The world slid away. The lid slammed shut, and almost took my fingers with it. Peck.

Not eggs. Letters. Letter after letter after letter.

Why did I reply ‘at last’? It seemed to me someone should take pity on you. Does that satisfy? The more interesting question is why you kept writing. LL

You are as persistent with this question as you were with your unanswered letters. I will be frank. Your first letter I took for a bored woman’s self-indulgence. I was not bored enough to answer it. Now I am. But you still haven’t answered my question. Why did you keep writing? I will venture a guess. You are lonely. LL

You say your husband is sympathetic. He is not the man you think, though he is the man I remember. Sympathy without action is nothing more than an idea. LL

You already know my story. When I arrived here as a boy, I thought it was a place as bright and shining as Heaven. I’d lived my first four years in a slave cabin with my mother until Mr George Benham, in his wisdom, decided I would serve, and plucked me right off his estate. I remember that my mother turned away from me, before I left. She refused to speak and, indeed, began to behave as if I simply did not exist. It made the parting easier on me, of course. Who can say what would have made it easier on her? I don’t remember much else. I’ve drawn a shade down over the rest of it. Five years, then he married you. I thought you were an angel. Everything you both surround yourselves with is so soft and luminous (even, if I may bring your husband into it again, your ideas). After I was sent down from Cambridge, I decided to take that name for myself. I became Olaudah Cambridge. For a time I was able to disappear. Some among your kind find it droll that I have named myself after that great university. Thumbing my nose at it. While I was there, I was introduced to some frilly baroness who asked me where I learned to speak English so well. I replied that even a parrot might be taught this uncomplicated language. It has served me well. I entertain myself by doing what you found me doing. Taking whites for sport. From the podium, and in the ring.

I won’t meet you simply because you command it, nor would you think much of me if I did. LL

From him to her. All of them.

Every mother hates her own babe. That’s what Phibbah used to say. The hate is a needful part of mothering, same as love. Always there comes that one moment. Early days, and they’re red, thunderous, ugly. Their feet kick, like dogs digging dirt. You’re awake knowing you need to be in the fields before the sun and you’re going to stay out there long after the sun too. It’s in that moment you wish it gone. Not a long wishing, just a blink. You feel it like your belly dropping out of you, all the way down to gully-bottom. And as soon as you do, the need boils up in you never to feel it again.