Jesse handed her some pages. He’d highlighted sections he found important. It was hard to tell if any of it even was, but Mira looked through it anyway. The first page was a family register. Mira read over the names. She pictured the steady hand focused on writing each of the birth dates in the cursive script, the move of the pen across the paper in sure, fluid strokes. The action was filled with the promise of a life, but on the right-hand side of the page another date was listed, the death date, many the same as the birth.

“All these deaths. She’d been trying to have children for years. Almost a decade. And they all died.”

“It was probably why Roman bought Lucy. To get her to finally let go of the possibility.”

On another page were the lists of slave names. In neatly written script, Annabelle had written the births and deaths of hundreds of slaves, all under the heading of “Negroes.” Lizzie, born August 1854, Mira read. Pleasant, Till’s babe born February 1855. Bell’s boy Bull S., born April 1855.

She ran her fingers along the page, tracing over the names of the unfamiliar and the lost. “There’s no Lucy here,” Mira noticed after she’d reached the end.

“I know,” Jesse said. He handed her another page. It was an 1858 bill of sale for an eight-year-old girl named Lucy with “yellow complexion and black eyes.”

“So this is her,” Mira said. She took the copy and went back to the photograph on the wall. She looked at the image once more, trying to picture her face, but as hard as she looked she couldn’t see anything. The image looked like the outline of a girl, a ghost image haunting the frame.

“This is why you came back. Why you got the job at the Woodsman Plantation. You’ve just been—researching and gathering all this stuff, because of some trick in the light that looks like a slave girl.”

“You and I both know that this is more than just some trick in the light,” Jesse said. He seemed a little taken aback at her reaction, but still—all of this, all this gathered material, photos and news articles and records. Piles of research. This was more than trying to understand history.

“Okay, but even if— So what we’re saying, what you’re really saying—” Mira stopped herself. The words choked inside of her. It was too much to wrap her mind around. She needed time, but there wasn’t any. She could see Jesse’s eagerness for her to believe, but he’d been thinking about this for years.

“All I’m asking is for you to consider it.”

“Let’s say I do. They’ve come, or are coming back. None of that explains why. Why are they here? What do they want?”