That sigh behind a closed door in the dark was a song I had never heard either of them sing before. It was the same song I heard, sometimes, while lying on the hearth of the Gradys’ home, many hours after everyone in the house had gone to bed. When I’d heard it there, I had instinctively pulled my blanket tighter around my head, hummed what songs I could remember from rehearsal, and, sometimes, resorted to clearing my throat loudly, to make it stop.

But I had not wanted to make whatever was behind that door quit. I had only felt a pang of longing. I had never wanted to know something so badly in my life. Not even when I saw Mama make a dead man walk, not even when I stared at the river for a lost lady, had I ever wanted to know something as much as I wanted the knowledge of what, exactly, Louisa and Experience were doing—no, not what they were doing, but what they were feeling—behind that locked door. Longing to know what had caused that smallest, sweetest of sighs made me shut my eyes tight as Lucien and his mother lazily quarreled about the best way to attack the fabric before them.

When Louisa had said that home was in Experience’s arms, and when she had defended Experience from every call questioning her coldness … they had been traveling to another country, I realized. They had lived there all along, while I stayed a citizen of this one, a land without sighs.

Mama, before I had left for college, had made oblique mention of what could happen to girls in school—“Girls, when they are left on their own, they become each other’s sweethearts sometimes”—but she had told it to me as something her white-lady patients sometimes fretted about, and for me, she made it clear, it was only another possible distraction to avoid on my way toward greatness. She had not suggested it could be like this. A closed door with a mystery behind it that I could never know.

Up until then, I had told myself that my disgrace at Cunningham College was a blessing. I’d thought I could endeavor to make this trip with the Graces into a permanent state of being—I could become their manager, writing to the respectable colored ladies of the North and finding drawing rooms and church floors and forest clearings where the Graces could sing. The three of us would never have to return to the place of my shame—we could indefinitely live in the admiration of colored women who would otherwise have scorned me for the failure I had become.