“Good afternoon, then, Libertie,” he said. And he turned to go back the way we’d come.

I was at the front door again, but I could not bring myself to go in.

I had admired my mother, in her ability to use the people around her for greater good: the baby in the bush; Mr. Ben and his delusions; the matrons who funded her hospital. I had thought myself a coward that I could not do the same. I had burnt in anger at a physics of the world that my mother took as given. And even in that anger, I had failed to do anything, had been disgraced as a student. I was no one’s promise.

But Dr. Emmanuel Chase still thought me good. Or, at least, thought of me as someone to admire. Mama had made it clear my anger was useless, unbecoming, superfluous in this world. But anger looked marvelous on Dr. Chase. It gave him a conviction, a heaviness, that he would not have had if he was sweet, if he was asked to be as polite as I was. He would be my avatar.

Through him, I could taste righteousness.

And he understood me. I thought.

To choose him would be to hurt my mother in a way I was not even sure of yet. I knew it would make a wound. I did not know then how deep, or how lasting.

I had been a success in something after all, and there were too many people to fit into the church alone. The children would marry in the copse of trees, which we hung with garlands of flowers. Colored people came from Manhattan, from Jersey, from Long Island. Some even came up from Philadelphia, on the word of Lucien and Madame Elizabeth. The whole thing had turned into a kind of homecoming for the older people, some of whom had not seen one another since the war ended, who cried as they embraced, who walked together arm in arm, who stopped to whisper to one another or sometimes draw back to laugh at some change in fortune.

Sometimes, when I looked up from wiping a child’s nose, I saw my mother in the crowd. She was on the arm of Madame Elizabeth, and the two of them were always in the midst of at least five other ladies. None of the former members of the LIS—that was not to be. But a few women stood gravely beside her as she spoke, and only allowed themselves to smile when Madame Elizabeth broke in and interrupted her.

Suddenly, Mama looked up and caught my eye, and I looked away. I crushed the purse at my side, just to hear the crinkle of a piece of paper there. It was a note, slipped under my door that morning in the small span of time between the Graces leaving the bed and when I turned over in sleep. The note was addressed to Erzulie, and it had been written in a hand I had not seen before but had known immediately who it belonged to.