“So they got you here, too, did they?” He peered past Miss Hannah and caught Madame Elizabeth’s eye. “So you managed not to kill my sister this time, like y’all did me?”

Madame Elizabeth did not respond. On her face was a look of the utmost pity, which seemed to annoy Mr. Ben even further.

“She got you good, Hannah.”

“Ben, you look a mess.”

“You would, too, if you’d been through what I have,” Mr. Ben said. “Drug here in a coffin all by myself.”

Miss Hannah knelt down beside him and touched his arm. “I came that way, too.”

He wouldn’t look at her. Looked down at the floor instead. Took another sip of his drink.

“They tell you the food here is horrible?” he said.

Miss Hannah gasped, laughed, then finally allowed herself to fully sob.

She turned to Mama. “You let my brother live like this?” she said, her voice breaking. “You let ’em all live like this? These people are not well.”

Mama put her hand up to her mouth and only nodded.

“You said you was a doctor. She said …” Miss Hannah turned and looked at Madame Elizabeth. “She said you knew how to help people and make ’em safe.”

“I tried,” Mama said, but then stopped herself. Her words sounded so lost, in this small, hot room.

“He can’t stay here,” Miss Hannah said. “None of ’em can stay here.”

Culver looked up from his bench. “No one’s forcing anyone to stay. We stay together because we like it.”

Miss Hannah ignored him, pulled at her brother’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “Come with me.”

He did not move at first. He did not move for a long time. We all stood, and watched, while she pulled at his arm and said, “Come with me,” until it became almost unbearable—her ask, his refusal.

But finally, he stood up and put his arm through hers, and Miss Hannah guided him from the room.

I think it was that—more than Miss Hannah’s shaming, more than Ben Daisy’s glassy eyes and his lips muttering nonsense, it was the fact that he would follow his sister out of the room, because of Miss Hannah’s patience, that convinced Mama of how badly she had failed. And I saw her, standing right there beside me, disappear again, into the world of her ambition.

She was going to make him right.

I do not know when, exactly, she started it. The letter she sent to begin it all, she wrote alone—she took the rare step of not dictating it to me. She must have written it that same night, when she realized she had lost Ben Daisy, because it was only a week or so later that I stood beside her in Culver’s shop as she looked at the mail that had come for her and she turned to me, the envelope still in her hand, and bent down, and she hugged me, hard—she never hugged hard—and told me excitedly, “We can begin.”