But it had all been a lie, built on nothing but Mabena’s desperation to escape her real home, her real friends, her real family. A whole world she’d never breathed a word of. A love gone wrong that Libby couldn’t have guessed at. A personality, wild and free, that she’d kept so reined in that the Mabena she’d shown Libby wasn’t really Mabena at all.
“I grow so weary of being alone.” The whisper, pitiful even to her own ears, scalded the night like the tears did her eyes.
His hand left her elbow, and for one eternal second she felt so incredibly bereft that she thought she might splinter, fracture, fall to pieces. But then, then his warm hand was cupping her cheek, and those fissures closed. “My sweet Libby. You’re not alone. You’re never alone. Even if your family were gone, even if we here who would be proud to be counted as your true friends were never to see you again—even then, you wouldn’t be alone.”
She knew well that he meant God. It was the vicar in him; he couldn’t help but say such things. And she admired him for saying them, for being able to believe them. Still, she had to shake her head. “I’m afraid I don’t know how to have that sort of faith, Oliver. I wish I did.” Even if she granted that He was necessary, He was still so very distant. She could see Him in the order of things, as Oliver had pointed out weeks ago. God not of the so-called mysteries that weren’t mysterious, but of order. But that was just a creator. Not a friend.
He tilted her face up, and she let her gaze follow, expecting to see disappointment in his face. Or even rebuke. After all, what kind of man of the cloth would let someone speak so of the Lord? But for some reason, the moonlight touched on a smile on his lips. “I’ve heard many people say they wish they had more faith. People who have been broken by life, by disappointments, who can’t fathom a God who is good in the face of a world filled with evil. But trying to answer that question isn’t the way to make Him known to you, is it?”
“I don’t know how He could be made known to me. That’s the problem.” She wanted to believe. But no one’s explanations had ever made sense. And maybe . . . maybe she wanted it more so she wouldn’t disappoint her mother than because she thought she needed that belief for her own sake.
“Is it enough, perhaps, to believe that He knows you?”
She blinked, refocused on his eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.”
He gave her that beautiful smile of his, full of caring and knowing and something a bit more she was afraid to name. “You are a student of nature. You study it and catalogue it. You take the utmost care to put the proper name with each specimen. Why?”
She smiled a bit, simply because it echoed the conversation she’d first had with his grandmother, before she knew she was his grandmother. “Because it’s by naming a thing, knowing a thing, that you come to understand it. Only when you see its unique traits can you truly appreciate what it is, and what it isn’t.”
He nodded. Ducked his head a few inches so their eyes were level. “The islands know your name, Libby—I know they do. You’re a part of us here. We will always be your people. Do you believe that?”
Her heart swelled in her chest so that she could only nod.
His smile deepened. “Don’t you see, then? It’s like that with God, but more. He knows your name. Not Libby, not Elizabeth Sinclair. Your true name, the one at the heart of you that has never been spoken. He knows you, and He calls you by it. You, in all your uniqueness. You, in everything that differentiates you from others. You, in all you have in common with them. He knows you, and He calls you by name. He knows how you fit into this world.”
“Does He?” Her breath wouldn’t come, stuck somewhere between her lungs and her throat. It was a thought that demanded more attention than she could really give it right now, with a dangerous man due to arrive within the hour. A thought that, if she emerged on the other side of this night in one piece, she’d no doubt lie awake contemplating. “Would that He would tell me, then.”
“He has.” Oliver’s thumb stroked gently over her cheekbone. “Perhaps you weren’t perfectly adapted to the environs into which you were born, Libby. But that doesn’t mean He made a mistake in where He put you. It means only that He set you on a journey, like any other migratory creature who needs different settings for different seasons. He led you here.”
She’d thought it Mabena who had led her here, not God. But Mabena had come back for her own purposes. Libby hadn’t been anything more than an excuse to her. Yet coming here—he was right, in the words he didn’t say. She belonged here more than she ever had elsewhere. And while instinct hadn’t led her on this journey like a bird knowing just where to fly . . . perhaps Someone had. Someone who knew her name. Knew her needs.
“Do you think so? The Lord led me here?”
His nod was solemn. His eyes somehow more intense at midnight than they ever were midday. “To us. To . . . me.” The last word was but a whisper.
A whisper that sent a thrill up her spine. He was definitely leaning closer now, and tilting her face up with his hand, and her breath was still caught somewhere in her chest, but she didn’t need it anyway. She needed only the feel of his palm pressed to her cheek. His other arm resting gently around her waist. The sensation of his hair, too long for fashion or Mrs. Gillis’s tastes, brushing against her a moment before the unbelievable happened.
His lips touched hers. She would have dreamed of this moment, if she’d known how. Would have tried to guess at how it would feel, to hypothesize the effect it would have on her, to understand what she’d done to attract the attention so she could repeat it. But such facts, if they existed, didn’t matter in that moment any more than air did. All that mattered was that she felt, for the first time in her life, as if she were exactly where she was meant to be.
She half expected him to retreat after that first light kiss—and to immediately apologize or express regret for it. But instead, he pulled her a little closer, caressed her lips with his again. Smiled against her mouth. “Are you cataloging? Taking measurements? Classifying?”
A silent laugh slipped from her smile to his. “I’d like to. But I’ll need a longer example to study.”
His fingers moved from her cheek to her hair. “Well. Anything for science.”
She’d always wondered what drew a bee to a flower, what allure nectar had that would bring them flying in from miles away for just a taste. Now she knew. She’d fly miles too, if she had the wings for it, for this moment. This taste of melding lips and racing hearts and the certainty that eternity could spin out here and now and she’d never miss the normal tick of time, never need the rest of the world. Her limbs felt like tidewater, flowing and ebbing. Her brain was nothing but fog.
Until a scream shattered it all. Piercing—and then, worse. Silent.
Mabena plunged down deeper, hands battling against the water, head an explosion of black pain and white distortion and the sudden certainty that this would be her end. She could feel the pull of the very island itself. The heart of its earth dragging her down. The pulse of its waters covering her. The cut of rock. The weight of time. Lungs burning, rebelling against the brine she’d sucked in.