“You shouldn’t have fled from the church like that, this is true. You could have left more discreetly,” Emmanuel said. “But he forgave you when I said you might be with child. He remembers what that is like. He said, ‘Women lose their minds when they are carrying. It is their burden.’ But he was pleased. He will be pleased.”

“Is that all?”

“I can see how it could help with a lot of things.”

“I’m to raise it, to have it, here with a grandfather that hates its mother and a madwoman for an auntie.”

“Don’t call Ella that,” he said.

I did not meet his eye. Instead, I looked at the reflection of the two of us in the mirror across from the bed—the back of his neck, red with heat, and my own reflection, dark in the shadows of the afternoon.

“I am not feeling well again,” I said. “I want to rest some more.”

He looked only slightly disappointed. He got up to close the shutters.

“No. Leave them open. The noise helps make the room bearable.”

He tried to smile. “For tonight only,” he said. Then he left me.

When I heard him walk all the way down the hall, I went to the desk and opened the drawer, the one he had told me was mine alone. The letters were crammed in until they tore, the paper crumpled into a fan. I took them out and brought them back to the bed and held them in the cradle of my lap.

Mama’s need was too great. Think of that, I told myself. But who would have thought of that? I’d needed her and needed her and needed her when it was unseemly, and now here was the proof that she’d needed me back.

I tried to read her letters, but the words would not focus. My eyes would not let me take them in. I felt a pressure at my temples and suddenly very, very tired. To recognize that I had become another person for possibly a reason as foolish and flimsy as misunderstanding my mother—it was too painful to bear.

Fragments of the letters swam into clarity.

You do not write

You do not write

You do not write to me

Why?

Libertie

I cannot think of a greater freedom than raising you from a babe in arms to a girl. You were mine, and I decided what you heard, who you listened to, what words formed on your lips. It was intoxicating to have that kind of open dominion over another, even more so because I knew you would grow to become your own person, and that person could be shaped by me.

You do not write to me

And then the letters went back to a blur.

I closed my eyes and rapped my fist on the desk—once, twice, three times.

And then I sat down and took a fresh sheet and dipped my pen in the ink.