Nonna Sofia said, and kissed his cheek. Then she returned to Alberto, giving him a cup of tea of his own. The cup and saucer were white, with fancy, frilly carp painted on them in blue. "Portici is a long way from here. You'd need a car to get there," she told him.

"You don't..." Alberto began, then remembered. "Celia said you get sick in the car."

"I do," Nonna Sofia said. She set down another teacup for Luca.

"Thank you," said Luca, but rather than pick the cup up to drink it, he just put his chin in his hands and let his eyes drift shut. Even the espresso Signor Granchio had bought for them didn't seem to have helped.

"Oh, dear, I think you'd better go straight upstairs," said Nonna Sofia with a smile. She pulled Luca's chair out for him to get up. "I'll be right back, Alberto," she promised.

Alberto sighed and leaned on the table as she escorted Luca out of the room. He knew if he tried to sleep, he'd just end up lying there with all these problems swimming circles in his head like a school of lost sardines. If Nonna Sofia couldn't take him to Portici, was there anybody else who could? The Gennaris couldn't do it today, because they needed a day off from him, but would tomorrow be too late? How much trouble was Giancarlo actually in? Did the three criminals already know where he was?

Why was this all so complicated? Life had been so simple when it had just been Alberto and his pet turtle on that stupid island. He hadn't had to worry about anything but finding food and killing time. He'd been lonely a lot, but then Luca had come along and everything had been perfect, at least for a little while. Even living in Portorosso was much easier than this. Living with Massimo gave Alberto a lot of work today and a lot of people to interact with, but he understood what he was doing and why and how it all worked.

Napoli and the Scorfano family were so different. There were so many things going on and so many people who all had their own problems and quirks that had to be accounted for. Nothing in Alberto's life had remotely prepared him for this. Luca seemed to be coping with it just fine, but Luca was used to living in a community and having a demanding family. Maybe he could tell Alberto how to handle it a little better, but Alberto hated to admit that he was having such a rough time.

Not that Luca didn't already know, after yesterday.

Nonna Sofia came back downstairs after getting Luca settled, and picked up his teacup to drink its contents herself. "Alberto," she said, "would you like to help me with some baking today, maybe? I'm making some canestrelli for Diana's boys. Umberto is bringing them over later so their mother can finally get some peace and quiet with the egg."

"Sure," said Alberto, mostly because he didn't have any other ideas. At least he'd get to eat a couple of the cookies.

"Wonderful." Sofia smiled. "Could you get the hard-boiled eggs out of the fridge for me, then? I did a batch yesterday."

Alberto opened the appliance, and found two small cartons of six eggs each. One was marked with an S, which he hoped stood for sode. "Are these them?" he asked, pulling it out.

"Yes, thank you. Do you know how to tell if an egg has been boiled?" Sofia asked as she took them.

"You break it open," said Alberto. That seemed obvious.

She chuckled softly. "I meant without doing that. Grab the other carton, and I'll show you."

He obeyed, and his grandmother demonstrated how a raw egg started spinning again after it was touched, while a boiled one didn't. Then she had him take the yolks out of the boiled eggs, while she measured flour and sugar and the other various white powders that somehow magically became sweets when cooked.

"I'd hoped you and I would get to spend some time together while you were here, just us," Nonna Sofia remarked. "I'd have asked you to stay with me, but I knew you didn't want to meet your father. I'm sorry again about what he did at the picnic. Sooner or later I'll have to say something to Diana about it, but I don't want to upset her while she's incubating an egg. Are those yolks ready?"

Alberto had been mashing them with a fork while she mixed the other ingredients. He held the bowl out for inspection, wincing in expectation of criticism. There couldn't be many ways to mash egg yolks incorrectly, but he was sure he could find them.

"Excellent. Thank you." She took the bowl to add them to the rest of the ingredients. "Flavia used to like baking with me. Even with her gills kept wet she can't stay out of the water very long, but she did enjoy helping me in the kitchen. Then the older kids started being nasty to her, and now she rarely comes out at all."

"If she doesn't Change, is that why her parents... um..." Alberto bit his lip. Was that question too much? Even if it wasn't, he found himself unwilling to say the words abandoned her aloud.

"We assume so, but we've never actually met them," Nonna Sofia replied. "Thank you once again for apologizing to her. I realize I put you on the spot and that probably wasn't fair, but she was here, and... well."

