This is what it must be like to be married to a widow. You give her bandages for her wounds; you offer comfort when memories sneak up and she cries for what looks like no reason. When she reminisces about the past, you don’t remind her of the things she has chosen not to recollect, all the while telling yourself that it’s unreasonable to be jealous of a dead man.

But what can I do other than what I’ve done? I’ve known Celestial Davenport all my life, and I have loved her at least that long. This is the truth as natural and unvarnished as Old Hickey, the centuries-old tree that grows between our two houses. My affection for her is etched onto my body like the Milky Way birthmark scoring my shoulder blades.

On the day we got the news, I was aware that she didn’t belong to me. I don’t mean that, on paper at least, she was another man’s wife. If you knew her, you would know that she never belonged to him either. I’m not sure if she even realized it herself, but she’s the kind of woman who will never belong to anyone. This is the truth that you have to lean close to see. Picture a twenty-dollar bill. You think it’s green, but when you get up close you find that it’s beige linen with dark green ink. Now consider Celestial. Even while she wore his ring, she wasn’t his wife. She was merely a married woman.

I’m not making excuses for myself. I know that there are men in this world, better men than me, who would cut these feelings off and burn the stump the day that Roy went to prison, especially with him being falsely convicted. His innocence is something that I have never doubted. None of us did. Mr. Davenport is disappointed in me, believing that I should have been a gentleman and left Celestial alone, letting her be a living monument to Roy’s struggle. But anyone who can’t understand doesn’t know what it means to have loved someone since you first figured out how to bend your tongue to talk, how to flex your feet to make steps.

I was a witness at their wedding, you know. The day she married Roy, I signed my name, Andre Maurice Tucker, even though my right hand trembled so badly I had to steady it with my left. At the church, when the preacher asked if anyone could say why these two should not wed, I kept my own counsel there at the altar, cummerbund strapped around my waist and a sloppy fist beating in my chest. She meant what she said on that spring day, but now you have to consider all the days that came after as well as those stacked up before.

Let me start again. Celestial and I grew up on the same narrow street in Southwest Atlanta. The street was Lynn Valley, off of Lynn Drive, which branched off of Lynhurst. The dead end was considered a plus because we could play in the road without getting run over. Sometimes I envy the children today with all their tae kwon do, psychotherapy, and language immersion, but at the same time, I appreciate that back then being little meant you really didn’t have to do anything but stay alive and have fun. We ran loose straight through the seventies, but we got stopped short when a serial killer terrorized the city. We tied a yellow ribbon around Old Hickey in memory of the twenty-nine missing and murdered. It was a rough couple of years, but the threat passed; the yellow ribbons frayed and fell like leaves and were burned like leaves. Celestial and I continued to live, love, learn, and grow.

When I was seven, my parents tangled in a nasty divorce back when nice families didn’t split up. Once Carlos moved out—a grand performance involving his three brothers, an off-duty cop, and a U-Haul—Celestial volunteered her own father. I’ll never forget her pulling me by the hand down to the basement lab. Mr. Davenport wore a white coat, like a doctor; his goggles burrowed in his asymmetric afro. “Daddy,” she said. “Andre’s daddy ran off, so I said you could be his daddy, too, sometimes.” Mr. Davenport fired up a Bunsen burner, pulled down his goggles, and said, “I’m amenable to the proposition.” To this day, this remains the greatest gift that anyone has ever extended to me. Mr. Davenport and I never became like father and son; the chemistry wasn’t quite right. Still with that gesture of generosity, she lifted the covers, I crawled under, and we became a family.

To lay it all on the table, we were not quite like brother and sister. We were more like kissing cousins. Our senior year in high school, we went to the Valentine’s Ball together, for lack of other options. She had her eye on a bass drummer, and I had my eye on this one majorette. As luck would have it, they had their sights on each other. I wasn’t surprised to be dateless. In a world that prized tall, dark, and handsome, I was little, light, and cute. After the prom, we kissed each other in the back of the limo from Witherspoon’s. Then, back at her house, we snuck down to the basement and made out on the little sofa her father crashed on when he needed a break from his work. The room smelled like rubbing alcohol, and the sofa cushions smelled like weed. Celestial glided over to a shiny file cabinet and produced a flask filled with something that might have been gin. We passed it back and forth until the courage kicked in.

Then I was such a mama’s boy that I confessed everything to Evie. The next morning. She had two things to say: (a) it was inevitable and (b) it was my duty to go next door, ring the bell, and ask Celestial to be my girlfriend. Like her daddy had said all those years ago, I was “amenable to the proposition,” but Celestial was not. “Dre, can we pretend like we didn’t do that? Can we just watch TV?” She was asking me a real question, wanting to know if it were possible for us to reverse the clock. Could we shift away from the memory of the night before, grow toward some other sun. I finally said that we could try. She broke my heart that afternoon, like how Ella Fitzgerald could shatter a glass with a song.

I’m not telling this to say that I planted my flag way back in high school. All I want to get across is that there is real history between us, not just an accident of time and place.

After high school, we went our separate ways, seeking our fortunes like the three little pigs. My seeking only took me seven miles up the road, to Morehouse College. I was a third-generation legacy, and this was enough for Carlos to pony up the tuition even though he hadn’t paid Evie half of what she asked for in child support. My first-choice school was Xavier University in New Orleans, but I had to go where Carlos was willing to send a check. I’m not complaining. Morehouse was a good fit, teaching me that there were dozens of ways to be a black man. I only had to choose which one was right for me.

