Peyton stood behind Lisa with his arms around her waist. They were looking through a doorway into his mother’s living room. Lisa’s parents had arrived with the kids, who were running back and forth between their three grandparents. Their youngest daughter was on Bonnie’s lap, telling her a long-winded tale about the family vacation to Disneyland.

Lisa smiled up at Peyton and said, “We finally pulled it off—our own Cubano’s Fish Camp.”

The beach house was quiet. Everyone had gone to bed.

“You asleep?” Peyton whispered to Lisa in the darkness.

“No—you?”

They both stifled laughter as they struggled to be quiet.

“Want to go swimmin’?” Peyton asked.

“We haven’t done that since the kids!”

“They all left their beds and climbed in with Mama, so I think we can pull it off.”

They slipped out of bed and got ready for a swim, then tiptoed through the house and out the front door to the deck and down to the sand. Peyton held her hand as they ran into the moonlit surf, Lisa giggling like a teenager.

“What’s so funny?” he asked her.

She looked up at the moon and shook her head. “I don’t know. I guess I feel like we’re getting away with something.”

Peyton laughed with her as they swam out just a short distance from the shore and floated on their backs, looking up at the sky.

“Isn’t that the Strawberry Moon?” Lisa said, reaching out for his hand.

“Sure is.”

Out here in the Atlantic with Lisa, his children safe inside the Tybee Island house that had brought such comfort to his mother, Peyton felt bathed in good fortune as the silver light beamed down. A blissful moment from their first time on Key West floated by on a memory. And he couldn’t resist a question for his wife.

“Hey, Lisa . . . what do you think we look like from the sky?”

Keep Reading for a Preview of Valerie Luesse’s Next Book!

Prologue

Alligator mississippiensis: the American alligator

leucistic alligator: the rare and beautiful white American alligator, distinguished from the albino by touches of pigment and brilliant blue eyes; cannot tolerate strong sunlight; believed to be incapable of surviving in the wild

Summer 1947

Raphe Broussard was just a boy when he first saw it—glimpsed it, at least. Mostly hidden in the sawgrass and canes of Bayou Chene, it had temporarily left the tip of its long alabaster tail exposed in the sunlight—a rare mistake. The streak of white offered only a hint of what lay hidden, the promise of what might be revealed. Raphe had watched silently, reverently almost, as the tail thrashed back and forth just once before disappearing into the green, leaving him to wonder if he had truly seen it at all. He told no one.

A full decade later, just a few days past his twenty-first birthday, Raphe would have his second encounter with the great reptile. His parents and many of their kin had been lost to the hurricane of 1940. A few years after that, his older sister fell victim to a storm of her own making as she drank herself into oblivion with her sorry excuse for a husband, both of them abandoning their only child for what they thought would be the high life in New Orleans. The high life ended them, quickly and without mercy. And though there was plenty of family willing to help, they had children of their own to feed, and the orphaned Iry, a boy of four, seemed to feel safe and content with no one but Raphe, who now had a decision to make.