"It's fine," said Alberto, then thought of another question. This one, too, was possibly too much, but by the time he realized that he'd already blurted it out. "How come you don't make Lucrezia apologize to her?"

"I have," said Nonna Sofia, kneading cookie dough. "It doesn't do any good. She's never really sorry, and Flavia knows that. I suppose I've given her a few too many of those second chances, but there's not much I can actually do about it. If I try to actually punish her, her parents will intervene."

"So she just gets away with being horrible," said Alberto with a scowl.

"I don't like it," Nonna Sofia said, "but I don't want to cause drama. There's enough of that in this family already."

The first tray of cookies had just come out of the oven and were cooling on the rack when Uncle Umberto and his sons arrived. Umberto in human form had a thick mustache and very bushy eyebrows, with streaks of premature steel grey in his hair. With him was eleven-year-old Girolamo, the seven-year-old twins Antonio and Alessandro, and Danilo, age five. All four of them had curly black hair, and strongly resembled both their father and each other.

"It's the Spinarolo boys!" Nonna Sofia said happily, holding out her arms.

The younger three ran to hug her, while Girolamo, who was old enough to find such enthusiasm a bit embarrassing, hung back and looked at Alberto.

"I thought you ran away," he said.

"I came back," Alberto replied, not wanting to talk about it.

Girolamo nodded. "Figures. Aunt Bettina says you weren't really going anywhere, you just wanted attention. And the other Aunt Bettina agrees with her, even though they never agree."

"What?" Alberto asked. "What do you mean, I just wanted attention?"

"I mean you were never gonna run away, you just wanted to scare everybody so they'd be extra-nice." Girolamo rolled his eyes. "Like Flavia when she gets all poor me, I can't do anything fun so you all have to love me best!"

"I've never seen her do that," said Alberto.

"You hang out with her. You fell for it," Girolamo said.

"Who wants canestrelli?" Nonna Sofia asked.

The kids crowded around to claim their share, with even Girolamo deciding it was worth being uncool for. Alberto hung back, scowling. They really thought his abortive attempt to go back to Portorosso had been a trick? Who would do something like that?

Lucrezia probably would.

The commotion in the kitchen must have woke Luca, because he came down the stairs rubbing his eyes, and smiled when he saw Alberto's cousins eating their treats. "May I have one, please, Madame?" he asked politely.

"Of course, Luca," she said. "Alberto, don't you want any?"

Alberto did take one of the still-warm cookies. Nonna Sofia was too busy with her grandsons to notice that his mood had dipped again, but Luca, of course, saw it right away. He came to sit next to Alberto at the kitchen table.

"You see?" he asked. "It's fine now. That's another thing families do: they forgive each other."

Alberto grunted.

Luca chewed thoughtfully on his cookie for a moment while trying to think of something to cheer his friend up. "We should go look at that island again," he suggested. "That looked cool."

The ruins had been intriguing, although if they went there it was gonna be hard not to think about Flavia... but Alberto immediately thought of a problem with the idea. "They'll make us take a grownup." The kids here didn't seem to go anywhere unsupervised.

"Maybe not," said Luca. "Excuse me, Signora Scorfano," he said.

"Yes, Luca?" Nonna Sofia asked.

"Is it okay if Alberto and I go for a swim?"

"As long as you don't go too far," she said. "The bottom drops off south of here into the Magnaghi Canyon, and there's old wrecks and depth charges down there that I don't want you getting close to."

Alberto tried to place that on his mental map of places he'd been to so far, and realized it must be close to where Uncle Leonardo and his family lived. That was where Flavia's submarine was.

"Don't worry, we'll stay in the strait," Luca promised. He stuffed the rest of his canestrello in his mouth. "Come on, Alberto."

Alberto stole another cookie on the way out, and they hurried down the first few of the steps on the cliff before finding a convenient place to leap from a height into the water, like they'd so often done back home in Portorosso. That felt good, and soon they were leaping in and out of the Tyrrhenian Sea like porpoises, on their way around the island of Procida to the northeast to look for the island.

When they arrived and began exploring, they found a maze of crumbling walls with mosses and trees growing through them, and pieces of broken glass and pottery sticking out of the ground. It was easy to get a general idea of how the castle's rooms had been laid out, and in one spot there was even the remains of a spiral staircase down into the basement. The roof of this had long ago collapsed into a layer of rubble on the floor, but it was fun to pick their way through it and imagine they were in an ancient dungeon.

