It took a moment to realize we were not alone in the room. There was Lenore, and our houseguests—the Graces, Madame Elizabeth, Lucien, and Emmanuel Chase himself, who stood at the mantel, a look of nervous expectation on his face.

He stepped forward. “You told her?” he said. I realized he was speaking to me.

“She discovered on her own,” I said.

Mama stepped forward and held out her hand. “Congratulations,” she said.

As Emmanuel reached to take it, she doubled over, a stream of sick splattering the hem of her skirts.

And that was how we announced we were to be married.

Emmanuel said we could always elope. “We do not need to stand up before your mother and family. We could be married by a judge and leave for Haiti as soon as possible.” But I knew if the mere mention of marriage had made my mother sick, it would possibly kill her if we brought more humiliation through an elopement.

So we planned for our wedding. Quickly, because in my harried scheming, I’d figured it would be another two months before Cunningham College’s letter informing my mother that I was not welcome back would reach the house. If I was safely married by then, and on a ship to Haiti, I could spare myself the exquisite pain of seeing her further disappointment. I was a coward in that way.

It seemed to me marriage was as good a plan as any other. I would not be a doctor, but I could perhaps be a wife. This optimism sprang from the fact that I was still not sure what a wife would be, but I knew what a doctor was and that I couldn’t be one.

We were to be wed quickly. Madame Elizabeth announced she would make my wedding dress and wrote to Monsieur Pierre to tell him she would not be home for another month. She installed herself in Mama’s front parlor, with a ream of white cotton and one long panel of lace that we had managed to buy, which she assured me she would drape across my shoulders.

All of the preparations I had made for the play wedding just a few weeks before suddenly became real. We were to be married in the same circle of trees, as close to my father’s grave as possible. I had insisted on that for Mama’s sake, but my mother had looked at me blankly when I’d told her, then nodded. She was not speaking to me. She nodded or shook her head, but she did not share any words with me. She continued to speak to Emmanuel—with him, she kept everything the same—issuing him orders for the clinic, conferring with him on patients, showing him the books. It was only I who was enveloped in silence.

Madame Elizabeth tried to talk with her. Emmanuel himself asked her to please stop. But she would only say, “I’ll speak to my daughter again on her wedding day.”