And then she thrust something small and crumpled up underneath my nose.

In that queer purple light of the evening, I could just make out my wife … you would wish it, too … Emmanuel Chase.

“What is this?” I said.

“I am not a fool, Libertie. So do not treat me as one.”

I took the paper from her hand and turned it over in my own.

“This is what’s upset you?”

“You’ve compromised your honor with a man who lives in my house. Of course this has upset me! Have you lost your mind?”

She did not know. She did not know that I had failed. I heard myself give a short, hoarse laugh. And then she slapped me.

My mother had never hit me before. Even as a small child, she had not swatted me—only Lenore, on rare occasions, had done something like that. I cannot say it even hurt very much—her blow landed soft, like a brush of silk, as if she had changed her mind between raising her arm and swinging it down.

When it was done, we both could only look at each other in surprise.

She recovered first. “I cannot believe you could be so foolish.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“You have ruined your future. You have spoiled our plans.”

I laughed again at that, in the same hoarse voice, which sounded foreign, even to me. “They’re already spoiled.”

She raised her hand again. “Don’t! Don’t tell me if you’ve sunk that low! Don’t say it!”

I should have said, I am a failure, but not in the way you think. I should have said, I cannot pass a simple anatomy class, and even if I raise all the money in the world from Tom Thumb weddings and girls singing, Cunningham College will probably not want me back.

Instead, I said, to the dirt beneath me, “I will never be a doctor.”

She sank down beside me. She was there on the road beside me, in front of our house, and her face now was merely her own, the moonlight masking the changes that had shocked me when I first saw her that day. My mother.

“You’ve given up your dream.”

“It wasn’t mine,” I said. “You dreamt it for me.”

“It was ours.”

“I cannot join you,” I said. “I am sick of the smell of other women’s blood, Mama. Please.”

“So you’ll leave me,” she said. “So you chose your body over your mind. So you were weak.”

“I am weak. But I did not fail you like that. Dr. Chase has been nothing but a gentleman. I have conducted myself with honor with him—”

“I have no reason to believe you,” she said. “You’ve already proven yourself a liar.”

She sat back in the dirt. Then she lay all the way down in the dust until she was looking at the night sky. We sat like that: Mama seeing stars, and me not daring to raise my eyes from the dirt, until she sighed heavily and settled even deeper into her skirts.

“I gave you too much freedom,” she said. “So much freedom and you gave it up for the first bright man who smiled at you.”

“I don’t want him, Mama.”

She took my hand in hers, still staring into the sky. Her voice was smaller now. “I know these tricks, Libertie. I hear them every day from the girls and women who come into my clinic, all big with child from a man who’s left them. They tell me, even then, ‘I don’t want him,’ but it’s only to save their dignity. You think he will do this to you, too? I should know that, at least.”

“He hasn’t done a single thing to me,” I said. “And I assure you, I don’t want him to.”

“You think it’s love,” she said. “Maybe it is love. But it is quite a thing, to be a wife. It is not the same as a lover. It is not the same as a doctor—”

“I know that, at least, Mama.”

“It is definitely not the same as being a free woman.” She turned to me, her eyes shining. “This is your ambition? You could be so much more, Libertie.”

“No,” I said, my voice thick with tears. “I can’t.”

She gave a ragged cry, the most terrible sound I have ever heard in the world, and if you would have told me as a little girl that I would have been the one to cause my mother to make that sound, I would have called you a liar. But here I was, beside her, as she sobbed.

“Come, Mama.” I pushed myself up, to stand above her. She looked so small in her circle of skirts, her head bent. I leaned down and pulled her up by her elbows. “Come, Mama. I am not lost to you yet. I will not marry him, if it makes you cry,” I said. I would have said anything to get her to stop making that sound. I got her to her feet. I put my arm through hers. I walked with her slowly, through the yard, up the steps, through the still-open door.

It took a moment to realize we were not alone in the room. There was Lenore, and our houseguests—the Graces, Madame Elizabeth, Lucien, and Emmanuel Chase himself, who stood at the mantel, a look of nervous expectation on his face.

He stepped forward. “You told her?” he said. I realized he was speaking to me.

“She discovered on her own,” I said.

Mama stepped forward and held out her hand. “Congratulations,” she said.

As Emmanuel reached to take it, she doubled over, a stream of sick splattering the hem of her skirts.

And that was how we announced we were to be married.

EMMANUEL SAID WE could always elope. “We do not need to stand up before your mother and family. We could be married by a judge and leave for Haiti as soon as possible.” But I knew if the mere mention of marriage had made my mother sick, it would possibly kill her if we brought more humiliation through an elopement.

So we planned for our wedding. Quickly, because in my harried scheming, I’d figured it would be another two months before Cunningham College’s letter informing my mother that I was not welcome back would reach the house. If I was safely married by then, and on a ship to Haiti, I could spare myself the exquisite pain of seeing her further disappointment. I was a coward in that way.

It seemed to me marriage was as good a plan as any other. I would not be a doctor, but I could perhaps be a wife. This optimism sprang from the fact that I was still not sure what a wife would be, but I knew what a doctor was and that I couldn’t be one.

We were to be wed quickly. Madame Elizabeth announced she would make my wedding dress and wrote to Monsieur Pierre to tell him she would not be home for another month. She installed herself in Mama’s front parlor, with a ream of white cotton and one long panel of lace that we had managed to buy, which she assured me she would drape across my shoulders.

All of the preparations I had made for the play wedding just a few weeks before suddenly became real. We were to be married in the same circle of trees, as close to my father’s grave as possible. I had insisted on that for Mama’s sake, but my mother had looked at me blankly when I’d told her, then nodded. She was not speaking to me. She nodded or shook her head, but she did not share any words with me. She continued to speak to Emmanuel—with him, she kept everything the same—issuing him orders for the clinic, conferring with him on patients, showing him the books. It was only I who was enveloped in silence.

Madame Elizabeth tried to talk with her. Emmanuel himself asked her to please stop. But she would only say, “I’ll speak to my daughter again on her wedding day.”

The Graces had left by then. They were committed to two more dates in the North—one in Hartford, Connecticut, and one in Florence, Massachusetts. We’d watched them leave for Manhattan, and as the boat pulled away to cross the East River, I tried to remember that I had never fully belonged to them at all. I had always been left out. Emmanuel took my hand as he stood beside me. I told myself, Soon, you will belong to him, and the thought was both thrilling and made me sad. If you would have asked me then what my heart’s desire was, it would have been to be with the Graces on a ferry or in a coach, maybe thinking pleasantly about Emmanuel Chase but not anywhere close to him in reality.

When we could no longer see the ship, we walked back downtown to Mama’s hospital, to where Emmanuel now slept, in the red velvet waiting room of the clinic. He had agreed to leave my mother’s house the night our engagement was announced. “Believe me,” he had said to her as he held his bags before him, “I meant no disrespect to your household, Madame Doctor. You have been nothing but—”

And Mama had cut him off. “I believe you,” she’d said, and he had been so relieved he did not hear what I had heard, the words unsaid, which were that she believed him—but not me, her own daughter.

Emmanuel and I allowed ourselves a half hour visit each day in the waiting room, when it had closed for the afternoon, while Mama and Lenore, on the floors above us, set the clinic right for the night. We would sit in that parlor, and Emmanuel would tell me what would come to pass in Haiti.

“In Haiti, you will meet my sister and Ti Me.”

“In Haiti, Papa will be the first to greet you.”

“You’ll learn how to say that word, once we are in Haiti.”