His hands dropped from me, the loss of contact subtle yet still devastating.
“I’ve been called to do the most good on earth. And this place, right here, is where I can do the most good.”
Reserved anger twisted my emotions. “Being without you makes me ill.”
He paused, pondering me with pained eyes. “I’m sorry about that.”
Beats of silence deafened my ears.
Tension thickened the air between us.
I swallowed, no reply left to be given.
Bastien frowned softly, so much seemingly left unsaid. Only, the right words made themselves scarce.
A series of booms rattled the floor under our feet then, subtle like an earthquake, before everything fell silent again.
Water rained over our heads, and Bastien’s eyelids, heavy with water droplets, turned from mine for the last time.
I swallowed, anxiety running white-hot through my veins before he nodded once. His full lips turned up slowly before he slipped behind the shower door, running a towel across his biceps and over his head quickly before tossing the spent towel on the floor at his feet.
The stretch of his broad body walking away from me, his last kiss goodbye.
TWENTY
Tressa
As I came down the narrow steps of Bastien’s stairway ten minutes later, Ronnie John—one of the kids from Bastien’s catechism class—sped around the corner, climbing the stairs two at a time with fear painting his features.
My heart pummeled my throat as I realized how bad this looked.
So very bad.
There was no sensible reason I should be sneaking down Father Bastien’s private stairwell so early in the morning. This kid would definitely run off and tell everyone he knew, and then where would that leave us? And Bastien’s job? The parishioners would revolt, the cardinal would come, Bastien would be ripped from St. Mike’s.
Our very worst fears were materializing on the face of this boy.
“I can explain.” I choked on the statement, because I couldn’t.
I couldn’t explain.
“Run.” He clutched my elbow.
“What?” I shook my head, confused.
“Run, Ms. Tressa,” Ronnie John urged, begging me to follow him a beat before seemingly giving up and scrambling up the stairs as quickly as possible. He landed at the top of the staircase and launched himself down the hallway just as a series of booms echoed through the tiny chambers of the house.
“What the fuck is going on?” I breathed, fear causing my palms to prickle with sweat as the smell of gunpowder circled my nostrils. “Ronnie!” I screamed up the stairs, eyes darting from the door he’d slammed closed behind him to the long, dark hallway down which he’d come. The one that led deep into the bowels of St. Mike’s.
I gulped, fear pulsing through me as realization dawned that danger lay ahead, in exactly the direction Bastien had gone.
“Oh God.”
I’d been so wrapped up in our sin, I hadn’t even realized the boom from earlier was something far more serious than I could have imagined. Indecision iced my veins before I launched forward, pushing myself down the long hall and bursting into the sacristy.
Horrifying, deafening silence.
I crossed the room, conscious of every footstep on the aged wooden floor.
My hand quaked as I turned the doorknob that led from the sacristy and into the nave of the church. Rustling against the other side of the door shook me before I sucked in a shallow breath and opened it a crack.
Centuries-old incense laced with the scent of blood pulsed in the air as Lucy clutched Ms. Watson against her body, blood leaking between her fingers, spread across her face, seeping beneath her folded legs and soaking the smooth wooden floor.
“Oh God.” I covered my mouth, holding back vomit and my wildest scream. Tears pierced my eyes and stung my cheeks. “No.”
I yanked the door wider, pulling Lucy and Ms. Watson into the tiny room with me, scanning quickly behind them for the cause of all this blood.
“Bastien’s out there,” Lucy choked out, eyes wide with fear as our gazes met for the first time.
“I don’t see him.” A sinking feeling ate up my stomach.
“He’s in the vestibule.” Her hands began to shake as fresh blood soaked between her fingers. It looked like it was coming from Ms. Watson’s chest, but it was so hard to tell.
I’d never seen so much blood.
Bile rose in my throat as a crimson river traveled down the cracks of the wooden floor I’d just crossed, unaware of the massacre happening just on the other side of the door.
“Are you hurt? The baby?” Fuck. Where was my phone? Both of them needed an ambulance.
“Tressa.” Lucy’s breath rattled with pain or fear, or a mix of both. “Bastien’s out there with him.”
“With him?” I glanced back through the crack in the door, eyes scanning for any signs of more bodies. Alive or otherwise. “Who’s him? It looks clear from here. I don’t even hear anything.”
Lucy shook her head, tears splashing down her cheeks as she tried to quell the surge of blood soaking her sweater and Ms. Watson’s jacket. “Tressa, you don’t understand. Close the door and lock it. The father of this baby is out there.” Fresh tears coated her cheeks as she rubbed at her tiny belly. “I think he’s got a gun.”
“What?” The shrill tone of my reply hurt my own ears and made me painfully aware a second too late that I’d just given away our hiding place.
“How long has Bastien been out there with him?” I tried to calculate how many minutes it’d been since he’d left me.
Too long.
That was how long.
Fear and courage swam in my veins, steeling my muscles for the bravery I knew I needed to save the man I loved.
“I’m going.”
“Not unless you have a death wish.”
I didn’t have the heart to answer her.
