‘You should be ashamed,’ she said, but she was not referring to my love affair with Milkman, which I assumed she was referring to because that was all anybody – whose business still it wasn’t – referred to. Instead she was talking about my colluding with Milkman to kill her in some other life. As well as her death, apparently I was responsible for the deaths of twenty- three other women – ‘some of whom were definitely doing herbs,’ she said, ‘just their innocent white medicine, and some of whom weren’t doing anything’ – and I did all these crimes during the time we – the whole twenty-six of us – were in this other life. She meant a past incarnation sometime during the seventeenth century and she gave dates and times and said he had been a doctor, but one of those quack doctors.