I walked in pain, and Emmanuel was there each step with me. And I knew there was no other face on Earth I wished to see, at that moment, except for his.

I thought, I have forgiven you.

I watched him as he watched me, as his soft mouth moved, as he held my arm, as we paced the hall together. I thought of his father, whom he still did not have the power to even make leave a room.

I could hear, in the bedroom next to ours, Ella and her father praying. A whisper—they would never pray loud like the Haitians did, like the Graces dared to do. And that made me even angrier—that even now, they would scrape and keep an etiquette of God. Their hushed prayers came over the gap in the ceiling, and it nearly drove me mad. Emmanuel felt the muscles in my arm stiffen and rubbed me gently there.

“It is all right.” He smiled, and I felt my love for him come back.

I have forgiven you, I thought, but I do not think that will be enough.

“What’s wrong?” he said. “Why do you make a face like that?”

“It only hurts,” I said.

At midnight, I sat up in our bed. Emmanuel lay beside me, his breath light.

The pain that was in my body was warm now. It was a pain I had seen when I attended births with Mama. The births back home in Kings County, when I was a girl—every one was a kind of celebration. Because we knew each new child meant we had a claim to the land, to our space of freedom there.

The very first birth I had seen with Mama had frightened me. I had wanted to run from the room while the woman bellowed and hissed, and the air became thick with the smell of something deep and hidden, something that smelled almost lost.

But Mama had given me a look, and I had not dared to leave her side, and on our walk home she had told me, evenly, “You will not understand until you yourself do it, but in birth is the freest you can be. You do not have to take your leave of anyone or do anything for anyone. You are even free of deciding for your body how it will go—it is deciding for you. Your only expectation is to follow, and that is a kind of freedom, if you let it be.”

Now in bed, I felt the next wave of pain and wished that she were here.

The sheet beneath me became wet. Emmanuel was woken up by the damp. He cried out in joy, in excitement. And then he was up, calling for Ti Me and for boiling water and for strips of cloth and for oil.

I wanted to leave the bed again. I wanted to feel the floorboards creak beneath my feet. A line of sweat trickled from under my chin to my chest between my breasts, to the top of my stomach.