Page 19 of The Sinner's Sanctuary

“Yeah, so that didn’t go over well, and her mom basically had a breakdown, but she did leave, which was good on the one hand, but she wasn’t in any shape to be a mother to Trinity. Anyway, her dad ended up marrying the other woman he’d been having an affair with, and you know—asked for forgiveness, so all was well.”

“Wow.” I turn and look at him.

“Long story short, Trinity accidentally OD’d on her stepmom’s sleeping pills.”

Shit.That took a turn I wasn’t expecting. “Accidentally?”

“She was tiny. When she couldn’t sleep after taking three, she took four more. She fell asleep when we were on FaceTime. Never woke up.”

He says this very matter-of-factly for someone who watched his girlfriend die on FaceTime.

“I feel like you’re skipping a few steps.”

“That’s because you’re the first person besides my mom I’ve ever told this to. Give me a second, and maybe I’ll fill in some blanks.”

Christian rubs his chest like it’s hurting him and pours another glass of whiskey. When he sits back in his seat with his drink, two tears fall in rapid succession down his cheek, and it feels like someone struck a match deep in my gut, taking all my breath away.

7

CHRISTIAN

The truth hurts. It always has. But whiskey dulls the sharper edges.

Roughly, I swipe the tears on my cheek with the heel of my hand. “I skipped about six months,” I tell Gibson. “Six months where she couldn’t keep her hands off me and fucking rolled around in hot coals to repent. I told her we didn’t have to do anything—it literally didn’t matter to me as long as she was okay, but she said she couldn’t be around me without wanting things she shouldn’t want. And we’d fight, and she got mad at me that I didn’t believe in Jesus the way she did, and she talked to her cousins who all thought she should break up with me, but I was also kind of all she had.”

She’d been tortured over a few kisses—a few intimate touches—we never even had sex. Sex wasn’t even on the table. But every day was a roller coaster of her guilt and my trying to fix it—her rage at my secular advice. “It got to the point where I couldn’t even say I loved her because she convinced herself that was impossible. She’d sinned and sinned again. There was nothing I could say. All I could do was hope she’d get a little older and see how brainwashed she was.”

“Out of curiosity—how did she square what her dad did with the church doctrine.”

“He asked for forgiveness,” I say again.

“But God’s forgiveness didn’t apply to her?”

“Not in a way that made her feel better.” I glance at Gibson, whose brow is furrowed with a look of genuine concern. “Don’t try to make it make sense,” I tell him. “It won’t.”

He gives a slight nod. “But you tried to make sense of it, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did,” I say, my voice choked and breaking. In so many ways, I’m still trying. Journals stuffed with poetry can attest to this.

“If you don’t mind my asking—how’d you handle her death?”

“Not well,” I say, finishing the whiskey in one gulp. I should lay off for now. My head is already fuzzy.

“I don’t think I would have handled that well, either,” Gibson says. “So, no relationships since?”

He’s giving me a way out of talking about Trinity, but she’s already inside me again. Her springy curls and her flawless skin. The way she took no shit and the other, better FaceTime calls where she’d talk me through her skin care routine and suggest tweaks to my eyebrows. She was beautiful and messy, and impossible not to love, and still she was swept aside. Made to pray to a God that hurt her far worse than I ever did. Her need for unconditional love went beyond what I could offer her—or what she could accept.

“I’ve tried a few times—given a few people more than one chance, but it’s not just that it’s hard to make a connection, it’s also that even after all this time, I haven’t forgiven myself for what happened, and I don’t want to put that on someone else.”

“Have you tried therapy?”

“In this economy?”

Gibson laughs.

“I don’t like talking about it. I do deal with it, though.”

“How’s that?” he asks.

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