A teenage daughter expresses her hatred of selkie stories, saying they're always about how you found an old coat in the attic and never saw your mom again. Her mom was a selkie, a half woman half fish, and that is how she left the daughter and the father to be in the ocean. After her mom left, the daughter got a job at a restaurant. She became friends with Mona, her only female co-worker, when she forgot her keys inside and Mona helped her break back in and they got drunk on some of the restaurant's wine together. Mona is afraid her mom will want to move back to Egypt, where the family used to live. Mona was born in Colorado, and Mona and the daughter make a plan to move to Colorado together. The daughter knows many selkie stories, stories about people who suddenly separate, similar to the way that her own mother separated from her family. As the daughter remembers each of the selkie stories she knows, she criticizes the one leaving and the one being left, calling them losers, or inconsiderate. They are always about two people in love, and one of them being a selkie and eventually leaving once they find their selkie "skin," which their lover hides from them. For the daughter, the selkie skin was the old coat the she found in the attic. While Mona's parents still lived in Colorado, they got divorced and Mona's mom tried to kill herself. Mona's mom tried again once she moved away from Colorado. The daughter is in love with Mona, but she has little faith in love after her mother left, and so she hasn't made a move. The girl remembers how her dad told her it wasn't her fault her mom left, "it was because she couldn't learn how to breathe on land," implying that as a selkie, she needed to be in the water to breathe. The girl rejects this excuse, and resolves to not let her and Mona's relationship end so easily. They would be more durable, better than their parents. The girl says selkie stories are only for losers who get complacent or give up on love.