When we could no longer see the ship, we walked back downtown to Mama’s hospital, to where Emmanuel now slept, in the red velvet waiting room of the clinic. He had agreed to leave my mother’s house the night our engagement was announced. “Believe me,” he had said to her as he held his bags before him, “I meant no disrespect to your household, Madame Doctor. You have been nothing but—”

And Mama had cut him off. “I believe you,” she’d said, and he had been so relieved he did not hear what I had heard, the words unsaid, which were that she believed him—but not me, her own daughter.

Emmanuel and I allowed ourselves a half hour visit each day in the waiting room, when it had closed for the afternoon, while Mama and Lenore, on the floors above us, set the clinic right for the night. We would sit in that parlor, and Emmanuel would tell me what would come to pass in Haiti.

“In Haiti, you will meet my sister and Ti Me.”

“In Haiti, Papa will be the first to greet you.”

“You’ll learn how to say that word, once we are in Haiti.”

And I could almost believe him, I desperately wished to believe him, that the future was a promise. But then I would leave him and go back home.

Madame Elizabeth did not, of course, have her dressmaker’s dummy in Kings County, and so instead she laid out the pieces of my dress on the parlor floor. Every night, there was a bit more to my bridal costume, and I would come back from my talk with Emmanuel and see it where it lay, deflated, on the floorboards, a kind of skinny ghost of my life to come. It made me sick to see it all flat like that. A bad omen.

“Put it on me,” I told Miss Elizabeth, and she laughed. “I’ve never seen a girl so eager to be a bride.”

The night before the wedding, Emmanuel Chase came for dinner, and it was almost as it had been when we had first met. Mama stood at the top of the table and raised her cup and toasted both of us. “A happy marriage to my Libertie,” she said, and I felt the tears run down my face in gratitude that she had seemed to forgive me.

But when I went to embrace her later that evening and held her close, she whispered in my ear, “Don’t do it,” and I realized that she would never bring herself to forgive me, and I went up to bed cold.