Celestial picked Howard University, although her mother voted for Smith in Massachusetts and her dad endorsed Spelman. But whatever Celestial wanted, Celestial got, so they bought her a gray Toyota Corolla she named Lucille, and she set out for the nation’s capital. I halfheartedly tried to meet up with her when Morehouse played Howard for homecoming. My girlfriend at the time wasn’t keen on meeting Celestial; even she could tell from the way I pronounced her name that my feelings were more than friendly.

About three weeks after I didn’t see her in DC, she came back home, shattered. Her family kept her essentially sequestered for nearly six months. I visited twice and I would have come by every week, but her aunt Sylvia sent me away. Something shadowy and female happened between them, as mysterious and primal as witches’ brew.

Come September, Celestial was ready to live again, but she didn’t go back to DC. Strings were pulled and she enrolled at Spelman College after all. Evie told me to keep an eye on her, and I did. Celestial was the same girl I had always known but with a little bit of risk about her, like she might cut you. Her sense of humor was ratcheted up a few notches, and she stood even taller.

All that was a long time ago, when things were different. I know that nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but I can’t help recalling those days when we were underage and broke; she would sometimes come stay with me in my dorm room and we feasted upon wing-on-wheat, a chicken-and-bread combination that cost only two dollars and some change. After we ate, I would mess with her, asking why she never brought around any of her friends to meet me.

“I notice that you never talk about me bringing anybody until after the food is all gone.”

“I’m serious,” I said.

“Next time,” she said. “I promise.” But she was never going to bring anyone around and she would never tell me why not. On these evenings, near 1 a.m. or so, I always offered to escort her back to her own campus and she would say, “I want to stay here.” We slept in my twin bed—her under the covers and me beside her with a sheet between us, for modesty’s sake. I would be lying if I didn’t say sharing the bed with only a stretch of cotton separating our bodies didn’t rile me up from time to time. But looking back, I attribute that to my youth. Once she woke up before the sun and whispered, “Andre, sometimes I feel like I’m not all the way together.” That was the one time I joined her underneath the sheet, but it was only to quiet her trembling. “You’re good,” I told her. “You’re good.”

And if I may say another thing to color the record, they met through me. She had slept over and Roy came by at 8 a.m. trying to hustle up some quarters to do his laundry. He came busting in with no warning, like there was no way I could be doing anything private. In college, I was a hard guy to categorize. I wasn’t militant enough to be an Afrikan with a k, I wasn’t peculiar enough to be a nerd, and it goes without saying that I didn’t have the moves to be a Rico Suave. So I may not have had a natural female constituency, but I did well enough. Roy, as per usual, was drowning in attention. He was tallish, dark, and handsome but unpolished enough that it made him appear wholesome. Since our dorm rooms shared a wall, I knew that the clodhopper act was a technique. Not that he wasn’t country as sugar on grits, but he wasn’t stupid or harmless.

“I’m Roy Hamilton,” he said, staring at Celestial like he was hungry.

“Roy Othaniel Hamilton, from what I hear through the wall.”

Now Roy looked at me like I had shared classified information. I held my hands up. Then he turned his eyes to Celestial again and kept them there. At first, I think it was the challenge of it all. He couldn’t believe that she had less than no interest in him. Even I was confused.

That’s when I realized that her transformation was permanent. This was the new Celestial, straight ahead and direct, the by-product of all that time she spent recuperating with her aunt. Six months in Sylvia’s care taught her two things: how to sew dolls from socks and how to tell immediately when a man was coming at her from the wrong side of the street.

Roy came to my room three or four times to ask after her. “Ain’t nothing up with y’all, right?”

“Nothing at all,” I said. “I been knowing her since we were little.”

“Okay,” he said. “Then give me some intel.”

“Like what?”

“If I knew, would I be asking you?”

There was insight I could have given him, no doubt. However, I wasn’t going to give Roy the map to the core of her. He was a cool dude; even back then I liked him. He and I were almost frat bothers. Part One of my father’s conditions in sending me to school was that I pledge—in his mind, only his first-born son could keep the legacy going. When I showed up for the “informational meeting,” Roy was there, too. Being first-generation everything, he didn’t have too much to write on the index cards, whereas the rest of us were busy inking our bona fides. I was sitting right next to him, so I saw a little blemish of panic bloom on his face. When the brothers came around and asked for his card, he handed it back as blank as the moon. “I didn’t feel those questions could tell you who I am.” He didn’t put the bass in his voice when he said it, but there was a little something there. The Big Brother snorted at him and said, “Fool, fill out the card.” Yet he won a little ground for himself there. Roy glanced over at my card on which I block-lettered my dad’s whole entire family tree.

“It’s in your blood,” Roy said.

I waved the card and said, “Ask me how many times I have seen these people in the last ten years.”

Roy shrugged. “It’s your family.”

I handed my card in and sat beside him again. Things got silly. I won’t go into detail because secrets are secrets, but let’s just say there was ceremonial garb but no sacrificial chickens or other livestock.

“We should break up out of here.” Roy poked me with his elbow, testing the waters.

And when I think back on it, I wish we had headed for the door, escaping with our dignity intact. Flash forward: short version—neither of us made line. Slightly more detailed version—they kicked our asses for three weeks straight and we still didn’t make line. Super-secret version—when we didn’t make line, I was privately relieved, but Roy wiped his eyes with his sleeve.