All I could say to him was, “I am a foolish girl.”

The road got steeper. The dust rose to my eyes, making them even wetter. By the time we reached the house, Emmanuel had begun to walk many feet ahead of me, overwhelmed by the tears on my face.

When Emmanuel had whispered to me in my mother’s waiting room about his father’s house, I admit I had not paid much attention to his actual words. It was from his tone, the urgency of how he described it, that I had imagined it as something much grander than what was before me. He had spoken lovingly of the large shuttered windows that faced the street. Of the front veranda his father had built, with the iron railings. Of the oak front door that was always kept shut and, cut into it, the smaller door that the family used to pass in and out of the house. “We only open the doors proper,” Emmanuel had told me, “when someone in our family dies.”

The actual house that was before me was shorter than what I had pictured, but still impressive. The wood was painted a pale pink, and the black iron railings were winking in the sun. Emmanuel’s father had been given the land when he came to Haiti ten years before—the promise to American Negro settlers fulfilled. He had traveled up and down the island, writing to the mother church back home, until they gave him the money to build a house worthy of the bishop that he was. At the very top of the house’s flat roof was a weather vane with the imprint of an iron rooster. It was strange to have on a house in a place that felt as if wind had not been born yet, I thought, as I looked above and felt the sweat trickle down my neck.

At the front door, the mule driver untied our two trunks from the back of the animal and said something to Emmanuel. A joke—because Emmanuel threw back his head and laughed, and tipped him an extra coin.

“What was it?” I asked, wiping the sleeve of my dress across my face, trying to rub it clean of dirt and tears.

“He only noticed you crying,” Emmanuel said. “And teased me about it.”

“What did he say?”

“You have to learn the language sometime, Libertie,” he said.

I thought at first he had arranged for the household to greet us; inside the hall, three people stood in a straight line. His father broke form first—a man a few inches shorter than Emmanuel, so just about level with my height. He was the same complexion as Emmanuel. He reached out to shake his son’s hand. But he did not extend one to me, only blinked.

Beside him was Ti Me. She, too, was not quite how Emmanuel had described her. In Kings County, he had told me that Ti Me had been young once but had dedicated her youth to raising him, after his mother and siblings had died. I had pictured a woman old and bent, with gray hair. But the woman who stepped forward to greet me was probably at most thirty. Her skin was smooth. And she had bright, intelligent eyes, which darted over Emmanuel’s face, then my own. She embraced him, as his father had, and pulled at his cheeks—scolding him, I guessed, for not eating enough. She was the only person in the house as dark as me.

Beside her was a woman Emmanuel’s height. Ti Me was dressed in white, in this heat. But this woman was dressed in a rusty-red skirt and a black jacket. Her skin was as pale as Emmanuel’s and his father’s, but it had a bright-pink undertone, as if she was about to burn. Her hair hung in great stiff sections around her cheeks. Each section had been ironed once and then again, to get rid of the kink, and then violently curled. Her face was Emmanuel’s, but leaner. His twin, Ella, I realized, with a start.

“And who is this?” she said as I stood beside Emmanuel.

“My wife,” he said.

“You’re married?” She raised one pale hand to her mouth.

I turned to Emmanuel. “You did not tell them?”

His father looked as if he was going to shout, and his sister was holding her stiff hair back from her face, her lips beginning to part—in a smile or a scream, I could not tell.

“You did not get my letters?” Emmanuel stepped back.

“You’ve married without my permission?” his father said. “And to whom?” He looked at me again, the whole length of me. I was, I could tell, in some way, lacking.

“Libertie Sampson. She is Dr. Sampson’s very own daughter. A physician in her own right. A graduate of Cunningham College.”

I pulled on Emmanuel’s arm to stop him, but he would not. “A true scholar,” he said.

“You married without my blessing,” his father said.

“I wrote to you to tell you. I sent three letters to you to tell you of it.”

“Who married you?” This was from his sister.