"It's too bad Flavia can't come up here. This place would be great for nascondino," Luca said.

For hiding, Alberto thought. Like his father was apparently doing. It was too bad he hadn't picked this island as his hiding place, because then Alberto and Luca would have found him, and could keep him from getting any more involved with whatever his human friends were planning.

"Maybe she just needs some more time to think about it," Luca added, trying to sound optimistic. "Maybe she'll forgive us later."

"No, she won't," grumbled Alberto, sitting down on a fallen stone. "And nobody else actually has, either. Girolamo – Aunt Diana's oldest one – said they all think I pretended to run away so people would feel sorry for me."

"Your Nonna doesn't think that," Luca said. "Neither does Signora Gennari. If they did, they'd say so."

"Everybody else does," said Alberto.

"We can still go home," Luca offered, though it was clear he didn't want to.

"They'll try to talk us out of it," Alberto scowled. "Anyway, I can't leave until I find out what happened to my father. Nonna Sofia said I get as many second chances as I need... maybe he can, too."

"I thought you didn't care what happened to him," Luca said.

"I don't want him to try to be my Dad again," Alberto told him. "I'm still mad at him for leaving me alone on the island, and I'm mad at him for losing all his money and never taking me anywhere, and I hate that all his girlfriends are humans who look like my Mom... but I don't want him to go back to prison. I saw that place and it was awful. I wouldn't want anybody to have to be in there. Not even... not even Ercole."

Luca nodded. "Maybe Signor Gennari can take us to Portici. He's got a car." He patted Alberto's back. "We'll ask him."

They did so at dinner that evening. Carlotta had tried to make trenette al pesto, but the recipe she used was a bit different from Massimos, with olives and dried tomatoes in it instead of the familiar beans. It tasted good, but it wasn't quite what Alberto wanted, and just made him miss Portorosso all the more.

"Did you have a good time with Zia Sofia today?" Carlotta asked anxiously. "She said some of your cousins stopped by."

"Yeah. Luca and I did our own thing," said Alberto. He looked at Luca.

Luca mouthed the words silenzio, Bruno, and put another forkful of pasta in his mouth.

Alberto nodded, and took a deep breath. "I think I need to find my father," he said. "Nobody's seen him and Nonna Sofia says she's worried. If he's not in the gulf he must be on land somewhere, and I think we need to go to Portici and talk to the people he works with."

This was greeted by silence. Mike and Carlotta exchanged a worried glance, and then both chewed and swallowed so that they could speak.

"I don't think... it's not your job to look after your father, Alberto," said Mike. "He's an adult. He needs to look after himself."

"When Zia Sofia said you were coming, she specifically mentioned that you didn't want to see your father," Carlotta agreed. "We were supposed to send him away if he came without being invited."

"Well, now I want to see him," said Alberto.

"Did he tell you he was leaving?" Carlotta wanted to know. "Did he say why?"

"No," Alberto said immediately. He wasn't about to tell them what he'd seen and overheard. If the Gennaris found out that Giancarlo was involved with a bunch of thieves, they might think he deserved to be in prison, and Alberto didn't want that.

There was another brief but weighty silence.

"Alberto," said Carlotta, her face very serious. "I know... I know your father has spent some time in prison. If he's doing something wrong and you know that, you really need to tell somebody."

"I don't know what he's doing," said Alberto.

"Well... maybe it's better if you don't find out."

"Celia," said Mike, changing the subject. "What did you and Mamma get up to today?"

"Mamma did the mending," said Celia, "and we did laundry, and I sat in the washtub and tried to Change."

"She did," said Carlotta. "I told her if she stayed in there all day she was going to dissolve."

Celia giggled. "That's silly! Sea monsters don't dissolve in water!"

"I know, Guppy," Carlotta gave her a tired smile.

"Did you manage to do it?" Alberto asked.

"Not yet," said Celia, "but I know what being wet feels like now. If you're human in the water, do your fingers and toes get all wrinkly like Papà's do?" she asked eagerly.

Alberto blinked. "You know what? I've never tried that."

"Try it!" Celia urged. "I wanna see!"

He wasn't going to find a solution to any of his problems tonight, so he might as well... and maybe Celia would make some progress learning to Change in the process. "Okay. After dinner we'll go out to the beach and see."