She sat on the porch as the light slanted gold across the yard. And when Titus came in from the fields at dusk and saw her face, he did not need to ask what troubled her. She told him plainly, the way she told him everything now, because plainness between them had become its own kind of tenderness. "Then it isn't really freedom they'd be offering," Titus said afterward. "It's a door that only opens onto more walking."
"Would you still walk through it?" Theodosia asked.
He looked at her for a long moment. "Only if you were walking beside me."
That summer, Augustine Peton fell ill. It began as an ordinary low fever, the kind that moved through the Black Belt every warm season on the back of the mosquitoes that bred thick in the low, wet bottomland along the creeks, a fever most men shook off within a week with rest and quinine bark. Augustine did not shake it off. By August he was confined to his bed, sweating through linens that Louisa's own maid changed twice a day, his breathing grown shallow and his mind in its clearer hours, turning over things he had spent twenty-two years refusing to look at directly.
He sent for Wardlaw twice that month, not for business matters, but to sit with him in long silences that the lawyer, out of some old loyalty or simple human decency, never once refused. No one in this story received a miracle. There was no sudden vision, no deathbed transformation of a cruel man into a saint. What happened instead was smaller and more believable.
The way real change in real people usually is. A man running out of time began in fits and starts to reckon honestly with a handful of the things he had done. Not because his soul had been washed clean, but because dying has a way of stripping away the vanities a man spends his whole healthy life protecting. He sent for Theodosia in the second week of September.
She had not set foot in the big house in over a year. Titus wheeled her chair up the ramp Amos had quietly built at the side entrance months before without being asked in case such a day ever came and left her at the door of her father's room because Augustine had asked to see her alone. The room smelled of camphor and sweat and the candle wax Louisa burned to cover both. Augustine lay propped against pillows, his face gray, his once thick frame gone hollow in a matter of weeks.
And when he saw his daughter in the doorway, something crossed his features that Theodosia had never once seen there before. Not shame exactly, because shame required a kind of honesty Augustine had spent his whole life avoiding, but something adjacent to it, something closer to fear. "You came?" he said. "You asked." He gestured weakly at the chair beside the bed, and Theodosia wheeled herself to it.
For a long while, neither of them spoke. Outside, a mockingbird worked through its evening repertoire in the magnolia tree beside the window, indifferent to what was happening inside.
"I've had Wardlaw draw up papers," Augustine said finally, his voice thin. "For the man, Titus." Theodosia went very still.
"What kind of papers?"
"Manumission. The bond is posted and the notice filed, all of it done properly so no fool in this county can challenge it after I'm gone." He paused to breathe, the effort visible. "He'll have to leave the state. Wardlaw told you that already, I expect."
"He has."
"There's land," Augustine went on, "a parcel I hold free and clear up in Ohio, across from Cincinnati. I bought it years ago on a speculation that never paid off the way I hoped. Forty acres, a cabin on it, nothing grand. It's yours now in the will, along with enough money to see the two of you settled there, and Titus's freedom papers filed the moment he crosses into free ground."
He stopped, and something that might have been the ghost of an old, buried tenderness moved across his ruined face. "Your mother would have wanted you settled somewhere kinder than this house ever was." Theodosia felt something crack open in her chest that she had kept sealed since she was nine years old.
"Why now?" she asked, and her voice, for the first time in longer than she could remember, was not entirely steady. Augustine looked at the ceiling for a long while before he answered. "Because I am out of time to keep pretending I don't know what I did," he said. "I don't ask you to forgive it."
"I only ask you to take what I can still give while I can still give it." Augustine Peton died eleven days later. In the last cool week of September, the fever finally winning the long argument it had been having with his body. There was no final absolution, no tearful reconciliation played out for an audience, only a quiet passing in a darkened room with Louisa at his side and the mockingbird, by strange coincidence, silent for once in the magnolia outside. Cedar Hollow observed a period of somber formality that lasted exactly as long as such things were expected to last among planter families, and then Wardlaw came to read the will.