This will be the night I escape. The thought repeated in my mind like a refrain, over and over, and I believed it so hard that I whispered it aloud: ‘This will be the night I escape!

The sky would be clear, colorless, mist blending together the air and the ocean, the waves whispering against the rocks.

I am swimming and it is just sunrise, the sky so gray as to be almost invisible. I rise to the surface to breathe and that’s when I see the dark shadow of a boat, gliding gently toward me in the water. Men ride in the boat, their faces grim and greedy and silent, and as I turn to watch them I feel a bite in my side, a piercing pain.

The ocean turns cold, dark, pressing around me, but the deeper I go the more the iron inside of me twists and pulls and I know that I’m tethered to the boat, that even now the men pull the rope tighter and drag me back to the surface.

I was sixteen, still my mother’s prisoner, the night I became the whale.

Hope – that silly, stupid creature that lived within me, no matter how often I tried to beat it to death – lifted its nose and sniffed at the air.