“I think we could have handled it,” I tell Mom later. I am helping her walk back from the bathroom. There’s something so undignified about it, I think, this tiny shuffling walk she has now, the way she has to have help even to pee. She doesn’t like it, either. Every time we do this she gets this grim expression, like she would do anything for me not to see her this way.

“Handled what?” she asks.

“The truth. That Dad was an angel. That we’re Triplare. All that. We could have kept the secret.”

“Uh-huh,” she says. “Because you’re so good at that.”

“If it was life or death, if I knew that, I could be,” I protest. “I’m not an idiot.”

I pull back the covers and carefully steady her while she slides into the bed. Then I pull the covers up to her waist, smooth them.

“I couldn’t risk it,” she says.

“Why not?”

She gestures for me to sit down, and I do. She closes her eyes, opens them again. Frowns.

“Where’s your dad?”

“Gone. Where does he go, anyway?”

“He probably has work to do.”

“Yeah, gotta go burn a bush for Moses,” I quip.

She smiles. “Marge Whittaker, 1949.”

It takes me a second to understand what she’s referring to. “You mean the one before Margot Whitfield?”

“Yes.”

“Marge. Nice. Did you always go by some form of Margaret?” I ask.

“Almost always. Unless I was running from something very bad. Anyway, Marge Whittaker fell in love.”

I get the feeling that she’s not talking about Dad. She’s talking about the time she mentioned before, the time she almost got married. In the fifties, she said.

“Who was he?” I ask softly, not sure I want to know.

“Robert Turner. He was twenty-three.”

“And you were . . .” I quickly do the math. “Almost sixty. Mom. You cougar, you.”

“He was a Triplare,” she says. “I’d never known too many angel-bloods before, Bonnie and Walter, who I met when I was thirteen, before I even knew what an angel-blood was, and Billy, who I met during the Great War, but never anybody like Robert. He could do anything, it seemed. He was capable of anything. One day he walked into the office where I was working as a secretary, and he asked me to dinner. Naturally I was surprised; I’d never seen him before. I asked him why he thought I’d agree to go to dinner with a complete stranger. And he said we weren’t strangers. He’d been dreaming of me, he said. He knew that I liked Chinese food, and he knew exactly the restaurant he was going to take me to, he knew I’d order sweet-and-sour pork, and he knew what my fortune would say. So you see, I had to go, to find out if he was right.”

“And he was right,” I say.

“He was right.”

“What was it? Your fortune, I mean.”

“Oh.” She laughs. “‘A thrilling time is in your immediate future.’ And his said, ‘He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.’ And both of those were right, too.”

“You were a part of his purpose?”

“Yes. I think he was meant to find me.”

“And what happened to him?” I say after a minute, because I sense it’s bad.

“The Black Wings found out about him. When he would not join them, they killed him. Samjeeza was there. I asked him to help us, but . . . he wouldn’t. He stood by and watched.”

“Oh, Mom . . .”

She shakes her head. “That’s what happens,” she says. “You need to understand. That’s what happens when they know. You have to fight for your life.”

The next morning Billy drives us to school, as usual. Everybody but Jeffrey seems way more relaxed about the Samjeeza problem since Dad showed up. If Samjeeza is powerful, I figure that Dad must be twice as macho, with no sorrow to impede him, the righteousness of the Lord and all that. We don’t talk most of the way, each of us lost in our own world, until Billy suddenly says, “So, how you holding up?”

Jeffrey stares out the window and acts like he didn’t hear her. She looks over at me.

“No idea,” I tell her.

“Not the kind of news you get every day.”

“Nope.”

“It’s good news, though,” she says. “Your dad being an Intangere. You know that, right?”

It seems like it should be a good thing. Except for the part where it means Jeffrey and I were pretty much born with a target on us. “Right now it just feels weird.”

She glances at Jeffrey in the rearview mirror. “You alive back there?”

Affirmative grunt. Usually Billy can charm Jeffrey, coax the occasional smile out of him, no matter what mood he’s in. Probably because she’s so pretty. But today, Jeffrey’s not cooperating.

“I bet it feels weird,” she says to me. “Everything’s been turned upside down on you.”

“Have you ever met a Triplare?” I ask after a minute.

She scratches the back of her head, considers. “Yes. Two of them, besides you and Long Face back there. Two, in all of my hundred and twelve years on this earth.”

“Could you tell they were different? From other angel-bloods, I mean?”

“Honestly, I didn’t get to know either of them. But on the outside I’d say they looked and acted like everyone else.”

“You’re a hundred and twelve?” Jeffrey suddenly pipes up from the back.

Her pleasant smile stretches into a mischievous grin. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you never to question a woman about her age?”

“You just said it.”

“Then why’d you have to ask?” she shoots back playfully.

“So you only have eight years left.” He looks down into his lap as he says this.

I feel a pang of something like loneliness then, knowing that Billy only has eight years left. I won’t get to have her in my life very long. In some ways I was taking a lot of comfort in the idea that Billy was going to hang around after Mom died. She was like a tiny piece of Mom I got to keep. She has all these memories of her, all this time they spent together. “Eight years isn’t very much,” I say.

“Eight years is plenty of time for what I have planned.”

“Which is?”

“I want to get to know you two, for one thing. That’s one part of your parents’ master plan I never agreed with. You know, when you were babies, I used to change your diapers.”

She winks at Jeffrey. He blushes.

“Don’t get me wrong. They had their reasons for keeping you isolated. Good reasons. But now, I get to spend time with you. See you graduate. Help you pack up for college. I hear it’s Stanford, right, Clara?”

“Right. Stanford.” I did accept their offer. I’m destined to go there, according to Angela.

Billy nods. “Mags always did have a thing for Stanford.”

“Did you go with her?”

She snorts. “Gracious, no. I never had any tolerance for school. My teachers were the wind, the trees, the creeks and rivers.”

We pull up to the school.

“And on that note,” Billy says cheerfully, “off you go. Try to learn something.”

I want to tell Tucker about my dad, but every time I open my mouth to say something about it, try to frame the words, it sounds so dumb. Guess what? My dad just dropped into town yesterday. And you know what else? He’s an angel. Which makes me this super-special-über angel-blood. What do you think of that?

I glance over at him. He appears to be actually paying attention to the lecture in government class. He’s cute when he’s concentrating.

Mr. A’s about to call on you.

Christian. I tune in just in time to hear Mr. Anderson say, “So, who knows the rights included in the First Amendment? Clara, why don’t you take a crack at it?”

“Okay.” I glance down at my blank notebook.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, Christian reads off in my mind.