He nodded. Ducked his head a few inches so their eyes were level. “The islands know your name, Libby—I know they do. You’re a part of us here. We will always be your people. Do you believe that?”

Her heart swelled in her chest so that she could only nod.

His smile deepened. “Don’t you see, then? It’s like that with God, but more. He knows your name. Not Libby, not Elizabeth Sinclair. Your true name, the one at the heart of you that has never been spoken. He knows you, and He calls you by it. You, in all your uniqueness. You, in everything that differentiates you from others. You, in all you have in common with them. He knows you, and He calls you by name. He knows how you fit into this world.”

“Does He?” Her breath wouldn’t come, stuck somewhere between her lungs and her throat. It was a thought that demanded more attention than she could really give it right now, with a dangerous man due to arrive within the hour. A thought that, if she emerged on the other side of this night in one piece, she’d no doubt lie awake contemplating. “Would that He would tell me, then.”

“He has.” Oliver’s thumb stroked gently over her cheekbone. “Perhaps you weren’t perfectly adapted to the environs into which you were born, Libby. But that doesn’t mean He made a mistake in where He put you. It means only that He set you on a journey, like any other migratory creature who needs different settings for different seasons. He led you here.”

She’d thought it Mabena who had led her here, not God. But Mabena had come back for her own purposes. Libby hadn’t been anything more than an excuse to her. Yet coming here—he was right, in the words he didn’t say. She belonged here more than she ever had elsewhere. And while instinct hadn’t led her on this journey like a bird knowing just where to fly . . . perhaps Someone had. Someone who knew her name. Knew her needs.

“Do you think so? The Lord led me here?”

His nod was solemn. His eyes somehow more intense at midnight than they ever were midday. “To us. To . . . me.” The last word was but a whisper.

A whisper that sent a thrill up her spine. He was definitely leaning closer now, and tilting her face up with his hand, and her breath was still caught somewhere in her chest, but she didn’t need it anyway. She needed only the feel of his palm pressed to her cheek. His other arm resting gently around her waist. The sensation of his hair, too long for fashion or Mrs. Gillis’s tastes, brushing against her a moment before the unbelievable happened.