Page 5 of Torn

I laughed, even though I knew he was teasing me. “How old are you?”

“Fifteen. Nearly sixteen.”

My eyes widened. “Wow. That’s really old.”

He raised one eyebrow. “Might feel like that to you now, but wait till you’re my age. I don’t feel old at all,” he said. “Trust me, our parents are the old ones. Mine have been married for more than twenty-five years. Can you imagine that?”

I couldn’t. Twenty-five years seemed like forever to me. “That’s a long time. They seem happy, though.”

I wasn’t just being polite. They really did seem happy with each other, unlike my own parents. I hadn’t seen them touch each other affectionately or smile at each other in a long time.

Mason nodded. “Yeah. They are.”

I tilted my head to the side. “Do you love them?”

“Look at you, asking all the deep questions.” Mason chuckled and cocked his head to the side. “Anyway, yeah, I guess I do. We fight sometimes, but I know they’re cool deep down.” He hesitated for a moment, his brows drawn. “How about your family? How’s your mom with your dad’s church stuff?”

I thought of all the recent arguments about the direction my father was taking his church in, and the broken glass my mom swept up after the last one. It made me squirm uncomfortably in my spot.

Why couldn’t my parents just get along all the time? Why couldn’t my mom just listen?

“I don’t think she likes it much. She told me he wasn’t religious when they first met, and that he’s changed a lot. She thinks he uses it to get his own way sometimes,” I finally said.

After blurting that out, I felt a sudden burning need to defend my father. I was probably making him sound bad. He wasn’t, though. He was just doing what our God commanded him to do. It wasn’t his fault that people were naturally so sinful and refused to listen half the time.

“A lot of other people like his new church, though,” I hastily continued. “It has over three hundred members now. They all love my father and think he’s nice and very smart. Some of them didn’t believe him at first when he told them what he knows, but he changed their minds.”

“So he’s charismatic,” Mason muttered. “Figures.”

“Charismatic?” I frowned. I wasn’t familiar with the word.

“Never mind. Big word. You’ll learn it in school one day.” He shielded his eyes from the sun and squinted into the distance. “Hey, what’s that over there?”

I followed his line of sight to a decaying white clapboard building in one of the distant fields. Once upon a time, it had been a beautiful church with a large bell, carved detailing above the stained glass windows and a tall steeple rising from the gabled roof. Now the paint was peeling, the windows were long gone, and parts of it were sagging or falling down. Mom never let me play near it because it could be dangerous.

“That’s a really old chapel. It was here when we bought the land,” I explained. “My mom said some early settlers built it more than two hundred years ago. They abandoned it when it flooded.”

“It flooded?” Mason frowned. “But it’s in the middle of a field. The nearest swamp is nowhere near it.”

“She said they tried to build some sort of basement below it, but they didn’t know much about the ground here. Apparently the water table is high, and that can cause flooding if you try to build underground stuff. The flooding made the rest of the building weak.”

He nodded slowly. “Oh, right. You sure know a lot about it, smart-ass.” He grinned and ruffled my hair again.

I blushed. I wasn’t smart. I was just parroting what I’d heard from adults.

Mason took a few steps away from the pond to try and get a better view of the old building. “Can we go explore it? It looks cool.”

I shook my head. “I’m not allowed there. It’s dangerous.”

“How so?”

“It’s falling apart. I think my father is fixing it up, though. I’ve seen men hanging around there with all sorts of building stuff for a long time now.”

“Oh, okay. That’s cool, I guess.” He turned back to the pond, lips pressed in a thin line. His interest was clearly waning. I was boring him.

“There might be treasure there,” I said, desperate to keep him entertained. I liked hanging out with him, and I didn’t want him to leave.

He lifted a brow. “Really?”

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