I turned in my chair and made a show of asking Lucien about himself.

He had remained as pleasant-looking as he had been ten years earlier, and I realized, with a start, that he was lightly flirting with me, though it seemed to be more for the amusement of his mother, I realized, then any sort of genuine interest. He made his jokes and verbal flips loud enough for her to hear and when one was finished, looked sideways for her approval. Madame Elizabeth would sally him on with a tap of her fan or a pull at her shawl.

In one of his moments of joking, he called me “Black Gal,” and I shivered.

“Do you remember?” I said. “Do you remember Mr. Ben?”

“Oh, Daisy!” Lucien cried in a nasal falsetto, and then fluttered his hands. “But of course.”

Madame Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. “That poor man.”

“Do you ever wonder what happened to Daisy?”

“If there’s any justice in the world,” Madame Elizabeth said, “her soul’s repented for all the pain she caused that man.”

“But how is it Daisy’s fault,” I said, “if Ben Daisy was the one who chose to die for her?”

“Well, listen to you, Miss Libertie,” Lucien said. His eyes shifted between me and his mother, sizing each of us up.

Madame Elizabeth tilted her head and held her finger to her chin, a practiced pose of concentration. Then she said, “Love is a mysterious thing, and a gift. A woman is a keeper of love, and when she does not take that duty as sacred, then things like that happen.”

Lucien sighed. “You lose your mind and end up trying to make love to a river.”

“You are terrible,” I said.

“Glug, glug, glug,” Lucien replied, and I saw, from the way his mother held in her laugh, that the joke was not a gamble.

I stood up. “I should go to bed, as well, Madame Elizabeth.”

“Ah,” Lucien said, “we’ve made you mad.”

“Lucien, stop it.” Madame Elizabeth held up her arms, and I stepped awkwardly toward her. “Good night. And say your prayers for your mama and me.” Her breath was murky with the smell of tea and sugar.

Madame Elizabeth and her family lived above the shop. The stairway to get to their rooms was clammy, built into the brick of the house. At the top of the stairs was a short hallway, dim, with only one cramped window at the end, which faced out onto the street. I hadn’t taken a light with me upstairs, and Madame Elizabeth had not offered one, so I moved along the hallway, my fingers running along the doors. I counted, one, two, three—Madame Elizabeth had said the third room was where we should sleep. I reached for the doorknob and turned it and pushed, but the door would not move.

I tried again, turning the knob back and forth, the iron becoming sweaty in the heat of my hand. I thought for sure Experience or Louisa would rise to let me in, but there was nothing. I scratched at the panel. “Louisa,” I called. “Experience.” Still no reply.

I held my ear to the door and heard the faintest shuffle, as if someone in bare feet was moving carefully. Then I bent down to the keyhole to look through. There was no candle, only the very faint moonlight from the window in the room. I could see nothing, really. But suddenly I heard someone on the other side of the door gasp, as if she had been holding her breath for a long time. I blinked once, twice. And then, again, nothing.

I stood up from the keyhole. And I think, then, that I knew. I looked at the doorknob in my hand, shook it idly, almost forlornly, one more time, and then felt my hand along the hallway wall until I was back at the cold staircase, and then down to Madame Elizabeth and Lucien at the fire. The two of them had resumed work on a cape, spread out before them at the table. Madame Elizabeth looked up, six pins between her lips, while Lucien stood beside her with a line to measure stretched between his hands.

“They were already asleep,” I said, not sure how else to explain myself. “And I shouldn’t wake them. It’s been so long since they’ve slept in a bed. They need as much rest as possible before their performance.”

Madame Elizabeth looked back at her work. “Well,” she said, her voice muffled by the pins, “sit by the fire for a bit, and then you may sleep here if you wish.”

And so that was where I fell asleep that night, listening to the hum of heavy scissors cutting through damask.

That sigh behind a closed door in the dark was a song I had never heard either of them sing before. It was the same song I heard, sometimes, while lying on the hearth of the Gradys’ home, many hours after everyone in the house had gone to bed. When I’d heard it there, I had instinctively pulled my blanket tighter around my head, hummed what songs I could remember from rehearsal, and, sometimes, resorted to clearing my throat loudly, to make it stop.

But I had not wanted to make whatever was behind that door quit. I had only felt a pang of longing. I had never wanted to know something so badly in my life. Not even when I saw Mama make a dead man walk, not even when I stared at the river for a lost lady, had I ever wanted to know something as much as I wanted the knowledge of what, exactly, Louisa and Experience were doing—no, not what they were doing, but what they were feeling—behind that locked door. Longing to know what had caused that smallest, sweetest of sighs made me shut my eyes tight as Lucien and his mother lazily quarreled about the best way to attack the fabric before them.

When Louisa had said that home was in Experience’s arms, and when she had defended Experience from every call questioning her coldness … they had been traveling to another country, I realized. They had lived there all along, while I stayed a citizen of this one, a land without sighs.

Mama, before I had left for college, had made oblique mention of what could happen to girls in school—“Girls, when they are left on their own, they become each other’s sweethearts sometimes”—but she had told it to me as something her white-lady patients sometimes fretted about, and for me, she made it clear, it was only another possible distraction to avoid on my way toward greatness. She had not suggested it could be like this. A closed door with a mystery behind it that I could never know.

Up until then, I had told myself that my disgrace at Cunningham College was a blessing. I’d thought I could endeavor to make this trip with the Graces into a permanent state of being—I could become their manager, writing to the respectable colored ladies of the North and finding drawing rooms and church floors and forest clearings where the Graces could sing. The three of us would never have to return to the place of my shame—we could indefinitely live in the admiration of colored women who would otherwise have scorned me for the failure I had become.

I did not see how that was possible now. Because in my fantasy, Louisa and Experience would stay with me always, would never leave me—we would travel together; there would be no secrets between us. And eventually, with a long enough proximity, I would understand the covenant between them and enter into it on my own.

But there was no room for me there. Perhaps that was what I had been responding to in their voices all along—their desire. As wide as their desire was, it could not make room for me. I knew that. It was a bride song, a song for twin souls, for one mate to call to another. And I, a fool, had mistaken it for a song of federation.

And so I was alone again. On the wrong side of a locked door. An interloper in what I had been so certain would someday be my country.

WE WERE TO take the train to New York for the last part of our journey—Lucien and Madame Elizabeth accompanying us. We left early the next morning—Experience’s cheeks flushing red at the sight of me, cramped in the same chair, by the fire, but Louisa looked up at me through her lashes and said, “You should have knocked louder, for us to hear you.”

She was so bold that, for a moment, I thought that I was mistaken, but I noticed that as she said this, her fingers trembled, and so I only nodded and looked away.

The train used to have mixed seating, but at the station we discovered it had a newly implemented car solely for colored passengers. Lucien wanted to contest it—“I’ll speak to the porter,” he said, but Madame Elizabeth waved her fan.

“I am tired,” she said, and Lucien fell back beside her, willing himself to swallow all of it.

Experience and Louisa tried to smooth over the ride by telling Madame Elizabeth how comfortable a train was, compared to a stagecoach—even Experience made an effort to say something merry, though all four of us were watching as something slowly ate Lucien up from the inside. He would not look at any of us, only at the country that rushed by the open window.