“What if I fail her? What if I make the wrong choice?”

“Then the sea will claim what was taken from it.” Her eyes began to close. “But if you are faithful… if you protect her and love her without trying to own her… the ocean remembers its debts.”

Before Baba Tunde could ask more, the mermaid’s body shimmered once, like heat waves over sand, and then she was gone. Only salt foam remained, the child in his arms, and the shell glowing softly in his palm.

As he stood there, strange words echoed in his mind—words he was certain the mermaid had never spoken aloud, yet somehow he knew them as if they were carved into his soul:

*Let her grow in truth, not fear. When the shell goes dark, the choice becomes hers.*

But what that truly meant, he could not say.

“Her name is Amina,” Baba Tunde told the village that morning, holding the baby as Mama Efe wept with joy at having a purpose for her grief. “Her mother… died in childbirth. She asked me to care for her.”

It was not entirely a lie.

The village women gathered around, cooing over the infant’s perfect features. “She is beautiful,” said Mama Yaa, touching the baby’s tiny fingers. “Look at those eyes—so deep, like she already knows secrets.”

“And her skin,” added old Adwoa, “it has a shimmer to it, like she’s been blessed by the moon.”

Baba Tunde’s heart quickened at their observations, but he said nothing. He simply nodded and allowed Mama Efe to take the child to her breast, watching as the infant latched on immediately, as if she had been waiting for this moment.

That night, alone in his hut, Baba Tunde kept the shell hidden beneath his sleeping mat, but every night he would take it out and watch it pulse with gentle light, like a heartbeat made visible. It grew warm in his hands, and sometimes he swore he could hear distant singing coming from within its spiraled chambers—lullabies in a language he had never learned but somehow understood.

The shell seemed to respond to the baby’s presence. When Amina slept peacefully, it glowed softly. When she cried, it pulsed rapidly. When she was content in Mama Efe’s arms, it hummed with a warmth that filled Baba Tunde’s entire hut.

“What are you?” he would whisper to the shell in the darkness. “What are you telling me?”

But the shell kept its secrets, offering only its steady, mysterious light.

Amina grew like a palm tree reaching for sky—tall, graceful, with a laugh that reminded everyone of rain after drought. She helped the women prepare fish for market, her small hands working with unusual skill. She could predict storms three days before they arrived, and fish seemed to swim toward her father’s nets when she accompanied him to the shallows.

But something strange began to happen when she was around deep water.

The first time, she was six years old. The other children were playing by the river pools, splashing and diving. Amina ran toward them, eager to join, but as she neared the deeper water, she suddenly stopped. Her small body went rigid, and she began to back away, her eyes wide with confusion.

“Amina, come play!” called young Kojo.

“I… I cannot,” she said, and the fear in her voice was real. “Something tells me I must not.”

That night, Baba Tunde checked the shell. It was glowing brighter than usual, pulsing rapidly like an excited heartbeat. The first condition was revealing itself: *She must not enter deep water until the shell goes dark.*

As Amina grew, the pattern became clear. She could wade in the shallows, help with fishing, even swim a little in the shallowest pools. But something invisible, something powerful, kept her from going deeper. She would approach the edge where the river deepened, and then stop, as if hitting an unseen wall.

The other children began to notice and tease her about it.

“Amina is afraid of deep water!” they would call. “Even little Adjoa can swim to the big rocks, but Amina stops at the sand bar!”