I veered to my left first, taking care not to tread on the wood. I remembered that my dad once took a false step and fell, breaking through the entire roof right over my bedroom. The heat made me want to hurry; streams of sweat tickled me everywhere. I leaned in to climb through an opening in the low brick dividing wall and looked out onto that side. I expected I wouldn’t see anything in particular, no menacing scratches on the wood, no suspicious objects, no traces of a nest; most of all, I expected not to find myself confronted with some structural problem that would force me to keep cajoling builders. I surveyed the expanse from left to right and panicked when I saw exactly what I’d imagined: no signs of any animals at all. I revisit it now in my mind as I burrow under the sheets – raaasss, troook, the roof keeps saying. It doesn’t smell like rats up there, or like anything other than dust. I wiped the sweat from my eyelids and retreated, ready to hide away again. There are no loose tiles, not even chinks where draughts or light can seep in, other than the skylight. No, no one could possibly come in through the roof, which is what I’d been thinking – that the noises were steps, that it meant the racket of an entire family hiding from OCCRE on top of my house. I shivered up there: what if it’s the duppy? I imagined a pair of Irish eyes meeting mine and felt like my head might burst. Dazed, drowning in sweat, I made my way down. I stepped onto the terrace for a moment to catch my breath, returned for the ladder, and closed the bathroom and bedroom doors. Could it be an iguana? Craaack, craaack, I hear again. I try to put it out of my mind and open my laptop.

There’s an email from Rudy. I knew the viceroy took the first census on San Andrés in 1793, but I told him I hadn’t been able to find the document itself. In his email, Rudy greets me, says he’s got news, and sends me two attachments. I open the documents before I read the rest of his message.

There’s the digital version of the census: a weathered yellow sheet of paper that lists, in cursive handwriting, the families on the island, from largest to smallest. A sense of predestination shoots through me. Among the 391 people on record, I read, were Don Torquato Bowie, ‘his wife’ Sarah, his four children, seventeen slaves and the tiller of the land.

‘Sarah’, named after the wife of Abraham the patriarch, I utter you, I invoke you.