Ayers pushes herself up and goes to the corner to study the photographs. The top is a photo of Rosie with LeeAnn and Huck. Rosie is wearing a white cap and gown; it’s her graduation from the University of the Virgin Islands on St. Thomas. Huck looks pretty much the same as he does now, maybe a few pounds lighter then with a bit more red in his beard. Ayers studies LeeAnn, Rosie’s mother. She was tall and statuesque and wore her reddish-brown hair in a braided topknot. Ayers had heard all about the glamorous LeeAnn—that she had modeled as a teenager and gotten as far away as the fashion shows in Milan but had come home to marry her childhood sweetheart, Levi Small, who’d ended up leaving the island for good shortly after Rosie was born. LeeAnn had then gone to school to become a nurse practitioner. To hear some people tell it, LeeAnn was the most qualified caregiver at the Myrah Keating Smith Community Health Center, even better than the doctors. Ayers had found LeeAnn intimidating—initially, anyway. She exuded competence as well as something Ayers could only describe as a regal bearing. When LeeAnn first met Ayers, she’d seemed disapproving that Ayers had no college degree and no way to support herself other than the hand-to-mouth existence that waiting tables afforded. Don’t your parents want more for you? LeeAnn had asked. Ayers had tried to explain that her parents were wanderers without a home, without possessions, really, and that they counted wealth by life experiences. LeeAnn had met this news with a skeptical arched eyebrow. Don’t you want more for yourself? LeeAnn asked. Ayers had shrugged; she was twenty-two years old at the time. But it was LeeAnn Powers’s questions that led Ayers to get her second, slightly more professional job on Treasure Island. After that, LeeAnn’s opinion of her had seemed to improve. Learn everything you can about the business, LeeAnn said. Then save your money and buy it.

LeeAnn had been even tougher when dealing with Rosie. The worst insult LeeAnn could dish out was to say that Rosie took after her Small relatives. That look in Rosie’s eyes, for example, that fire, that defiance, was pure Small, LeeAnn said, and it had to be contained or the girl would ruin herself.

What would LeeAnn have made of the Invisible Man? Nothing good, Ayers guesses.

Ayers hasn’t said this out loud to anyone but she doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that Russell Steele, the “Invisible Man,” reappeared in Rosie’s life just after LeeAnn died. A few weeks ago, Ayers had learned that Russ was Maia’s father, meaning he had been in Rosie’s life a lot longer than anyone knew.

Oh, how Ayers longs to ask Rosie herself. You could have told me everything, Ayers thinks. I was a safe place for you.