After the last dish was put away, Ellis leaned against a counter and faced Raven. “So . . . I have a problem we need to talk about,” she said.

“What problem?”

“Your name.”

Raven prepared for battle.

Ellis looked into her eyes. “I know. It’s the only name you’ve known. But I can’t call you that.”

“Why not? I call you Ellis.”

“The day you were abducted . . .” Ellis paused and looked out the dark window for a few seconds. Maybe to stop herself from crying. She looked at Raven. “When something traumatic happens, you remember all these weird little details. And those details become bad associations—forever, as it turns out in my case. And one of the bad associations I have from that day is a raven. There was one calling over and over when I left you in the forest.”

A shock seemed to zing all over Raven’s body.

“I almost felt like . . . this will sound crazy, but later I felt like the raven had distracted me with all that noise. I blamed it a little bit for what happened.” After a pause, she said, “I guess it was some kind of self-preservation. I was sick with guilt, and I needed to put some of the blame on someone or something other than myself.”

Mama had told the truth about a raven giving a baby to her! The raven spirit had known Ellis and Jonah weren’t the right parents for the baby they called Viola. It had distracted Ellis and given her to Mama. Raven wanted to cry with relief.

“I still hate the sound of ravens,” Ellis said. “But I don’t have to hear them now. Ravens don’t live in Florida.”

Too bad. Raven would miss them. Especially now that she knew a raven spirit truly had given her to Mama. Mama had thought the baby was born of the spirit world, but of course she would think that when a raven called and showed her a baby all alone in the forest. Raven could still think of the raven spirit as her father.

“Do you understand the problem?” Ellis asked.

“Yes.”

“Can you think of a solution?”

“You mean call me something else?”

“You could let me call you Viola. If you knew Quercus is the oak genus, maybe you know that Viola is the genus of—”

“Violets. I knew that since I was a little girl. My mother and I picked violets to eat every spring.”

Ellis recoiled a little when she said my mother. “Then maybe she’d like the idea that you’re named for the genus of that flower.”

“She might have liked that, but she would want me to keep the name she gave me.”

Ellis’s gaze hardened. “She had no right to rename another person’s baby.”

“I wasn’t yours anymore when she named me. I was hers. I was given to her.”

“What do you mean given? She stole you from me!”

“Not stole. You left me all alone, and she found me. She dreamed of having a baby for a long time. And there I was. That was no accident. There must have been a reason.”

“How dare you say that!” Ellis shouted. “Do you have any idea how much pain this woman you call Mother has caused me and my family? You have to deal with the reality that you were abducted. What she did was wrong. She’d still be in jail now if they’d caught her.”

“But she wasn’t caught. Why was that?”

Ellis trembled. “What, you think some divine intervention helped her escape with you?”

“I think there must have been a reason.”

“What reason?”

Raven couldn’t say she believed earth spirits had helped her. That was a forbidden topic.

“Did she tell you why she named you Raven?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

Everyone now knew Raven hadn’t been born of Audrey Lind’s body. She could tell Ellis the truth. “She told me she heard a raven calling to her in a forest. When she went to see what it wanted, there I was, a baby girl with raven eyes and hair—exactly what she wanted. She named me for the raven that brought us together.”

“Oh my god,” Ellis whispered. “You’ve known all along she didn’t give birth to you? You never told anyone?”

“What did it matter that I didn’t come from her body? I was born to be with her.”

“You were born to be with me!” Ellis shouted. “And with your father and brothers!”

“No, I met them. And that horrible grandmother. I was never meant to be with them. Or in that ugly house. My spirit would have gotten sick and maybe died if I lived with them. I think that’s why you left, too.”

Ellis stared at her openmouthed.

“If you like a pretty place like this, that house and those people were killing your spirit. You weren’t meant to be there either. But I’m sorry I had to be taken away from you for you to see that.”

Ellis held on to the counter and slid down to the floor. Raven must have hit on the truth.

“Are you for real? Am I imagining this?” Ellis said.

Raven smiled for the first time in many days. “I’m real.” She sat on the wood planks next to Ellis. She took her hand in both of hers. “I never meant to make you sad. I didn’t want to come here either. But I’m glad I got to meet the person who gave birth to me.”