She took her daughter’s chin in the tips of her fingers. “I am not afraid. Look at me,” she said when her daughter’s eyes fell to the floor, tugging her face up to her own. “There are laws, and they will come. Soon. And there’s nothing you nor I can do; it is already done and was done the moment I dropped that little boy’s hand and untied the tourniquet. It was done long ago, I suppose, before you was even you.”

“What are you saying? You going to jail?”

“My girl, I ain’t going nowhere.”

She sat down. Patting the sofa seat so that her daughter might sit next to her, she wept openly and without abash. She held her arms out into which Lady Mae threw herself, pulling her mother in close enough to feel the racing of her heart.

“You going to be alright,” her mother said. “We’ll be just fine.”

“What’re they going to do you?”

Her mother gently smiled and smoothed back Lady Mae’s hair, brushing it back off her shoulders and twisting curls around her fingers. “Don’t much know.”

“You’ve got to know something! Can’t you remember the law?”

“Not any more than you, but I’ll try if it’ll calm you.” She closed her eyes. “Seems I remember there being a penalty of some kind… a fine of some sort, or perhaps they’ll take me to the square.”

“For what? An outcry?”

“As an example. Try to shame me, us, our way. Even though it is the way the Deputies gave us long ago. Don’t reckon it’ll be that bad.”

“But can’t you just explain yourself? Can’t you bring the boy back and give him his atonements? Just tell them you made a mistake, that you thought you had the wrong boy.”

“It won’t matter to them. Besides, don’t reckon I made a mistake.” She looked out the window again. They saw it at the same time: a small dot of light glowing in the distance. That ain’t the only thing that burns, Mama. Lady Mae and her mother watched in silence as it grew brighter, bobbing up and down with each of the Deputies’ steps. Had they opened the window, they might have been able to hear the boots grind in the gravel as they neared the house.

“What do you mean you didn’t make a mistake?”

“I mean that sometimes one’s got to do the wrong thing for the right reason.”

Her mother took her daughter by the hands and pressed them to her own knees, which were thin and hard through her skirts. “Look at me now,” she said to her daughter.

But Lady Mae could not look at her mother because to look at her would be to know what she had always known to be true deep down. It would be to see clearly what she knew lay behind her mother’s kind eyes and tarnished hands.

“I ain’t in the habit of telling you how to live your life, but I done been wrong about one thing I reckon.”