As she opened the book they’d been reading, she asked herself once again why she was putting herself through all this. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have enough to worry about. It was mid-July. She wouldn’t be able to begin harvesting this year’s honey until early August, if she was lucky, and as always, she was frantic about money. She’d been trying to create new products, but that took a financial investment for materials, and how many of her products would actually sell? At least she’d begun to see tiny cracks in Toby’s dislike of her, the same cracks that had formed in her own resentment toward him.

The wicker armchair creaked as he pulled his grubby bare feet up on the edge of the cushion. “I can read good. You don’t have to read to me like I’m a kid.”

“I like reading aloud,” she said. “That way, I can learn at the same time as you.”

“I already know all this stuff.”

That was total crap. He knew even less than she did, although she was learning more every day.

With the help of the island librarian, she’d located a few books on transracial child rearing only to discover they focused primarily on whether or not it was right for white families to adopt black children. Hardly helpful. Most of the rest of what she’d been able to discover didn’t go much further than an explanation of hair care, something Toby was handling just fine for himself. Not one of them answered her most fundamental question—how was a pale white woman like herself supposed to instill a sense of racial pride and identity in this golden-brown child?

She was working on instinct.

He slung one leg over the chair arm, waiting for her to begin. So far, he’d finished short, kid-friendly biographies of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, along with the story of the Negro Baseball League. He’d rebelled when she’d found a book about the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, so she’d begun reading it aloud to herself. Within a few pages, he’d forgotten his prejudice against “books about girls,” and when she’d reached the end of the first chapter, he’d pestered her to keep going.

Even though she was tired from a day that had begun too early, she read for nearly an hour. When she finally closed the book, Toby started picking at his big toe. “Did you get another movie for us to watch this weekend?”

“When We Were Kings.” She made a face. “It’s about boxing, a famous match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.”

He forgot about his toe as his face lit up. “Really?”

“I know. Disgusting. Let’s watch The Princess Diaries instead.”

“No way!”