Chapter 2: The Scar That Stays

The heat in New Orleans that July felt personal, as if the city itself were pressing its palm against your lungs and daring you to breathe deeper. Nawana had been gone from the shotgun house on Rampart Street for nearly two years—ever since the night in the Crescent Moon Inn when time first bent to her will. She had drifted: Miami for a season, Atlanta for another, a string of cheap apartments and cheaper lovers, each one a brief canvas for her growing hunger. But something had pulled her back. Not homesickness. Not guilt. A nagging itch she couldn’t name. The need to see if the power could still be spoken aloud without shattering.

She arrived just after sunset, the sky bruised purple over the river. The house hadn’t changed. Same narrow shotgun silhouette, same faded Creole blue paint peeling in long curls, same brick piers holding it three feet above the flood-prone ground. The front stoop sagged under the weight of years and potted ferns gone leggy from neglect. A single bulb burned behind the Screen door, casting long shadows across the heart-pine floorboards that ran straight through all three rooms like a single vein.

Delphine was in the kitchen, the heart of the house. Fifty-one now, but the years had carved rather than softened her. Her skin was still the deep, rich color of chicory brewed strong; her hair wrapped in a fresh tignon of crimson and gold hibiscus print; her hands, calloused from decades of hotel linens and hotel lives, moved with the same deliberate grace. The small altar to Papa Legba stood in the corner of the bedroom, visible through the open doorway: white candle guttering low, half-empty bottle of Barbancourt rum, red ribbon knotted tight, a scattering of cornmeal and brick dust across the threshold. The air smelled of red beans simmering with andouille, onion, bay leaf—and beneath it, the faint, sacred smoke of copal that never quite left the walls.

The radio on the windowsill played low zydeco—Rufus Thibodaux’s accordion laughing through the static like an old friend who knew too much. Delphine sat at the scarred oak table, shelling pecans into a chipped yellow bowl. Crack. Crack. Crack. The rhythm is steady, almost meditative.

Nawana let the Screen door slap shut behind her—sharp, deliberate. She stood in the parlor doorway, arms folded, weight on one hip. At twenty-three, she was taller than her mother now, body fuller and more dangerous, eyes carrying shadows no twenty-three-year-old should have accumulated.