Sky takes my right hand, and Sage takes my left. “I’m scared,” I whisper as my body heats up with light.
“I was scared, too, to step back in,” Sky tells me. “But it’s the easiest thing in the world. I promise. It’s like taking one long, deep breath.”
Mama’s glowing in blue, and that same form, the one I saw at the beach—she’s suddenly here, right in front of me. And Sky’s right—it’s likebreath. I pull my left hand from Sage—the one where Mama took my light from me—and I offer it to little me.
It’s as easy as an inhale when she returns. When I return to myself.
“Give it back! Give itback!” Mama wails, and the door bursts open.
“What’s going on in here?” Harriet yells.
Then there are hands wrapped around my neck. I turn and see my mother, tightening, frantic, her eyes brown and wild, herhair frizzing. This close to me, I can see how weak she is, how much she has stolen her whole life and how none of it has been enough.
“Get off her!” Sage screams, pulling her back, but Mama won’t let go.
“Stop,” I say, and when I do, lightning crackles over my whole body. She gasps and releases me as though she was burned. Because she was. I made sure it hurt. Not for revenge, but as a warning.
I take a step toward Mama, and she takes one back. “I am the Witch of Wild Lightning,” I tell her. “And until you are ready to apologize for all the wrong you’ve done to us—all three of us—I am finished with you.”
And then I turn and walk out, my sisters right next to me.
33
As I walk out ofthe gallery, I am completely struck by the intensity of this earth. I can feelso much—the way the water inside the trees is the same water gathering in the clouds above us. The way the streetlamps, making everything look a little bit brassy and gold, are a speck of what lightning is, which is a speck of what the sun is. How we are all made up of light and water, sun, stars, oceans.
“Is this what it’s like?” I breathe, looking up, up, up. The sky is nearly black, but the last rays of sun illumine the clouds in a dirty apricot glow. I take a breath and more clouds come. I exhale and they push away. I raise my hand and rain flicks onto it, and when I drop it, the air clears of water entirely.
“Yes,” Sage says, smiling. “Like you can feel how everything intertwines and touches each other. And how you’re a part of that, too.”
“How could she take this from me?” I ask again, though there isn’t really an answer. It doesn’t matter. Because what was lost has now returned.
Shereturned.Ireturned.
“I don’t mean to interrupt your revelations,” Sky says to me. “But isn’t that Abuela Erika over there?”
I turn, and at the back of a restaurant, at one of the tables under a sea of fairy lights, sits a woman who is indeed Erika. She’s glowering at me as though I’d just struck her with lightning. I laugh—I can’t help it. Nothing will ruin this for me. I’m no longer broken, like she said. I’m no longer unlovable.
“Ready to go?” Sage asks, wrapping an arm around me.
I nod, and we make our way toward the car. But before we get there, someone stops us, hissing, “Flores brujas!”
I roll my eyes when I see it’s Erika walking up. “You.” She points at me. Behind her, her dinner companions—older women, probably friends or something—stare wide-eyed. “You think you can keep my grandson from me, and my great-grandchildren and get away with it?”
“Didn’t Carter tell you what would happen if you disrespected me again?” I say, and she flinches. I want to feel bad for her, but he set those boundaries. He said he’d never speak to her if she verbally abused me again.
“You got in his head!” she declares. “Why else would he say such horrible things to his grandmother? You and Eugenio.” She shakes her head. “I kept that money from him aslongas I could. Money and women”—she looks over me and my sisters—“Flores women, especially, make men weak!”
“Ma’am, with all due respect, I think you need to get laid.” Sky says it so seriously that Erika just blinks at her for a few seconds, speechless, while Sage bursts into laughter.
But I’m stuck on something. “What do you mean, you gave Carter the money? That’s the whole reason why—” I break off.That’s why he married me, I don’t say.
“What is this? Now you’ve messed up my grandson’s memory and sense of reason?” Erika gives me another nasty glare. “I waited a whole week. Begging him the whole while to get an annulment. But he kept saying,No, no, Abuela, I need the inheritance for my new life now. All that money at once would make him stupid, make him do stupid things like stay married toyou!”
I blink at her and then I look at Sage. “Carter already has the money? Like, for real? You’re not just babbling here?”
“I can’t believe he did this to me!” Erika is howling. I’m not even sure she’s heard the question.
“She’s had a lot to drink.” One of her dinner companions has walked up, putting her arm on Erika’s shoulder. “Come on, Erika. Let’s finish our salmon, no?”
