“You’re the best thing to ever happen to this place,” I whispered.
“Oh, Cassius, we can rebuild. If it’s something you want to do.” Unsure if I’d ever be capable of that, I drew in a deep, cleansing breath. “This was the chapel of the estate. Passed down from generation to generation. A part of our family history.” I smirked. “A good old Catholic, Italian family. During the plague of the 1920s, when it was unsafe to attend church, my ancestors built this so they could pray safely.” I drew in a sharp breath. “It meant so much to my mom.”
Anya fixed her attention on me, never wavering.
“Anyway, I wasn’t supposed to run the business. I wasn’t supposed to be involved. I never wanted that for myself. I wanted to give myself to something different.”
“Like what?”
“I loved music, but I loved science, too. Mom used to joke I’d make a great doctor because I was always fascinated by science. I never got a choice.”
She looked around as though trying to tie all the pieces together. “Why do you hate this place?” A tremor in her tone.
Those same old emotions coming at me like a freight train—
Throwing me into the fray, as though I’m back there again. Looking beyond the pews, seeing a blurry image—me, as though having an out-of-body experience and witnessing it all over again. My former, younger self was standing at the altar.
“My father.”
I moved away from Anya and started to pace. “As you know, I found my mother laying where we left her. She’d been dead for hours. I picked her up and carried her in here and lay her over there, near that pew. That’s when I saw him.” I gestured to where my father’s body had been discovered. “Dad had been shot in the head. All that time that I had been hiding in the maze like a pussy, my father was alive.”
“Cassius, you were fourteen.”
“I don’t give a fuck. I could have saved him. I should saved him. Instead, he was brought in here and killed. He died alone.”
Anya’s eyes were filled with sorrow. “I’m so sorry.”
“Then I went back for my sister and brought Sofia to sit with me in here to wait for the police.”
“Why didn’t they arrest Stephen?”
“There weren’t any witnesses left alive to testify to seeing him here. Only Sofia, and she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t testify it was him. As I’d been hiding in the maze and merely heard gunshots, I was an unreliable witness. Even after telling the detectives what had transpired out on the swamp only hours before.”
“Why didn’t they believe you?”
“Stephen had witnesses who put him at another part of the city.”
“They lied for him?”
“Most people would. If they wanted to live.”
“After everyone had gone. After the police, the medics whose only job was to take the bodies away, I came back here.”
“Where was Sofia?”
“Hospital.”
“You were alone here?”
“I refused to leave.”
“What about your friend Ridley?”
“His father kept him away. The only reason his dad survived was he left minutes before Stephen and his men got here. He’d stopped me from seeing my dad. From warning him.”
“He passed on that guilt to Ridley?”
“After Ridley graduated law school, he came to work for me. I assumed he felt obligated to do what he could to protect me after his father had inadvertently gotten mine killed. Though I’ve told Ridley I’m not sure anyone could have stopped Glassman.”
She looked around, aghast when she realized it had been me who’d done all this damage.
“I came back to the chapel trying to make sense of it, but I couldn’t find anything. Couldn’t find any meaning behind it. So, I made it make sense. In my own head, anyway. I found a sledgehammer and—” I scanned the chapel to say the rest.
“Even the statue?” she said breathlessly. “To find meaning?”
“I tried and failed to, so I punished God. Tore down his house. He broke me, so I broke his sacred home. Tore it to shreds. Allowed this place to die. Because at that moment, I couldn’t have faith. Couldn’t find anything to believe in. My only goal from that day out was to avenge their death. And since then, I haven’t . . .”
“You haven’t what?”
“I haven’t been able to leave this chapel.”
“What do you mean?”
“In my mind, I wake up here every day. In my dreams, I’m standing over there before St. Mary Magdalene. My nightmares are all here. Each waking hour I’m in here. A part of me never leaves.” Shaking my head, I admitted my truth. “What you see here around us, is me.”
She took a few seconds to process my words, trying to make sense of the way I’d annihilated everything that had been sacred.
“No,” she soothed. “This is just a building. A structure. Where terrible things happened. This is not you. You’re more than this. You’re remarkable and profound and have so much to offer.”