“But it’s enough for us to live on, when you add in Rufus’s allowance. And we are together, in relative safety. Many married people don’t even have this much.”

“I asked Valentina about the midwife training. She wasn’t very encouraging.”

“Perhaps she doesn’t like the thought of competing with a doctor’s daughter.” Philos kisses her on the temple. “You only gave birth a week ago, my love. I think you are allowed a little time to collect yourself before you start hustling to deliver other people’s babies.”

Amara chews her lip, anxiety gnawing at her. “But her dowry.”

“She’s five days old!” Philos laughs. He moves himself, so that he can look into her face, cupping her cheek with his hand. “I know why you worry—I do understand. But she isn’t going to have your life, or mine. I promise.”

Amara has told Philos about her own journey to slavery, the dowry her parents never saved, forcing her mother to sell her after her father’s death rather than see Amara starve. The start of her long, brutal journey to Pompeii, to Felix. “I can’t bear that you’re not free,” she says, unable to keep the words back, even though she knows how much it will hurt him. “Sometimes it feels like I can’t breathe.”

“I know.” He rests his free hand on Rufina, the other still soft against Amara’s cheek. “That’s why Julia’s protection matters so much.” Philos does not finish his thought, but Amara still hears it. In case I am taken from you.

44

“But those you see with figures like to each

And faces like both parents, these have sprung

From the father’s body and the mother’s blood . . .

By two hearts breathing as one in mutual passion,

And neither masters the other nor is mastered.”

—Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe

Rufus does not attend Rufina’s naming ceremony, nor does her real father. Amara is not sure whether this is easier—whether seeing Philos as an unacknowledged slave at his own daughter’s Nominalia would have been even more painful than his absence. She had half-expected Rufus to be the one who gave her the lunula, but instead, her former patron sends a lavish platter of fruit and a toy horse on wheels. It is Julia who gives the precious necklace that signifies the baby’s freedom—a small crescent moon on a delicate chain. It is made of silver, and seeing the charm against her daughter’s skin, Amara feels a slight easing of the pressure on her heart. She starts to believe that Philos is right: this child will not repeat the lives of her parents but will have her own.