“You’ve given up your dream.”

“It wasn’t mine,” I said. “You dreamt it for me.”

“It was ours.”

“I cannot join you,” I said. “I am sick of the smell of other women’s blood, Mama. Please.”

“So you’ll leave me,” she said. “So you chose your body over your mind. So you were weak.”

“I am weak. But I did not fail you like that. Dr. Chase has been nothing but a gentleman. I have conducted myself with honor with him—”

“I have no reason to believe you,” she said. “You’ve already proven yourself a liar.”

She sat back in the dirt. Then she lay all the way down in the dust until she was looking at the night sky. We sat like that: Mama seeing stars, and me not daring to raise my eyes from the dirt, until she sighed heavily and settled even deeper into her skirts.

“I gave you too much freedom,” she said. “So much freedom and you gave it up for the first bright man who smiled at you.”

“I don’t want him, Mama.”

She took my hand in hers, still staring into the sky. Her voice was smaller now. “I know these tricks, Libertie. I hear them every day from the girls and women who come into my clinic, all big with child from a man who’s left them. They tell me, even then, ‘I don’t want him,’ but it’s only to save their dignity. You think he will do this to you, too? I should know that, at least.”

“He hasn’t done a single thing to me,” I said. “And I assure you, I don’t want him to.”

“You think it’s love,” she said. “Maybe it is love. But it is quite a thing, to be a wife. It is not the same as a lover. It is not the same as a doctor—”

“I know that, at least, Mama.”

“It is definitely not the same as being a free woman.” She turned to me, her eyes shining. “This is your ambition? You could be so much more, Libertie.”

“No,” I said, my voice thick with tears. “I can’t.”

She gave a ragged cry, the most terrible sound I have ever heard in the world, and if you would have told me as a little girl that I would have been the one to cause my mother to make that sound, I would have called you a liar. But here I was, beside her, as she sobbed.

“Come, Mama.” I pushed myself up, to stand above her. She looked so small in her circle of skirts, her head bent. I leaned down and pulled her up by her elbows. “Come, Mama. I am not lost to you yet. I will not marry him, if it makes you cry,” I said. I would have said anything to get her to stop making that sound. I got her to her feet. I put my arm through hers. I walked with her slowly, through the yard, up the steps, through the still-open door.