Dread curled in my bones as the awful truth of my situation sank in.

I knew what happened to a lone woman in this world.

It had been a long while since I’d thought about the time after Papa died of smallpox, but my mind drifted to those dark days now. I remembered Mama crying for days and days. Her heart was broken, she’d told me. It would never be whole again. In time her tears dried up and she took over his shoe shop. I remembered how strong she’d looked hammering nails into soles, sweat rolling down her pretty neck. Papa’s customers liked her shoes—she’d made them just like he had. Eventually she’d done one better, burning flowers and patterns into the leather with hot needles and selling buckles she bought from a trader from the Orient. Word had spread of her artful designs and soon merchants from all over the Out Islands came to buy from her—but not a year after Papa’s passing, everything had changed again.

A man named Mr. Slade who had his own shoe shop in Nassau accused her of being an immoral and depraved woman. He spread rumors that Mama was having relations with men—some of them enslaved men—and she became a woman of ill fame.

People crossed the road when they saw her. They hissed “filthy strumpet” and “bloody doxy.” They threw eggs and rubbish at our shop, sometimes in plain daylight. With a few untruthful words, Mr. Slade had ruined Mama and caused his own business to thrive.

Mama sold the shop and we moved to a room above a tavern. Then the money from the shop ran out, but our hunger didn’t, and that was when she started leaving me for long stretches. Day and night, and night and day. I began to suspect she was doing just what she’d been accused of, but I never asked. It didn’t matter to me what she did. She was my mama and my everything.

Then Sewel came around and I saw her smiling again. With him by her side, people still crossed the street—but no one dared speak a backward word to her anymore. With him beside her, she held her head up again.

After they married, we left Nassau to start our life in the Out Islands. Year by year, she laughed less and Sewel drank more, and yelled more, and on bad nights did even worse, but she accepted all of it. He’d claimed her—a fallen woman. And no amount of drunkenness or wickedness mattered, ’cause he was loyal, and that was better than many men in the world, Mama said, and certainly better than no man.

I was meant to learn from all her hardships. Live for something more, she told me, again and again in different ways, but always with that word. You must have more than I’ve had. More than my life has given me. More than this. While we gardened. While we cooked. Even while I slept, I knew she whispered in my ear, sliding her wish for me right into my dreams.