"Mmhm."

"What're your family like?"

"...mom's dead, father's evil, stepmother's boring, siblings are small."

"Sorry about your mummy. Do you wanna fish?"

"I thought we were gonna swim?"

"I mean, do you want a fish?"

"What for?"

"To eat."

"I'm not hungry but you can get one for you if you want."

"If your dad's evil, how come the other grown ups don't spear him?"

"...because in civilized society people don't usually solve their problems with violence."

"So what do you do with evil people?"

"Arrest them."

"You should lure him into the water, then my grown ups can spear him!"

"That's evil!"

"Isn't he evil?"

"Yes but two wrongs don't make a right."

"But even if it's evil, there will be less evil when it's done!"

"There'll also be one less person when it's done, and it makes the world more evil while it's happening, and even after there'll be no one to take care of my stepmother and my half-siblings, and everyone gets uncomfortable about the idea of being speared if they do stuff other people don't like, and killing people is much worse than that! And, and there's a reason humans stopped doing that."

"Humans are weird."

"Mer are evil."

Tears begin welling in Michael's eyes.

She folds her arms and bites her lower lip. Then relents after a second: "Well, humans are evil in some places, too."

...kinda relents.

Michael realises he probably isn't going to teach Sadde to swim in one day. "Wanna look around the island?"

"Okay."

Walk walk in the water back to shore.