I’d given it over to Bastien.
The sounds of a scuffle were slight but present as soon as I opened the door into the church. “I’ll be right back. Two minutes, I promise, Luce. Just hang tight, okay?”
Our eyes met, gazes watered down with fear.
“No, Tressa, please.” She looked down at Ms. Watson. Before Lucy could look back and beg me to stay again, I slipped out of the sacristy and into the main chamber of the church. My eyes scanned the pews, searching for anyone else who may need help.
It looked clear, the only victims already accounted for in the room I’d just left.
Sliding along the cold stone wall, I measured my breathing with my footsteps, keeping to the shadows as the sound of soft grunts grew louder in my ears.
Bastien’s warm, deeply inflected voice uttered something before all was silent again.
I came to the corner, only steps away from the set of doors that would open into the front vestibule of the church. Eyes caught on the iron cross that hung on a tiny hook next to the door. “I know I don’t deserve it, but please pray for the man I am about to save.”
Barbed wire cinched tighter around my heart, crushing my courage one millimeter at a time, deflating my resolve.
I could run the other way.
Escape out the back door, dial 9-1-1 as I ran down the sidewalk, and never look back.
And then I heard it.
The soft snick of a bullet sliding into a chamber.
Fire tore through every vein as I fisted the heavy cross on the wall and yanked, the old hook coming free of the stone easily before I powered with all the force I had through the double doors and into the vestibule. A man in black, beanie pulled low over his head, gripped Bastien’s neck with one hand, a gleaming revolver in the other.
The barrel aimed right at Bastien’s temple.
Without pausing, I smashed the cold iron cross into the attacker’s head, unwilling to stop, newfound stores of primal energy running on a violent cycle through me. He fell to the ground, gun clutched in one hand, and still, I attac
ked.
Blood pooled, streaking from the edges of his beanie and fueling my rage.
Bastien swept the gun from the man’s limp fingers and made quick work of tying the assailant’s hands as tightly as he could muster with his belt.
Once Bastien was sure he was secured, his eyes met mine.
“I’ve got him,” Bastien murmured, hand slipping over mine to ease the cross from my hands.
I gave it up, feeling the tension drain from my muscles as I did.
“There.” Bastien rose, hands clutching gently at my shoulders as my eyes began to glaze with shock. Tremors of remorse erupted inside my body, a scream bubbling up from my throat, one I couldn’t contain a moment longer.
So much blood.
Too much blood.
Did I just add killer to my list of sins?
“Tressa.” He pressed his palms to my neck, thumbs sliding down my jaw and throat, willing me to come back to him. “Sweet dove, please. I need you.”
His forehead brushed mine, tears beading at his eyelids as he placed soft kisses along my lips.
Sirens vibrated in my eardrums, closer and closer with every passing beat.
“Can you take care of Luce for me? And check on Ms. Watson? I have to stay here, but can you check on them for me, my dove?”
His words solidified in my consciousness.
I nodded, hollow but present.
“Yes.”
“Good.” His smile, pained but relieved, lit my desperate soul. The fact that I had the power to put that smile on his face, even in the middle of the most horrifying moment in both of our lives, fueled something inside me.
Something I’d spend the rest of my life trying to inflame and douse in equal parts.
TWENTY-ONE
Tressa
I picked my way around the wreckage. Shrapnel in the form of hundreds of tiny objects.
Objects meant to destroy, ravage, maim the flesh of God’s most obedient flock.
Gunpowder and shrapnel had settled on the last rows of pews, only those with heavier trajectories flying farther up the nave.
Ronnie John picked up a wrench and a jagged shard of steel sitting under the final Station of the Cross, Jesus’s death, hanging just outside the sacristy door. The very objects responsible for battering Lucy and Ms. Watson almost fatally.
When I’d found Ronnie John huddled in a bathtub upstairs, his frail teen boy arms shook with fear as he covered his head and cried.
I cried with him when we walked down the stairs and he told me how he’d come in early before Mass to set up the catechism room and help Father Bastien distribute this week’s leaflets to the missiles in each pew. He described feeling the first boom shake the foundations under his feet. By the time he’d exited the tiny catechism room and snuck up the back stairs, a dark figure was pulling another weighted backpack into the main hall of the church. With the bomber’s back turned, Ronnie John had crab-crawled across the front pews and ducked inside the sacristy, his only focus finding Father Bastien to warn him.
What I hadn’t realized, and what Ronnie John had confessed as we walked back to the chaos, was that Bastien had apparently, and very recently, had a security system installed. A discreet button hidden in a corner of the sacristy rang the security company and local emergency services. Ronnie John had helped him install it before Bastien explained to him and the rest of the kids in catechism class how it worked, urging that if they ever felt threatened, they were to use this without hesitation. He’d also explained to them the importance of keeping it a secret, especially from church officials who wouldn’t approve of its installation without their knowledge.
When one of the kids had asked why it was necessary at church, Bastien had only shrugged it off with a simple, “We all should do what we can to save future souls.”
