Mickey Teasdale's curiosity shop is full of odd, lovely things, and she has a story for every one of them. Lately the stories have stopped working on her, and the shop feels like a job rather than a wonder.
Then Ren Montague comes in, a single father who prefers order to whimsy, with his teenage daughter Ava in tow and no interest in being charmed. Ava finds an old diary among the stock, and the three of them start pulling at the question of whether it really belonged to a mermaid.
Chasing the answer together does something none of them planned: Ren finds he wants the version of the world Mickey lives in, and Mickey finds that real life can be better than the ones she invents.
Book five of Jaimie Admans' Ever After Street series, a romance that reads as a complete story on its own.