I am walking on Hubbards Beach with Maura when she announces that she is going to stay here forever and live as a Siren, the mermaid kind. I ask what happened to her new job, and she laughs. She tells me that she’s grown tired of luring men into purchasing software licenses and she’s ready to try luring them to their watery doom.

Fair enough, I tell her.

There’s a scratchy old blanket in the back seat of my truck, and we wind it around and around and around Maura’s legs until you can’t tell that she ever had any. I get her settled on a rock and get to work picking shells and sea glass from the beach for her scales. It takes all day, me sifting sand through my fingers to get the good stuff the tourists haven’t carried away, and Maura tugging loose threads from her new tail to tie them on. The sun is dipping toward the horizon when we finish, and I tuck a fan of dried kelp into the bottom of the blanket to serve as her fin.

I can already feel it, she tells me, and sure enough she curls and flattens her new fin, which is looking less and less like kelp by the minute. She drops her bikini top onto the sand, and I feel her skin already cooling against the warm flush of mine as I help her arrange her hair just so.

There’s a kayaker out on the water and she decides to make him her first victim. On the way here, Maura had sung all the wrong words to all the choruses of all the pop songs on the radio, but now she opens her mouth and what comes out is more magic than music, a wordless melody of notes and heartaches and sharps and flats and desires and secrets all strung together. I want to grip onto her tail until the sharp sides of her shell-scales slice clean through my palms, so I sit on my hands. But the kayaker doesn’t seem affected at all, and eventually Maura stops singing.

I think he’s got bluetooth headphones on, I tell her as we watch him drag his kayak across the sand to the parking lot.

It’s getting dark now, and the cold wind coming off the Atlantic is whipping sand across an empty beach. Maura tells me I can leave now if I want to, leave her to her new life of salt-slick rocks and riding tides and men lashing themselves to masts made from noise-cancelling technology. But I can hear the music in her voice even as she speaks to me. And I couldn’t leave her even if I wanted to.