When Betty had arrived, I hadn’t been able to turn her away. She was my cousin, my childhood friend; plus, the Order wanted her back. She had shown up with her daughter in the middle of the night, covered in insect bites and scratches, panicked and dehydrated. She had run through the jungle with the baby, trying to escape. I’d known she had settled in the jungle nearby with the organization she belonged to, and I had always intuited how badly that plan would turn out, but Betty believed in herself. She and her comrades were trained, they had an arsenal. When she announced herself to the guards at the entrance to Puerto Reyes, alone and defeated, I took her in. I talked to Florence, to my mother, my father. Of course she’s welcome, they said. She’s part of the family, she’s a Bradford. The Ceremonial was in a few days. She would have to stay locked away until it was over, because Betty was not an Initiate. Later they would decide what to do with her and her return, which they had long hoped for.

Betty, however, had left her isolation, despite my orders and my pleas. She wasn’t rebellious, she was disobedient. She could be brave, I won’t argue with that, but she didn’t understand where the limits were. Why did she go out there? Why didn’t I lock her in? It was my fault. And her moment of curiosity had created another weight for Juan to carry, because now he also had to suffer for Betty and her daughter. How hard it had been to calm her down after she had unwittingly stumbled on the Ceremonial. She had no idea what she had seen, she didn’t understand it. She was in shock for weeks, raving about a black light that had taken her daughter—though that wasn’t what happened, it only cut off her arm—and then the man, she screamed, the man had healed the wound with his hands! With his hands! she repeated. The black light and the hands. She screamed all night. She went crazy. I halfheartedly took care of her daughter. It was lucky that Marcelina and Tali were there, because I didn’t have patience for Adela, who was nervous and whiny. I didn’t really like kids, just my own son, and not even him all the time. I had told Betty that the man with the hands was Juan, but she never did believe it. How annoying.

And how pleased Mercedes, Florence, and Anne had been with what they considered a gift, a black miracle. That’s what they called it: the youngest child ever touched by the Darkness—and she was in the family! Adela was a gift to the Order. Toss them both in the river, Stephen had told me. I would have happily done it, too, but there would have been consequences and I was still in danger, because I was disposable. I saw it in Mercedes’ eyes. You never deserved the honor of giving birth to that boy, she would tell me. By that point, my love affair with Puerto Reyes was over. The project at the museum was coming to an end and I wanted to live in a city, go back to Buenos Aires. I had proposals not just from the university, but from foreign institutions that had satellites in the capital.