I was breathing as hard as if I was racing up the walls of the room. With Mama, sometimes, a woman insisted on laboring with a knife in the bed beside them, to cut the pain. I had thought it silly then, as silly as Mama declaring those moments an emancipation. I had never thought, fully, what it would mean for me to join them there.

“I want Mama.”

“Yes,” Emmanuel said. “Yes.”

By then, Ti Me was there, holding my other elbow. I could feel inside me a great, deep churning. A new world was trying to break out of my body.

It felt as if my hip bones would grind apart. I looked over both their heads to the ceiling and cried up to it. I felt Emmanuel wipe my sweat and tears. My knees began to shake. My spine bore down around itself—I could name every bone as I felt each one break.

I pushed my feet on Emmanuel’s shoulders, a gross inversion of all the times I used to do the same, in pleasure, at night on the boat. And then I heard nothing. Not Emmanuel crying, not Ti Me whispering, not Ella and Bishop Chase’s prayers winding over the ceiling walls.

I heard only the blood rushing in my ears, as pure and steady as a river, and in that one last searing burn of pain, I heard my mother’s voice, wordless, only the tone and timbre that she’d make over our family’s graves.

I felt the heat of my blood between my legs, and when I looked down again, I saw Emmanuel covered in my blood and crying, and Ti Me covered in my blood and smiling, and lying on each of my thighs, my son and my daughter, our children, my children, born into this world I would make for them.

My Dearest Mama,

You have received this letter delivered to you by Louisa and Experience. Know that, as of this writing, I am alive. By the time Louisa and Experience hand this letter to you, I will have delivered your grandchildren.

I do not know what I am or what I will have become by then. I am not sure I ever knew myself. I used to think this was a failing. Something to hide from you. How could I be a righteous woman, to serve the world as you did, if I did not know myself?

But that seems like so little of a concern, now. I may not know myself, but I know the loneliness of love. I know what toll forgiveness takes. I know that the world is too big to be knowable.