Page 130 of At Her Will

Going to the cross, he put his hands on the base, his forehead on the polished wood above it. But that didn’t give him rest. He wanted to beat his head against it, use the impact to give him answers he didn’t know.

He backed away, and sank down in a pew in the middle of the church. As he leaned against the wooden side, he put his head into his hands.

A movement had him lifting it. A woman wearing jeans and a T-shirt had come in from the chancel door. She had close-cropped hair and caramel-colored skin.

She was also blind. She wore dark glasses and used a white cane decorated with colorful stickers to navigate the space before her. The casual way she swept it left to right told him she used it only to be sure nothing unexpected was in her path.

The reason for her familiarity with the surroundings became obvious as she turned his way, making the swirly white letters on her T-shirt easier to read.

I’m the pastor. Really.

(Yes, God does have a sense of humor.)

She wore a military dog tag in a silver frame. The short chain it was on was threaded with jasper beads and a cross, the cross lying against the dog tag.

Her head cocked in his direction. “Hello. Are you all right?”

A kind question. If he was fine, just here to pray, she would leave him be. If he needed something…

He was used to being the one who offered what she was offering. Veracity was the first who’d offered Rev, as a man, things he’d finally allowed himself to need. Or maybe she had pushed through the doors he’d kept closed on that.

He didn’t know what to say. He needed to say something, because she couldn’t see if he was nodding or shaking his head. But a paralyzing mix of grief, rage and helplessness gripped him, and an overwhelming desire to act how he shouldn’t. If he so much as twitched, he feared he’d become an agent of destruction, a tornado he couldn’t control.

The woman moved toward him. Though barely past five feet and small-boned, there was a toughness to her that made him think the dog tag could be hers.

She slid into the pew behind him, leaned forward and put her hand on the pew, sliding it toward him until the side of it touched his shoulder. “I’m here,” she said quietly.

She said nothing further. Just sat with him, with no expectation, no pressure on him to say or do anything. It helped him let some of that pressure out and keep ahold of himself. It also meant the words that came from him had no prompting other than being what covered all of it.

“I failed her. My Mistress.”

A peculiar stillness gripped the woman. He’d likely confused her with the odd word choice. But he couldn’t think of how to change that, so he just kept going. “My family…they think I chose her over them. She thinks I chose them over her. I tried to follow my love for all of them, and that sword, both sides, is cutting me to pieces. I don’t know how to put myself back together to help either one of them. And there’s such anger in my heart for my family, I don’t want to help them. I only want to help her.”

He trembled with the terrible truth of it, said aloud in God’s house. She gripped his shoulder, just a light, brief contact, but it was a powerful connection, like two live wires. The woman understood the path. Like Veracity did, even when hurting and confused.

The wound in him was bleeding, and he would let it keep flowing. He told the pastor everything that had happened tonight. She didn’t interrupt once, and her hand tightened during the worst parts. Relaxed when he said how Veracity was okay, and with her chosen family—it hurt to not include himself in it—and that he’d made sure his family had done the right thing.

The kids from the basketball court abruptly burst in, laughing, busting each other’s chops over the pickup game. Rev started, and rubbed his face, wiping away the tears he hadn’t realized were there. The pastor squeezed his shoulder, a reassurance, and twisted around.

“John Walter, if I hear that basketball bounce on this floor, I’ll rearrange your internal organs by putting a combat boot up your backside.”

“I know better, Reverend Dana,” he promised. “Do you have any of them sausage biscuit roll things in the kitchen?”

“I made up a breakfast batch. Leave me a couple of them, you pack of wolves. There’s bottled orange juice, too. Look in the fridge. And be quiet and respectful in this space.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Rev saw her dip her head his way. The kids minded her, quieting down and sliding past him with sidelong looks, the one in the lead murmuring, “Sorry, sir.”

They disappeared through the door she’d used in the chancel, likely the best way to the church kitchen. They resumed their banter once more, though at a lower volume, their shoes thumping along with them.

When Rev turned on his hip toward her, Reverend Dana had a fond smile on her face. “They’re good boys,” she said. “Go on, if you have more on your heart.”

Rev did, but he spoke it slowly, thinking it through. Letting the rest out had helped him dig deeper. “There are moments that say, take this in your own hands, take up the sword. I think God does use us that way, when you have to protect innocents. I would have fought them to protect her. I would have taken life to do it. The life of my own cousin, raised like a brother with me.”

It was another terrible thing to say aloud, but it was the truth. “I'm glad it didn’t come to that."

“Me, too,” Reverend Dana said. “The lives you take never really leave you, even the ones where you had no choice, not if you want to protect what matters. You relive it, though, thinking, if there’d been more time, more space to make the decision, it could have turned out differently. But with humans, it doesn’t always work that way.”

“No ma’am. Some things, people I know, I can help put back together, but I can't fix them permanent. They keep figuring out ways to get broke again.” Craig passed through his mind, that poor boy’s flat dead eyes. The families of his victims would say his soul had fled his body, but the soul didn’t have that choice. It was cowered down in him somewhere, miserable and afraid.

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