Lewis McCartney

Lewis's garage was a chaos of test tubes, lunar charts, and water samples. With his glasses crooked and his typical enthusiastic energy, he was typing furiously on his laptop.

"The data just doesn't add up," Lewis muttered, frustrated. "The girls were with me the entire full moon, but Mako's sensors recorded the passing of a fourth mermaid. There's a variable I'm missing."

Beside him, she swallowed hard, forcing a smile. She knew exactly what that "variable" was: herself, narrowly dodging his underwater sensors the night before.

To Lewis, she was his sanctuary of normality. The sweet girl who listened to him talk about marine biology without judging him and who didn't cause storms when she got angry. The irony was delicious: the leading expert on the secret of Mako was searching for clues in the ocean, without seeing that the mystery he was trying to solve was looking him straight in the eyes.

"Maybe it was just an ocean current, Lewis," she suggested, subtly moving away from a glass of water resting on the table.

"Impossible, this is pure biological propulsion," he insisted, pointing to the screen. "If only I could find her..."

She gave him a tender kiss on the cheek, the secret burning in her throat. Lewis was the science guy, but he was completely blind to the most important experiment of his life.