“The reverend of my church in Kings County,” I said. “Reverend Harland, whom I believe you know, Bishop Chase.”

Emmanuel’s father looked from me to his son. “You are always too rash,” he said.

I could feel myself begin to cry again. But I could see, from the corner of my eye, Emmanuel’s sister watching me. So I stepped forward and unknotted the bonnet from under my chin. Once I had gotten it off, I moved toward Ella and took her in my arms. I held her there, though I could feel her body stiffen. I felt her tortured curls scratch against my cheeks, made harsh by whatever hot comb she’d lain on them. She smelled of dried perspiration and burnt hair.

“I am sorry,” I said. “But I hope we can be sisters now.”

I let her go and hurried over to her father, avoiding whatever look was on her face. “I am sorry, sir,” I said, holding him in the same way. “I hope you can forgive your daughter.”

I held him longer than I had Ella. He, too, was resistant, but I sensed that I should not let him go as soon, or this whole scene would be made even more ridiculous. As I held him, I could hear Emmanuel speaking in Kreyòl to Ti Me, who then shrieked—he must have told her I was his wife—and gave a short laugh.

“It is not funny,” I heard Ella scold.

“Sorry, mum,” Ti Me said.

I held on for a few moments more, for good measure, and then I let the bishop go. I stepped back to stand beside Emmanuel and watched his face, warily.

“It is not how I wished it would happen,” Bishop Chase said finally.

“But we are here with you now, Father.”

“Ti Me,” the bishop said, “show them to Emmanuel’s room,” and then he left the foyer.

Ella had composed herself by then.

“Will you show Libertie the house?” Emmanuel asked her.

“We will have four for dinner, not three,” she called to Ti Me.

Ella kissed her brother on the cheek. “We are happy you are here,” she said. And then she left us.

Emmanuel and I still stood in the foyer of the house, which was so dim all I could see of that murky room with high ceilings was a flash of silver from a mirror hung on the farthest wall. All the shutters were closed against the afternoon sun.

To the right of the foyer, I could see a small room—with a table and chair, and a few books stacked on the end of the table—what must have been Bishop Chase’s library. It, too, was dimly lit—its large window opening out onto the street also shuttered. There was a flutter in that room, and I realized that was where Emmanuel’s father must have retreated.

To my left was a staircase, leading to the bedrooms. Directly in front of us was a dining room, its heavy oak table set for a formal dinner with six places, a single silver candelabra in the middle. The windows were unshuttered in the dining room, so that you could look out onto the back courtyard. It was full of a few flowering bushes and some clay pots growing herbs. The ground had been overlaid with stone. At the back of the courtyard was a small shed—the cookhouse, I realized—and farther away from everything, the latrine. Through the window, I saw Ella reappear, stalking toward the cookhouse.

“Come,” Emmanuel said, taking my hand. He led me up the stairs, Ti Me behind us, carrying one of the trunks on her back.

“Oh,” I said when I saw her struggle, and Emmanuel looked over his shoulder, then to me.

“She will carry it,” he said carefully.

Upstairs were five rooms—more than I had expected. But then I remembered the mother and brothers and babies long dead. This house had been built for a much-larger family.

The doors for each room were shut. Our room was the first by the staircase. Its windows, at least, faced the backyard, so the shutters were open and the light was not as dim. There was a single double bed, the mattress dipped in the middle, a mirror, this one smaller than the one downstairs in the foyer, a chest of drawers, with a metal owl and a pitcher standing on it, and a wooden cross, above the bed.

Ti Me letting the trunk fall to the floor with a bang. She looked at me, pointedly, and said, “Ti fi sa a twò cho.” Then she left us.

“What did she say?”

“You have to learn, Libertie.”

“You won’t even tell me this once?”

“She said you are a pretty mistress,” he said.

I sat on the mattress and felt it dip further beneath me. “You and Ella do look a lot alike,” I said.