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As the days crawled by, and then the months, my stomach grew. My baby’s kicks inside of me the only thing that kept me going after the loss of Lukas.
Frano ignored the new life growing inside of me as his obsession with creating a mermaid grew.
I’d find him at the end of each day, bent over sketchbooks, scribbling pictures of mermaids and merman, and more disturbingly so, diagrams of human’s gradually becoming mermaids.
He was so desperate to get his brother back, that he had closed himself off to the world around him.
It made me miss Lukas more. I longed to hear his voice again. Longed to see him slip into my bedroom through the secret wall. Sometimes I stared at it and willed it to open and show me Lukas.
He never came.
But one day, late in my pregnancy, when my fingers grew so fat the skin bulged around the sun ring, Lukas’ ring, I twisted it around to loosen it and was surprised to find a tiny clasp at the base of the crystal sun.
I held my breath as I picked the clasp open using my fingernail and gasped when it sprang open to reveal a tiny square of paper hidden inside. Lukas must have slipped it inside the ring on the night we made love and created the life now growing inside of me.
With trembling fingers, I opened the folded square and cried out when I recognised the handwriting.
‘I will return.’