Phibbah let the fan slap against her hip. ‘Kiiii! If it killing you, what it doing to us?’

Miss-bella stopped dead with the cup kissing her bottom lip. Then she laughed. ‘Well, it’s the Europeans I’m worried about, girl. Me in particular.’

Let me tell you, I saw Phibbah whipped for all manner of petty things: whenever a piece of china-ware went missing, after she let one of Miss-bella’s teacups slip and break, once when she was late bringing in the salted cod at breakfast, but never once did I see her whipped for talking back. I asked her about it once. ‘That the only entertainment the woman ever gets,’ she replied.

When you look back at anything, time caves into itself, like dirt running into a fresh hole. I see the three of us – the women of Paradise – like figures etched in glass. And it’s as if no time has passed, as if that girl knelt at Miss-bella’s feet, blinked, then woke up to discover she was the Mulatta Murderess.

From where I crouched, I could see out to the river. Oh, it would be a miracle to feel something soft as that water against my skin again, though I’d settle for lying on fresh-cut grass, or even just the chance to rub my fingers along a fresh-laundered shift. The air was sharp with the smell of cane trash burning out near the river, and the orange oil Phibbah used for polishing. ‘Go on in now, girl,’ Miss-bella said. ‘Fetch some of that pineapple tart you made yesterday. And is there any orangeade?’

Phibbah set the jug by the door. I’d kept my head down all that time, scraping at dirt under Miss-bella’s nails with the toe-picker, lifting first one foot, then the other. Heart still hard as a drum, but the rest of me gone soft as butter in a skillet. It was an ivory-handled picker I used, as if that could magic some dainty into Miss-bella’s feet. I lifted one out onto the towel beside her chair, to dry, and she and I both leaned back and admired it. Like it was marble in a museum. We used to pretend those feet were pretty as the teacups, same way we pretended the teapot wasn’t half full of rum.

She wasn’t done complaining. ‘I’m so tired of forever staring at these same old no-account hills.’

‘We could set out front, sometime,’ Phibbah said, ‘if you wasn’t so stubborn.’

‘Oh, no. I couldn’t.’

‘Get a view of the sea.’

‘That’s precisely why I could not.’ She flicked her a look, sharp, over the shoulder. ‘But you’d know about that.’

‘About what?’

‘Wanting a thing so much you can’t bear looking at it.’

Phibbah stabbed and stabbed with the fan, murdering air. ‘I thought it was the hills bothering you. Now you say it’s the sea.’

Miss-bella laughed into her cup. Then she paused, like she was giving thought. ‘Seems I can look neither ahead of me nor behind.’