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When she took me inside her completely, her canal vast and perfect around me, her wings closing over us both like a cathedral roof—I wasn't making love to a woman anymore. I was being married to the Adze’s true self. I moved in her with the rhythm she'd taught me and felt Celeste's fingers lace through mine in the grass as I thrust into her warth repeatedly. I heard the fireflies rise in their thousands, humming in Ewe, “nye dzi lɔ̃ wo, nye dzi lɔ̃ wo”, and when I came it was with her teeth in my throat and her cry breaking over the marsh as she cried out her love for me in Ewe⁠—

"Nye srɔ̃!! Nye dzi dzaa! Me kpe wo! Wò ŋu nyɔ”

After, the three of us lay in the mud with the tide coming in around our ankles. Addie returned to her gorgeous womanly form again, divine and soft between us, as I wept. I was finally free. I was finally loved. Addie and Celeste held me as the marsh captured the tears of a man who finally found where he belonged.

"Welcome home," Celeste said quietly before kissing me tenderly.

"I've been home for three weeks," I said. "I was just too damn stubborn to call it what it is.”

Addie laughed and pulled us both closer, as the marsh rejoiced in her finally having the love she deserves.

EPILOGUE (CONSUMED)

Five Years Later

The basket I was working on was nearly done. I sat on the porch of the house on Wadmalaw Island—my house now, though Addie owned it similar to the way the marsh owns the land, which is to say completely and without paperwork. I worked the final coil with fingers that no longer bled, using sweetgrass, longleaf pine, and palmetto. The intricate pattern had come to me in a dream three nights ago. It spiraled out from the center in rings that weren't quite circles that doubled back on themselves before crossing and rejoining like a tide chart or a family tree. Brother Seabrook would've known what it meant. He'd died the winter before last, ninety-one years old, in his sleep, with a half-finished basket on the blanket beside him. We'd buried him on Johns Island under the oaks. Addie had stood at the back of the crowd in a black dress, and no one had asked who she was, because everyone knew, and that night the fireflies had come down over the grave so thick you could have read by them.

I was thirty-nine though I looked twenty-five. My students at the College of Charleston had noticed my youthfulness and her the folktales about the Adze. The whispering had started around year three, when the faculty photos stopped changing. Now the fodder’s settled into the kind of campus legend that nobody examines too closely.

“Professor Owusu doesn't age.”

“Professor Owusu lives on Wadmalaw with a woman nobody's met.”

My course on African Diasporic Spiritual Traditions has a waiting list every semester and students come out of it changed. Their curiosity about the traditions leads them to the Sea Islands on weekends, where they return with sweetgrass under their nails. I didn't discourage any of their desire to learn the truth. I encouraged them to dive deeply into the history to distinguish truth from lies. My grandmother had told me the real stories underneath the frightening ones, and I was passing them on. I taught two days a week and the rest of my time was spent here in the marsh with Addie.

The marsh was dimming at the edges for the night, and I could feel her coming before I heard her. The thread of her in my chest was tightening the way it did at dusk, a tug that said the tide was turning. I heard the cowrie shells clicking in her hair and the porch boards leaning toward her weight.

She came up the steps in her usual wax print, the same colors that she’d always worn to honor my Grandmother. Five years hadn't changed her because nothing changes with Addie but the new memories she collects from her night husbands and wives. She remains as beautiful as ever, still plus-sized and abundant in her desires. Her skin is still dark and luminous in the dying light as her hips roll under the cloth with a gravity that still made my hands twitch. She'd fed last night—a shrimper out of Rockville who'd lost his son to the water and wanted to dream of him. After having her fill, she left him at dawn weak and smiling with a sweetgrass bracelet on his wrist. Her eyes were calm and her lips soft, as she bent to kiss me, tasting of palm wine.

"Nye lɔlɔ̃," she said, and settled onto the swing beside me. The chains hummed, and the whole porch sighed in relief to see her return home.

“Yes, my Love.”

"Celeste is coming at nine, but Zora wants to see you first."

Zora was eighty-three now and aging slowly. Nothing was particularly wrong with Zora; she was enjoying the time she had left after living a full life. Addie gently fed from her every night now, taking only a sip at a time to give her back enough to keep the pain quiet and the dreams sweet. When it came, Zora would go the way the Anlo grandmother had gone on The White Lion—with her wrist at Addie's mouth and a smile, carried rather than lost. I'd been reading my Grandma's letters one at a time, in order. I made it to 1989. Addie told me she liked the ones about my mother's wedding.

"After," I said. "Let me finish this."

Addie leaned her weight into my shoulder and watched my hands. She'd never once in five years told me a basket was good because she didn't need to. I could feel what she felt.

"David called," she said. "He's in Accra. He found the compound."

I pulled a stitch tight. David had left in year two—not left her, left the marsh, with her blessing and a sweetgrass ring on his finger and her thread in his chest. He was changed, the way everyone who leaves is changed. He'd gone to Ghana to find Grandma's village and had been there eighteen months, learning the life and the language we'd never been taught, weaving in a style the Ewe hadn't practiced in two hundred years. He sent photographs of the same red roads I’d walked in my dream. The sky was as blue as I remembered too. The pictures of the fireflies at the end of the rainy season, rising from the mangroves in their thousands, made me smile. If you looked, a few of them were moving against the wind, a sign that Addie had sent them to protect David.

“Last I talked to him, he says the elders there don't believe him about you,” I told her.

"They will." Addie's voice was unbothered. "They always do with time.”

I tied off the last coil before holding up the basket up. It was so tight and pristine it would hold water, and if I asked it to, it would hold a great deal more.

"That's for Seabrook," she said quietly.

"It's for the altar where the tin was." I set it on the rail. "Josephine's going to keep the letters in it. All three hundred and twelve."

Addie didn't say anything, only letting her hand find mine as her thumb traced the sweetgrass ring. Sitting in silence briefly, she spoke in Ewe so softly I almost didn't hear it, "Akpe. Akpe na wò."

Over the years, the house had continued to breathe not just for Addie but me as well. The baskets had changed as well, still hundreds of them on the walls, but they changed with every new night husband and wife. The photographs had evolved over five years. David's had moved from the solarium to the hallway, to the place where the ones who'd left and the ones who’d stayed loved went. There was one of me now too, taken by Celeste on the porch the morning after Vance. The beauty of the photo was complex in that you could see the blood still under my fingernails, Grandma’s knife across my knees, my face doing something I’d never seen it do in London: smile. The knife itself lived in a basket on the mantel, wrapped in red kente. The iron remained for any monsters who might try to make their way here to cause harm. I'd been sure Vance was a monster when I encountered him, and I’d be sure again when the next one came.