Bastien’s dogged determination to help the helpless had always impressed me, but the idea that he’d installed an alarm without even the cardinal’s knowledge was something else entirely.
I couldn’t help but wonder if something he’d found in the attic upstairs had driven him to seek out enhanced security for St. Mike’s.
My rebel saint, the man with the plan to save us all.
Ronnie John cleared his throat as he swung open the door of the sacristy to reveal a now-bustling crime scene.
Armed officers, detectives, and medics swarmed.
I wrapped my arms around my body, sliding my palms up and down the long sleeves of my shirt before crossing the threshold of the door and letting it close softly behind me.
Ronnie John caught my eye and nodded before heading for a group of detectives, presumably to tell his side of the story.
I wondered if he’d tell the part about me running down the stairs, freshly showered and with Bastien’s marks on my body? What would I say if they asked? What could I say? I didn’t think there was a likely explanation other than the truth. Anything else seemed laughable in comparison.
Anxiety threaded my muscles, making it hard to walk, hard to think, my only focus the fear of what might happen if we were caught.
One night.
One indiscretion.
Two lives changed forever.
I walked the length of the church wall, fingertips drawing on the smooth stone to steady me as I descended each of the Stations of the Cross, a dark representation of Jesus’s last moments before death. The calm look on his hollow face haunted me then, and it did even more so now.
Nearing the light spilling out of the double doors at the entrance of St. Mike’s, I saw Lucy’s softly lit face shining through the pane of a single window, one medic attaching an IV to her arm, the other performing a triage scan of her major moving parts. I’d make sure I was in that ambulance with her by the time it was set to take off for the hospital. No way would I let her navigate that experience alone when she was already suffering from so much.
I pushed through the doors, the smell of gunpowder finally fading, probably with the gusts of wind that carried in and out of the church each time someone new came in and out of the crime scene.
St. Michael’s.
A crime scene.
I was still in shock. It would take me days to unpeel these layers, especially when they were so intimately wrapped around a man who held the most sacred of soft spots in my soul.
I paused at the second set of doors, my view clearer than it’d ever been.
Bastien’s form was hunched over what looked to be an innocent bystander who had been knocked off his feet by one of the blasts.
Bastien held the old man’s frail hand as a medic poked and prodded all the other parts of his body for wounds.
Dried fingerprints of blood caked Bastien’s hands, his gaze intent on the soul suffering before him.
Father Bastien tending his flock.
Just as he’d been called to do.
Pushing through the final set of doors, my focus crisp and clear after far too long, I walked on confident steps to the person who needed me most. Validation coursed through me in the form of a wave of satisfaction so profound, all I could do was glance back for one last stolen moment.
I watched him, kneeling and helping the wounded man at his feet, so very God-like from the inside out. The last thought to cross my mind was something he’d probably parroted to me at some point over our torrid last few months.
The best in life is only bought at the price of great pain.
Maybe this was our penance.
Our greatest pleasure had brought the greatest pain to those we loved most.
Heart shattering every step, I turned back, walking away from a life set aflame, resolution finally riding me harder than the longest of my many dark nights.
Lucy held a hand out to me as I approached the ambulance, our eyes locking when I climbed through the back doors, listening to them close before we turned out of the churchyard, a hard left over the curb, and then the next right, headed in the direction of the rest of our lives.
TWENTY-TWO
Tressa
—seven months later
Lucy and I lived for three months in a one-bedroom apartment, her in the bedroom and me on the couch, before I got a call on a colder than normal Sunday morning that Mom had suffered cardiac arrest in the middle of her dinner one night, cigarette burned into a shell of ash in her hand. My heart broke when I went back, cleaned up the life she’d spent all of her days working so hard for. The small blessing was that she’d left everything to me, meaning Lucy and I could move in to Mom’s tiny little house, the burden of rent suddenly off our shoulders.
And Lucy grew.
At seven months, the doctor began to talk about taking the baby early. He also asked her if there was a chance she could be farther along than she thought.
She was adamant, though.
Her story unwavering.
Casey.
The boy with the backpacks.
That was still how I thought of him.
The sad, broken boy with the backpacks he’d stuffed chock-full of metal debris and pipe bombs and set off in St. Mike’s on another colder than normal Sunday morning.
I’d begun to resent the cold Sunday mornings, expecting only shitty tidings for the rest of the day.
Unfortunately, Philadelphia was afflicted with about 100 freezing-cold mornings a year, which made the odds almost never in my favor.
I dug a little deeper each morning, one foot in front of the other as I took the bus downtown to one of the jobs I’d applied for that morning months ago, before everything else had happened.
That’d been the one stellar silver lining in the catastrophe of my life.
I’d landed just about the greatest job I could have imagined, coordinating the corporate giving department of a major local bank with hundreds of branches situated around the area. I was expected to research charities and different locations around the globe that the bank could organize donations and giving events for. It was the best part of my day, every day.
I took my work home most days because I loved it. My life seemed to sharpen into focus in a way it never had before, my purpose to help those around me in any way I could. Corporate giving maybe wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but it was certainly something I loved in the moment.
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