Mariel, who had touched her softly, insistently, that night, and all those that followed in the summer of her 13th year.

Mariel, whose eyes painted her face with the wide open adoration of
someone who had discovered holiness in a place the nuns had never
taught her to look.

No one had ever looked at her that way again, or touched her with such reverence, or loved her so fiercely. Until Helena.

“You’ll never be the same, Tina,” she had whispered, sliding her
fingers into Tina’s wetness and rekindling a fire that still burned, a
fire Bette couldn’t quench, a fire that had transformed her.

The fire burned in her now. She felt it in the inexplicable desire, in
the growing ache of her clit, alive in the arousal of dream and memory.
She felt sexual, she felt hungry for the touch of those women who had
seen her strength, her power, her beauty, and adored her for it.

She wasn’t the same. In the space of a few short hours, she’d been
remadewhen an expected gentle labor turned to crisis, when the fever
roared out of her bones and burned its way through her skin, when her
daughter was carved out of her swollen belly, when her stapled womb had
cramped and tightened for the first time in response to her child’s
need to be fed, to be held, to drink love in the milk of her breasts

In less than a day, Tina Kennard had been reborn into her own history,
a mother in a long line of mothers who furrowed the hard soil to plant
beans and corn and tomatoes, mothers who poured off the warm cream into
heavy bowls filled with bright berries still hot from the sun, mothers
who promised themselves that their daughters would have more–and
less–than they had settled for.

She’d been reborn into the memory of a love so intense, so sacred, so
forbidden that she’d buried it deep because she believed she wasn’t
worthy of it. Like her mother, her aunts, and all the women before
them, she had settled for what she thought she deserved, not for what
she thought she could have.

“Having a child changes you.” Tina felt the truth of it in her marrow.
Change, doubling back, doubling in on itself, change that was deeply
rooted in memories she’d been too afraidor too ashamedto carry with
her out of the Carolinas and into the west, to the city of angels where
a life could be lost and a new one created to take its place.

Having a child had changed her, in ways she could not possibly foresee.
But she felt its enormous power moving in her, through her, the
certainty that to be a woman who was powerful enough to create life of
her own flesh was to be a woman powerful enough to reclaim her own
lifeher own sanctity. Mariel had seen it, Helena had known it,
Angelica had tasted it. She confirmed it now as she drifted off to
sleep, dreaming again of a young girl’s hand between her legs, fingers
stroking her to ecstasy and release.