All this takes your breath away, which is already short, because two expanding baby skulls are lovingly pressed on your lungs, making you lose your capacity for air. You are running out of air. You are not sure your husband understands this.

Gasping, you try to make yourself useful. Cooking is very much like making medicine, you think at first. There is a certain amount of drudgery in mixing and chopping and measuring, though Ti Me measures by handfuls and pinches, which makes more sense than how your mother measured, you thought bitterly. Your mother with her scales and her pipettes, and you, as a child, having to wash them each night for her. You try to do the same here, telling yourself you are useful. Ti Me looks skeptical.

You offer to gather eggs in the morning for Ti Me, and she says she supposes that you could. Sometimes, the eggs are malformed, the tops folded over onto themselves. You look at the nests, at the brooding hens, and you feel … nothing. You’d imagined that you would feel a great kinship with the world of mothers, now that you will shortly be one. But you do not. The pregnant nanny goat with its red swollen belly still disgusts you, and when you see another woman with child waddle past the back of the courtyard, you only feel embarrassed of how little you yourself have become a mother. Of how much you are still lacking.

Getting the eggs is tricky, because you are avoiding your husband and his family. You try to either get up before any of them or stay in the shed until your husband and his father, at least, are gone. But at night, when you lay on the worktable, you still lie as if Emmanuel was beside you. You curl to the edge and make space for this boy, as if the two of you were still in bed.

You lose count of your nights in the shed. Eventually, your husband leads his sister to the door, leads her by the hand like a child, and has her stand and call, “Libertie, Libertie, I have something to tell you.”

You do not come out of the shed. You sit in the dark and call back, “You can say whatever you wish from there.”

You hear them scuffle, as if someone is about to leave. Then Ella yelps. Had your husband pinched her? Ti Me, later, will confirm that he had. Just like when they were small. But after the yelp, you hear Ella, in her grudging singsong, say, “I did not mean to frighten you, sister dear. Please forgive us.”

You do not shout anything back to that. You can feel the two of them out there, waiting. You will not respond. Eventually, one of them shuffles away.

A few minutes later, your husband comes into your shed and says, “Ti Me, may we have a moment.”

When she is gone, you say to him, “You’ve forced Ti Me out of her home.”

“You have,” he says back, and it shocks you a bit, his willingness to do battle. You have always known him as a lover. You have always felt that power over him. You did not expect him to be willing to fight. If you do not know yourself as his lover, as the one who makes his eyes turn soft and makes his voice weak and makes him bow his head to please you:

What are you?

What power do you have here?

You are frightened then that you’ve lost him. That maybe he was lost to you already.

So you square your shoulders and decide, no matter. If he’s lost, then maybe you are ready to be something else.

“You are a liar,” you say.

“I have never lied to you,” he says in a sob, and all your resolve nearly leaves you. And it is maddening that he is right. You want to go to him and hold him, to hold him as you did when you were both at sea. But in the dark shed, you think of the gleam in Ella’s eye, and Ti Me’s quiet voice saying:

You know what a man is like.

It is no use to wish for something different.

It is not possible.

“Do you remember,” you say, “when you wooed me and told me that we were equals? That we would be companions?”

“Have we not been?”

“You did not tell me your family’s history.”

“I have always thought—” He stops, his voice strangled with tears. “I have always thought that I could be myself with you.”

“But your self belongs to this rottenness. Your self defends it.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Which self have you been? The one who wants a million sons to build a free nation? The one who lets his father corrupt a country with his lewdness and greed? The one who calls his sister mad until maybe she’s become it? The one who imagines doing all of this means he’s working toward freedom?”

In the dusk, you see how slight he is, again. How pale his skin is, and how it glows. You think of how much pleasure you took in his looks, how much you took pleasure in the pleasure others took in looking at him. You were Mrs. Doctor, Mrs. Emmanuel Chase, Mrs. Chase. Your genuine desire for him was all mixed up in knowing how much he desired you, and how much anyone—Ella seething in the sitting room, his father peering at you over his glasses, your mother, shocked and scared, the high yellow American women of the colony with their faces fixed in disbelief—how all of them could see it. It was so plain they couldn’t deny it.

How much it would hurt if all that certainty of who you were, at least to them, was gone.

“You are unfair, Libertie,” he says. He unbends his head. And for a moment, it is as it was when the two of you were in the mountains, in the pool, his hands holding you up, through the water, to the sky.

“I do not know what to do,” you say.

“There is nothing to do,” he says. “You are only upset and broody.”

“No,” you say. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Come back in the house, Libertie.”

“I think,” you say carefully, “I will stay out here for a little while longer.”

He sighs. Bends his head again.

And then he is gone.

THE BEST PART about living in the shed was being close to the fire. I no longer had to listen to the string of chicken move past Emmanuel’s father’s teeth, or his sister sip each teaspoon of her consommé. The only sound I missed was the fork up against my husband’s tongue.

I did not eat what the family ate. I ate what Ti Me did. Sometimes, we roasted plantains in the embers of the fire. Sometimes, she cracked two raw eggs in a cup and drank it, and I drank it, too. I did not have the nausea so many women have with pregnancy. Instead, I craved the scraps of Ti Me’s worktable. Sometimes, she had to slap the potato skins from my hands—she would catch me gathering them up and sucking each one as if it was honey.

“You best not start eating the dirt, mamselle,” she warned me. “You do that, and I’ll have Monsieur Emmanuel himself come and get you.”

It was true I had been tempted, but I took Ti Me at her word, though I kept a small handful of dust in my smock pocket, to lick at when she was asleep.

“Ti Me, do you love the younger Chases?”

“Non, mamselle.”

“No!” I laughed, surprised by how she’d said it without hesitation.

Her expression did not change. “They are kind. They were good to me when I came to them as a girl.”

“But you don’t love them?”

“What does any of that have to do with love?”

“You never loved Emmanuel and Ella, then?”

She snorted. “I never love Monsieur Emmanuel. Or Mamselle Ella. I care for them like they are my brother and sister. I care for them better than a mother. But I don’t love them. When I first saw them, they were so thin. And so pale. They got spots in the sun. They were so scared—scared of everything. Emmanuel told me they see their mama pass, right in front of them. Their brothers, too. Their papa, he would always pray. The children cry, and he would tell them to pray. They would cry on me at night. I have my mother—she still living, so I did not know what to do. She told me just to hold them. So I did.”

“You were not tired of them?”

“What do you mean?”

“When someone needs you that much, it doesn’t make you tired?”

“You are speaking nonsense.”

“I used to think that as a little girl. And I thought that was what was wonderful about Emmanuel. He wanted me without asking anything of me. I thought that at least. But now I think he asks too much.”

“He asks nothing of you.”

“He asks me to live with a bad man and a girl who pretends to be mad and does nothing all day.”

“But the bishop and Ella can’t help who they are.”

“Do you think they will ever change?”

“The bishop. What would you change? He wishes for a place he cannot return to. He does what any other man would do if they were him. It is no use trying to change him.”

“That’s what you always say, Ti Me. Nothing is ever of any use.”

“It would be cruel to try and change the bishop. You can only live beside him and turn away from him when you can. And Ella, she is still a child.”

“I am to stay here and take whatever the bishop says or tries to do to me?” I said.

“You want to know why you are so restless, causing all this family trouble?”

“It is Monsieur Emmanuel who’s caused the trouble.”

“Bah,” she said. “Men do what they do. They are like a plow, moving through dirt—they just make the way. It’s women like you and your fretting that cause a mess, disturb a rut.”