“I feel a lot more myself in a smaller town,” he said.

“I do, too,” Flora’d said, and that was when he knew she was definitely the one for him, and he forgot all about those other three or four girls. He hadn’t been serious about them anyhow. He never took them to the Actor’s Dinner Club. And when Flora’d told him stories about her childhood upstate, and admitted that she, too, sometimes wondered if it had been a mistake to come to the big city, he’d felt something serious. Like her slender fingers wrapping themselves gently around his beating heart.

Flora had finally let herself enjoy Bill’s attention after four months of his obvious flattery, and only after he’d stopped flattering the other five girls from their acting class. Flora didn’t miss a trick, and she’d frown until her dimples pierced her cheeks when he was winking or waggling his eyebrows at girls around the room. Mistrusting men, especially white men, had been something her mother had instilled in her from a very young age. She’d learned the lessons all black girls learned from their mothers, but her appearance made sure no one would ever know the truth about her unless she wanted them to. “Your eyes and hair,” her mother would say, shaking her head in disbelief every time she lifted the fine, straight strands that would barely hold a curl. “They’ll spare you.”

Flora’s being “spared” caused an uncomfortable overlap of relief and guilt that stacked like flapjacks on top of each other as she observed how the world treated her versus the way it treated someone like Lila Carter, her friend from grade school, or Ernestine Brown, the woman who mopped the hallway floors of Flora’s New York apartment building. Flora would release the confusion of emotions in her acting exercises and in the characters she played onstage.

It was the vile words of a vicious-minded white shopkeeper hurled at a young black man begging for work that had smacked and stung worse than any blows might have. Hearing them had sent Flora racing down an alley to vomit behind a trash can and collapse in a frustrated, sobbing heap. The world was a cruel place. The next morning Madame Ososki’s eyes had shone with tears, her breath held and hands clasped beneath her chin, as she watched Flora’s performance.

“Oy! Kak krasivo!” Although the class didn’t understand the words, they knew this was Madame’s highest praise, and although she wasn’t looking directly at him, Flora knew Bill Parker’s mouth was hanging open in awed admiration. Flora’s secret identity, as she sometimes thought of it, made her acutely aware of her environment.

Flora paid attention to everything and everyone, and one thing that stood out in her mind was that Bill Parker had been patient and open and more honest than anyone else she’d met in New York.

She was the one who’d suggested the move. She was the one who’d said, “Couldn’t we be together and pursue our love of acting on the stage somewhere smaller? Somewhere less overwhelming, less intimidating? Somewhere easy and friendly?”