“Robert Halliday never believed we were dead.” Mama was lost in a memory.

We didn’t stop her.

“They want what they think they’re owed and I’d rather die than to give it to them.” She seemed to notice us there, our expressions telling her something that lifted the veil. She smiled softly. “They’re in jail now. Buck’s brothers. Robert is old, but determined and connected. And Alma,” she said the name like it was poison on her tongue, “will do whatever she must to reclaim her place. So that means…” Mama freed one hand from the baby to squeeze Asher’s arm first, then mine. “…when the gift shows itself, we must smother the light.”

Smother the light. Even as a child I understood that had multiple meanings. When I spoke, my voice quivered in time with my chin. “They can’t take a baby from his mama. Isn’t it against the law or something?”

“Men like Robert Halliday don’t follow the law.” 

“What about your family?” Asher asked. “Can they help us?”

Mama’s lashes fluttered over mermaid eyes. “My mother is dead.”

“But—”

“My mother is dead.”

The punch of her words rendered us silent. She tried to reassure us, but I’m not sure it worked. “You are both the best of him, you know that? The absolute best of him.”

The best of him? That might be true of Asher but not me. I was foolish. Impulsive. Quick to judge. Didn’t she see? Buck was the sun that lit the world.

I was the moon who stole light to be seen.

We turned at the sound of footsteps on the path behind us. “Folks are waiting for you,” Valdez said, standing with his back against the sun. “Will you be much longer?”

Asher stood, brushed dirt from his pants, and reached out to help Mama. Gabriel gurgled in her arms, but all remained well. 

“Wait.” I scrambled to my feet, trying to keep my dress from climbing up my legs. “If Buck was once Gideon Halliday, who were you?” 

“No one, really, Jemma. I was no one.”

Valdez and Asher flanked Mama up the buggin’ trail. When I didn’t follow Asher turned back. “You coming?”

“I’ll be right there.” 

The river and I had business to finish. 

I turned back to it and spotted the cross of sticks, almost completely submerged in the water. How much anger could I hold towards Willie who was the cause of all this pain? 

“Mama lied,” I blurted out, the pain of betrayal burning into my bones. I looked up to the sky. “She said if I was good and said my prayers and just believed, you’d come through. Why didn’t you?” I whisked away a surprise tear before it tumbled down my cheek. “We’re just a bad match, you and me, so it’s best we go our separate ways. That way in the end? Neither of us disappoints the other.” 

My first breakup was with God. I thought my heart would feel light after shedding the weight of a heavy and useless dogma. Instead it collapsed like one of Tía Raquel’s white dwarf stars. 

I wanted to lash out. To give Him a real what for, but something caught my attention. A dragonfly buzzing close to my ear, hovering like a humming bird. I wondered if it was the same one Willie let go. If so, she was just a little insect, still so much growing to do. I was glad this little bug was free. Unconstrained. Despite my instinct to cup it in my hands and carry it back to a jar in my room, I held still and watched it dart back and forth, near and far. Then I watched it fly away, off to make its way in this world. I wanted to tell it goodbye, that I’d miss it. But it was never really mine to miss in the first place.

When I started up the buggin’ trail, I left the spirit of Buck behind in the river. Taking my first steps away from my father’s light was scary. Uncertain. Up ahead, something else waited for me: Shadows of a world where suspicion and fear crowded the horizon, like clouds moving in from the west.