Page 174 of Beautiful Obsessions
She had fought.
“You’re safe now,” I told her.
It was the priest’s answer.The gentle yet useless answer.
Her eyes widened.A violent tremor went through her.“No,” she said.Her grip tightened with what little strength she had left.“I’m not.”
The woman swallowed, and tears slipped sideways into her hair.
“They will kill me.”Her voice cracked.Then she said the words that closed around my throat like a chain.“Just like they killed my father.”
The room emptied of air.
Her hand went slack on my sleeve.Her eyes rolled back.
“Signorina?”I said.
“She has fainted,” Sister Marina said, already checking her pulse.
But I barely heard her.
Just like they killed my father.
The words repeated inside me, each time darker than before, the pattern arranging itself with obscene clarity.
She was fatherless.A hunted life dropped bleeding at my altar.
Sister Marina stared at me across the bed.
“You understand now,” she said.
I did.That was the problem.I understood too well.
The holy thing to do would have been to trust the law.Trust the Church.Trust the systems built to protect the frightened and punish the wicked.But I had seen wicked men build systems.I had seen them donate to them, dine with them, marry into them, bless them, and use them as cages.
For years, I had built peace from repetition.A life narrow enough to keep the past from entering.And now the past had found me anyway.
I closed my eyes.When I opened them again, Sister Marina was still watching me.
“What will you do, Father?”she asked.
Father.
The word felt heavier than it had an hour ago.
I gently freed my sleeve from the woman’s hand, then covered her fingers with the blanket.
“I will make a call,” I said.
Sister Marina’s eyes sharpened.“To whom?”
I looked at the crucifix on the wall.
Christ hung in carved silence above us, His ribs exposed, His head bowed beneath the unbearable weight of mankind’s endless talent for cruelty.
For years, I had knelt beneath that cross and begged Him to make me good.Kinder.Cleaner.
I wondered if God had ever intended to answer that prayer.Or if tonight, He might need me to be something else.
Slowly, I turned back to Sister Marina.
“Someone I prayed I would never need again.”
