Near-perfect engine. Notes are trims, not fixes.
1. First line is a landmine: “This is not the baby!” Then the nurse, face turned “to gaze across the fields” while the child is scanned. She knows. She looks away. One gesture, whole household.
2. Désirée’s fear arrives in her own mouth first: “I’m so happy; it frightens me.” Planted by the one who can’t see it.
3. Reader learns the truth a beat before she does: child vs. the boy fanning him, “over and over.” That gap is the horror.
1. “That was his last blow at fate.” The scene already showed it. Narrator, step back.
2. Enslaved characters get no interiority. 1893 convention, but deliberate: people who can’t speak. Keep the silence knowingly.
Armand’s interiority appears once; the bonfire is pure action. Keep it that way. The end re-reads all: he casts her out for staining his name, and the letter proves the name was never his. Never about her.
“Page one of a real read. Full runs go twice this long, line-level.”