She looked at me. I raised my thumb back to my mouth. “All right,” she said. “He hasn’t told you, has he, yet, of the bad year we had here?”

“When your mother and brothers passed. Yes.”

“He has not told you, though, what else happened?”

“No,” I said.

“We were thirteen,” she said. “We had been here three years. We knew the language so well by then. There was a great crime, in Port-au-Prince. We lived there then—we had not yet come here to build the church in Jacmel. A man had sold his niece to the Vodoun priests, and they had slit her throat and drained her blood and drank it and ate her flesh. The government investigated and brought the bad people to justice. We watched them burn in the capital square. Ti Me, my brother, and I. We saw God’s law that day. It was extraordinary. Emmanuel fainted, and Ti Me kept saying, “It is not right.” She stayed at the square till the last of the embers died down. I think she was waiting for something. I do not know what. My brother was very upset. He said it was a tragedy. That they should never have burnt those terrible people. He still says it was a tragedy. He wrote to me about it, even when he was with you, in New York. So I began to make this for him. To remind him of the true history. I wrote it—see, I stitched it in thread. So he will always remember.”

As she spoke, she’d taken the jacket from me and fanned it over her lap. She ran her fingers over the stitches, again and again, as if she was mesmerizing herself. The thread was red and ragged, from her touching it over and over, and the jacket itself, which had started out white, I think, was a dun gray. It was like a child’s rag doll, pulled apart by the child’s own desire. But Ella treated it like a prize.

I was not sure what to do, until Ti Me came to the door to say “Market.” And then Ella tucked the jacket up and put it underneath the divan, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Oh, I thought. Oh. I saw now her stiff, irregular hair, her rigid dress. That she should know something of Emmanuel that I did not, even now. That he should hold this in him and only share it with her, and not with me, his wife. That he would not tell me this. I felt furious.

When Emmanuel and I made it back to the water, I was ready.