How did I pick Saint X? Easy. I knew not a soul there and not a soul knew me. I had two suitcases and Sara. She was four months old, a scrawny babe with a head of dewy curls and an aroma like boiling milk turning to caramel. I wore the prettiest thing I owned, my floral dress and ivory pumps. The pumps had cut up my feet before Saint Kitts was even out of view, but so what? They would heal somewhere else, and that was all that mattered. I was seventeen.

When we debarked at Bendy Harbour, a gentleman in a linen suit offered to help me with my luggage. When he asked my name, I told him I was Agatha Lycott, which wasn’t true. All my life I had been Agatha Hodge, but over my dead body would I be her here, too. Lycott was the surname of a girl in the form above me at school. I always thought it elegant, the sort of name that, of course, belongs to somebody else. From that day forward it was mine and, above all, Sara’s. To anyone who asked, I told the story I had dreamed up awake and alone and growing bigger in the dark in my father’s house, about how my husband, a government minister, had died in a tragic automobile accident just weeks before our daughter’s birth. To make the story more convincing I told everyone I was twenty-four, though I was such a small thing I could more easily have passed for twelve.

But this one’s cousin on Saint Kitts knew that one’s friend on Saint X, and so on. I had been on the island less than a month the first time I told my story and was met with suspicion rather than compassion. The rumors trailed me even here, to this sand-and-rock speck where they make their curry with vulgar quantities of allspice and where not even the teachers speak properly.

You can never start over. They will not permit it, neither the ones who shun you nor the ones who are kind to you so they may lord their kindness over you. In the end they are all after the same thing, all so very curious to know the truth about the origins of the daughter of that skinny little Kittitian sket. I will not give them the satisfaction, though the truth would make them beg for my forgiveness. I will carry the secret of Sara’s paternity to my grave.

Before Sara was born, I imagined that my love for my child would be a sweet blooming inside of me. I was desperate to have someone to love this way, desperate for love to swoop in and soften my sharp edges. But there are other kinds of love. What I got instead was a love that filled and terrified me, a love I knew as intimately as my own body; it was my mother’s love for me, a thing I never, ever wanted.

When Sara told me she was pregnant, I knew I had been naïve to think a new name would be enough to put an end to the passing down of this broken mother’s love. I never should have let her leave the house so angry that day, the day she brought Clive Richardson home. Wait! Don’t go! Sara, I love you. Sara, forgive me. Sara, my child.

At night, I plead into the darkness, hoping with the force of my love to undo the past so she may begin again.

But answer me this: If I’m such a sket, then why have I been lonely every day of my life?