A year and a half away, I had not forgotten her face, but I was shocked by the changes to it. Her hair was not as bright—it was fainter— not yet given over to gray but closer to it than when I had left. And when I stepped close to her, I saw that her face was threaded with a thousand little lines of worry. As I embraced her, I heard Madeline Grady’s instruction: You’ve got to press the memory out.

Even her embrace felt different—my mother’s arms were not a place I knew well, but in my recollections of them, her arms had always been heavy and strong. They felt lighter now, and her skin, where it touched mine, felt soft.

Is Mama ill? I remember thinking for one terrible moment, but then realized, with a shock, the truth was more awful. I had not noticed her age when we were together. But seeing her, after we were apart, all her years on this Earth came down between us.

I pulled away.

“We have missed you,” she said. And then she looked over my shoulder expectantly. “Is this your great cause, then?”

“Miss Louisa and Miss Experience,” I said. I saw Louisa quickly reach for Experience’s hand and then drop it as they moved forward to greet my mother.

“Libertie speaks so much about you,” Louisa said.

“And this,” my mother said, “is Monsieur Emmanuel Chase.”

He was only a little bit taller than Mama. This is the first thing I remember noticing about him. He had been there this whole time while I embraced her, just back behind her elbow, but I had not noticed him in the excitement of reunion.

He held out his hand, the other tucked behind his back, the model of a gentleman.

I took it.

He was most nearly white—Mama had been modest when she said he could get by. He was even lighter than she was. His hair was fine, but balding at the temples, narrowing back into a widow’s peak, the rest of it slicked back with oil, though curling at the bottoms. His eyes were deep and wide-set and black, and his mouth was thin. This was because he sucked his lips in whenever his mouth was relaxed, a habit his mother had switched into him. When his mouth was allowed to fully rest, as it did in sleep, his lips were as full as any of ours, fuller even than my own. His mother beat him because his lips were, in her imagination, the only sign that he was a Negro. Holding them in or letting them loose was a choice between life and death, she believed. But I would only learn this from him later, when I lay close enough to trace his mouth’s outline for myself, with my little finger.