I stared at the half-finished sentence on my page and couldn’t remember how long I’d been stuck there.
“Lumi.”
My head came up.
Vince was looking at me — not sharply, not expectantly. Just… openly. Like he’d been waiting, not watching.
“You’ve spent more time than most thinking about this question,” he said. “When you’re ready — no rush — would you like to weigh in?”
The room went very still.
I felt it then — not pressure from him, but attention from everyone else. The shift in the air as faces turned, curiosity sharpening into focus.
The girl with the ponytail twisted halfway around in her seat. The boy near the front straightened, like he expected something to go wrong.
Vince didn’t move. Didn’t rescue me. Didn’t push.
He just waited — the way you wait for someone you trust to find their footing.
The room held its breath.
I could feel them—every set of eyes, every held inhale, every person waiting to see if I'd crack. The girl with the ponytail had turned around again. The boy near the front was smirking slightly, like he expected me to fail.
My throat was dry. My hands wanted to shake.
I didn't let them.
"Sometimes the original state wasn't better," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. "We assume the selkie wants to be human because that's the form we recognize. But the story never says she was unhappy in the sea. Just that her life was changed, her timeline interrupted."
Vince tilted his head. "Go on."
"The restoration arc assumes there's something to restore to. That the 'before' was complete." I thought about cold. About hunger. About a man who had forgotten he had hands. "But what if it wasn't? What if the transformation isn't a loss at all—just a different kind of becoming?"
The room was very quiet.
Vince studied me for a moment. Something flickered across his expression—interest, maybe, or recognition.
"That's a generous reading," he said finally. "Most scholars focus on the tragedy of the husband. The children left behind."
"Most scholars aren't selkies," I said.
Someone in the back laughed—startled, quickly suppressed. Vince's mouth twitched.
"Indeed they are not." He turned back to the room at large. "Consider that for your papers. Whose perspective does the narrative serve? Whose definition of 'restoration' are we accepting, and why?"
He moved on. Something about werewolf mythology and the lunar cycle. I wrote down words without processing them.
My heart was pounding like I'd run a mile.
For the rest of the hour, I kept my head down. Took notes that might or might not be coherent. Focused on the scratch of pen against paper, the weight of the desk under my elbows, the solid reality of the chair beneath me.
Normal things. Anchoring things.
When Vince dismissed the class, I stayed where I was until most of the room had emptied. Chairs scraped. Bags zipped. Voices returned to normal volume, like the tension had been a held breath everyone was eager to release.
I didn’t want to be pressed into the flow of bodies. Didn’t want to explain myself with my face.
When I finally stood, Vince was stacking papers at the front of the room.
