Even in the heat, Ti Me had draped a blanket over me, and in my exhaustion I had let her. But now I tossed it off and pressed at my stomach, naming each part I imagined I felt through my skin. The liver, the kidneys. I imagined feeling the womb. I had not thought of this part of it, of falling pregnant without my mother there to name everything. I thought of the last day of our journey to Haiti, when we’d thrown the satchel Mama had handed me overboard and toasted to babies to come. I had done it to amuse Emmanuel, to amuse myself, really, by imagining what my mother would think if she could see me then. I had not let it occur to me that any of it could be real.

The world is only consequences, Libertie. I could hear her voice now.

“You do not always have to be right,” I said to the ceiling above me.

There was a flash of light there, the reflection from the bowl of water and herbs Ti Me had left by my side. I watched as the light from the water skipped over the ceiling—back and forth, back and forth. It meant nothing. It meant everything. I was not sure where this thing called a will came from. Mama had it. Emmanuel had it. Even mad Ella, in her obsessions, had a will. But I did not. Would it come when whatever was in me was born? Or did I have a little more time to develop one, before this something else was here?

I began to laugh again, a little weakly. The heat of the graveyard was beginning to leave me. I could feel the sweat cooling on my face. By the time Emmanuel returned, led by Ti Me, both of them panting from running there, I was sitting up in bed, sipping from the bowl of water, in the last little bit of sunlight from the shutters I had thrown open wide.

“You are feeling better, at least?” Emmanuel said, his voice hesitant.

I set down my cup. “There was never anything wrong with me.”

“Ti Me says you took fright.”

“I was only overheated. But I am well now.”

He sat down on the bed, motioned for Ti Me to leave the room.

“She told me what you heard at the cemetery.”

“Do you believe it?”

“It would not be surprising.”

“You do not sound delighted.”

“It is only that there is so much to do, still, for the two of us,” he said. He bent his head. He would not look at me.

He made as if to fall into bed beside me, but I pushed him away.

“You do not wish for this either,” I said.

“There is not much to be done. It was not part of the plan, but I cannot say I can’t see how it could be. Father will be satisfied, at least.”

“He was about to yell at me, last time I saw him.”