Libby shook her head. “I don’t understand. There is only one set of facts.”

“Is there?” That fairylike chuckle slipped into the room, made Darling shift, curl into a new position even closer to Mamm-wynn, and redouble his purring. “Is that what your microscope has shown you?”

She opened her mouth but then paused. “It shows me that what I assume is sometimes wrong. That what my eye sees is only a partial story.”

“Exactly so.” Mamm-wynn nodded, her eyes slipping closed again, though only for a moment. “As our eyes always do in this world. We see only in part. But there is more. More to this physical world that your magnifying lenses can show you. And more still beyond it that we need a spiritual lens to see.”

Her chest went tight. “The mysteries.”

“How an old woman can know where her granddaughter is hiding.” Mamm-wynn’s fingers drifted back down to rest on the bedcover. “How sometimes the future can be whispered into our hearts. How one Man’s blood can take away our sins.”

The tightness was different this time than what she usually experienced. Not the anxious squeezing that made her stomach ache. But the kind she felt when Oliver looked at her. The kind she’d known when Mabena had called her friend. The kind that had seized her when Mama and Bram presented her with the microscope last Christmas, proving not only that they knew her but that they loved her as she was.

The kind that spoke of truth beyond facts. Of the spirit beneath the cells of her body. Of a God who called her by name and made a place for her in this world where she was allowed to explore it. Of a Son who did the miraculous, the impossible, so that she might live after those cells returned to dust—and so that she might love beyond all reason in the interim, knowing that’s where true treasure lay.

That really was the mystery. Not how a plant grew or whether a comet was a chartable phenomenon or a harbinger of supernatural destruction. Those they could learn about and come to understand, as Oliver had said. But how sins could be forgiven, how Jesus could have taken them upon himself with death and then come to life again, how they could somehow partake of a world beyond the physical one she so loved . . . those were the things that belonged to faith. Those were the things science couldn’t answer, and didn’t need to.