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.”

The Graces had left by then. They were committed to two more dates in the North—one in Hartford, Connecticut, and one in Florence, Massachusetts. We’d watched them leave for Manhattan, and as the boat pulled away to cross the East River, I tried to remember that I had never fully belonged to them at all. I had always been left out. Emmanuel took my hand as he stood beside me. I told myself, Soon, you will belong to him, and the thought was both thrilling and made me sad. If you would have asked me then what my heart’s desire was, it would have been to be with the Graces on a ferry or in a coach, maybe thinking pleasantly about Emmanuel Chase but not anywhere close to him in reality.