The first things to come back were Gloria’s glass earrings, Azalea’s pewter spoon, Dalia’s empty perfume bottle. They found them in the sunken garden, earth-darkened, but whole, the earrings set next to each other like they’d been left on a nightstand.
Then, Calla’s paper flowers turned up like they were blooming from the hedges. Gloria’s apron and Estrella’s old dress washed up, drifting on the surface like floats of lily pads.
The Nomeolvides girls took these as signs that the land was forgiving them. These returned offerings were the ground’s silent way of letting them go.
But then came things they did not recognize. A watch with a braided wristband caught on an arbor. A pair of dark velvet shoes, embroidered gold, appearing on the stone steps. Tiny jars of saffron threads and chili powder.
None of their mothers or grandmothers would claim them. Not the necklace of silver leaves. Not the carved wooden comb with the scrolled handle. Not the satin purse embroidered with sea-colored beads. It made Estrella and her cousins wonder how many generations of Nomeolvides girls had done the same thing. How many hearts had lived with that same hope.
Now they had all pulled the work of their hands from the ground, and all the Briars except Bay had abandoned La Pradera. Even Reid would not come back, fearing this place now that he knew all his family had done, and all the wrath it held.
The Nomeolvides women would watch over this land. They would tell the truth of what had happened here, and they would let this land reclaim the acres of grass and flower borders and stone fountains. They would guide this place out from under more than a hundred years of betrayals so deep the Nomeolvides girls could not have imagined them.
Bay had told Fel and Adán and the other miners that they would live in the Briar house until they knew where they wanted to go next. “No arguments,” she said. They would stay until they could chart their paths on maps, or find the far descendants of family members they’d once known.
When they had all blinked at her, she told them, “It’s what my grandmother would have wanted.”
The miners would tell their story. Bay, the girl who’d grown up as the Briar bastard, would help them. The truth of what this place had been before it was La Pradera would be spoken.
Each day Estrella and her cousins kept their eyes ready to find what La Pradera had given back, like they were spotting dyed eggs hidden in the grass. But then, one damp, chilled morning, Calla’s father appeared in the low beds at the edge of the sunken garden. Then, days later, the traveling salesman Abuela Flor had loved showed up in the courtyard of blossoming trees. Then the map collector Gloria had counted as her father.
La Pradera gave them back, along with the possibility of who else might return to them.
It wasn’t just men with bodies who slowly came back. Some nights, Estrella and her cousins caught faint silhouettes lifting off La Pradera like shadows, the spirits of those lost so long ago they were more ready to leave this world than join it again. They rose into the air. Some fled across the sky like winged creatures skittering off water. Others joined the shapes of women who seemed to appear from the highest magnolia branches. Heartbroken women already gone from this family.
“Why?” Calla asked, and in that single word they all understood the question. Why were these men not coming back to walk this ground like the miners? Why were they not reclaiming their bodies and lives and turning up in the gardens?
“Because everyone they want to follow is gone,” Gloria said, her hand on Calla’s shoulder. “It’s been too long, so there’s nothing else here for them.” Her words were soft, not mournful. More like she was telling them all a nighttime story.
“It’s a good thing,” Azalea said, her voice so quiet and sure that she sounded like Gloria. “They’re going off to find everyone they love.”
The five of them watched the shadowed spirits rise from the gardens. Then the shape and faint light of them disappeared into the gray sky.
Without ever speaking of it, the older Nomeolvides women called back to them the lovers they had once sent away, fearing they might vanish. The cousins hadn’t heard anything about it from Azalea’s grandmother until they saw her at the front gate, meeting a man as old as she was, their smiles shy. Then, close to sunrise, Estrella caught from her window the sight of Calla’s grandmother embracing a woman whose hair was a mix of red and gray.
Estrella watched for Luisa, the woman whose name her mother had left unsaid for so long. She could not find the words to ask her mother, so instead she waited. They all waited, with the hope and wonder of how this land was thawing and warming to them.
All the grandmothers prayed into the grass beneath their feet and the sky above them, as grateful for the lovers returned to them as they were hopeful for others. When Estrella and her cousins and their mothers joined them under the darkening sky, she felt the force of all of them, true and heavy as some small star.