In July, Marco sat with Abuela Celia in her kitchen and told her everything, including the parts he'd withheld before.
The name. The pronouns. The running. The pack. The fourth moon and what he'd chosen. Rook.
He told her about Mateo, and about Cara finding the name change in the county records, and about the pack's memory of his great-great-grandfather running in the Backs until he was old and gray-muzzled and finally at peace.
Abuela Celia listened to all of it with her tea and her rosary and her seventy-two years of paying attention.
When he was finished, she was quiet for a long time.
"Marco," she said. Testing the name, the way you test ice.
"Yes."
"Marco," she said again, more settled. "Marco Vasquez." She looked at him. "You know, when I was pregnant with your mother, I had a dream. I dreamed of a wolf standing at the edge of a forest, and the wolf was looking back over its shoulder, and in the dream I understood — the way you understand things in dreams — that the wolf was coming home." She wrapped her hands around her cup. "I thought the dream was about me. About our family. About the Vasquez name finally settling somewhere."
"Maybe it was about me."
"Maybe it was about all of us." She looked at the window, the July light coming in golden and late. "Mateo and I. You and Mateo. The family line, coming back to the place it started." She turned back. "I am not surprised. I am sad, a little, for the pieces of Mara that you are putting down. But I know —" she touched his face with one careful hand, "— I know you are not putting down anything that was real."
"I'm keeping all of it," he said. "The memories. The years. Everything that was true."
"Good," she said. "Then Mara is not gone. She became part of you. The way the land becomes part of the river that runs through it." She lowered her hand. "Marco."
"Abuela."
"I am proud of you."
He put his forehead against her shoulder the way he'd done when he was small, and she put her hand on his hair, and outside the July sun was warm and the garden was blooming and in the Backs the old forest stood in its ancient patient dark, waiting for the next full moon.