Epilogue
brEANNA
The raft bumped against the bank at Hadley Bend, and before Bishop had the bow line tied off, Opal was already climbing over the side.
"Bugs," she announced, pointing at the grasses along the waterline. "Mama. Bugs."
"I see them, baby." I caught the back of her life jacket before she could launch herself into the river oats headfirst. "We wait for Daddy to tie the boat. Then we look at the bugs."
She was three. She had Bishop's chin and my impatience and a fascination with anything that crawled, flew, or glowed that I was choosing to believe was genetic. She'd said her first word at eleven months—bug, not mama, not dada—and I'd been unreasonably proud of it ever since.
Bishop tied off the raft and stepped out into the shallows, then reached back for Opal.
She went to him with her arms up, and he lifted her onto his hip like she weighed nothing, which she basically did to him.
He carried her up the bank to the flat shelf where the hemlocks used to stand, where the wildflowers were thick and the grasses were tall enough to brush her dangling feet.
He set her down, and she was off—crouching immediately, peering into the vegetation with the intense focus of a person who had important work to do.
"She's going to find a beetle and try to bring it home," Bishop said.
"She's going to find six beetles and name all of them."
"Last time it was a millipede."
"Gerald. I remember Gerald."
He looked at me. Five years, and the look hadn't changed. The same steady focus he'd given me across the counter at Wildwood River Co. the first afternoon I'd walked in. Like I was the fixed point and always had been.
I'd defended my dissertation four months ago.
Dr. Breanna Ingalls—entomologist, specializing in bioluminescent signaling behavior in synchronous firefly populations along Appalachian riparian corridors.
The fieldwork that anchored the entire study had been conducted right here, at this bend, over four summers of data collection.
My advisor had called the site "one of the most significant Photinus carolinus habitats documented in the western Carolina range. "
Bishop had driven to Raleigh for the defense.
Sat in the back of the room with Opal on his lap while I presented four years of research to a committee of five people who had once been the only audience I'd imagined for this work.
Opal had been quiet for the first twenty minutes, which was a miracle, and then had pointed at a slide showing firefly flash patterns and said, "Pretty bugs," and the committee chair laughed so hard she had to take her glasses off and wipe her eyes.
I'd passed unanimously.
On the drive back to Wildwood Valley that night, Opal asleep in her car seat and Bishop's hand on my knee, I'd cried for thirty miles.
Not because I was sad. Because I'd spent years believing I had to choose—the work or the life, the career or the love, the scientist or the woman.
And I'd been wrong. I hadn't given up anything.
I'd built something bigger than I'd known to want.
The light was changing now. Gold going amber, the shadows stretching across the water, the sky above the open canopy shifting from blue to rose.
I knew this light by heart. I'd cataloged it across a hundred evenings at this bend—the exact progression, the way the colors moved through the sky like a sequence that had been running long before anyone was here to watch it.
"Watch the margins," I said to Opal, the same words I'd said to Bishop the first night he'd brought me here. "The shallow water along the south bank. That's where they'll start."
She crouched at the waterline, still as a stone, watching. Bishop stood behind me, and I leaned back into his chest, his arms coming around me the way they always did—easy, certain, like holding me was the most natural thing his body knew how to do.
The first flash came from low in the grasses. A single pulse—yellow-green, two-thirds of a second, then dark.
Opal gasped.
A second flash. A third. A dozen. They rose from the bank in waves, lifting into the warm air in slow arcs, and the river caught their reflections and doubled them, light above and light below, until the whole bend was glowing.
"Mama," Opal whispered. "Mama, look."
"I see them, baby."
She turned around, face lit in gold, eyes wide. "What are they saying?"
I smiled. My daughter, three years old, standing at the edge of a river, asking the right question. The only question that had ever mattered to me—not what are they, but what are they saying. The language in the dark. The signal and the answer.
"They're finding each other," I said.
Bishop's arms tightened around me. His mouth pressed against my temple—not a kiss. Contact. Confirmation. A signal repeated so many times now that it had become its own language.
Opal turned back to the fireflies. We stood on the bank at Hadley Bend and watched them rise—the three of us, the river, the steady hum of a summer night in the mountains—and I didn't reach for my notebook.
I didn't need to. I already had everything.