Standing up, she felt the edge of the envelope against her rib. She pulled it into the basement light. This man had killed her father. And he knew it. She couldn’t imagine living with that. She pulled out a handful of the cash that she couldn’t imagine really using. She set the envelope amongst the other supplies on the shelf and spent some time stuffing cash under the vases to lift them closer to the underside of the table.

Kama and Brendon were together. That felt right. Everything, anything was allowed by her loss. She couldn’t say why, not to any judge or jury. But having done this, she exhaled.

Dune went back up to Kama’s room, which felt brighter, clearer now. She opened the top box in the closet. Right on top were three cameras, each in its own Ziploc freezer bag—a Polaroid with no film, a fancy black masterpiece with an assortment of detached lenses, and a small digital handheld wrapped with its cord. She blessed her father’s Virgo tendencies and took the digital one from the box.

She closed the box up. That was enough touching her grief for one night.

“Oh Dune—it’s an altar!”

Elouise stood next to the model, hands resting on her round belly. Dune felt competing emotions at this new experience of having another human standing down here—she felt protective over what she had created, proud of the detail and care.

Dune showed Elouise each of the systems, everything she had so far. The little signs for each person she had found. The cards, organized alphabetically by neighborhood. The images. Elouise wanted to understand each one.

After reviewing it all, looking at it from every angle, Elouise repeated herself. “It’s sacred work, love. It’s an altar.”

Dune hesitated to own that. “I’ve been seeing it as a research project. I mean Kama used to make altars. But we never had some clear lineage. I don’t want to be …” Dune paused, then made a gesture of grabbing things all around her.

“You can’t. Don’t worry.”

“Yes, I can. I don’t belong to anything, it doesn’t belong to me.”

“Well that’s just the thing,” Elouise turned to Dune with soft eyes. “When everything has been taken, filling that emptiness ain’t appropriation. It’s something else. It ain’t pure, none of it. I think of these practices, my Orisha, my altars, my prayers and chants, and all this accumulation of spiritual armor, as something to comfort me when my ancestral ghost limbs hurt. Because I need Spirit so much! I answer what calls me—Spirit is bigger than any one lineage! It comes through all these channels. It’s complicated, beautifully complicated. But it ain’t appropriation, not amongst displaced and denied peoples. It’s different.”

Dune was quiet, accepting the permission Elouise offered, letting the moment of divine tremble up an energy between them.