“He’s complicated.” Kingsley’s conscience gnawed at him. “Ask him to explain why it is he won’t be with you…maybe then you’ll understand.”
“I don’t want to understand.” She set the teacup down so hard it shattered on the counter. “I want my husband to touch me.”
Marie-Laure crumpled to the floor as her slight body shuddered with the wave of grief that overtook it. Kingsley knelt next to her and gathered her in his arms.
“I’m sorry...” He didn’t know what else to say. What could he say? As much as he loved Søren, he still hated to see his sister this unhappy. They would have to tell her…or show her…something.
“What is it?” Marie-Laure whispered. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” Kingsley turned her tearstained face up and smiled at her. “There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s him. I promise you it’s him.”
“Is there…” She paused to swallow a sob. “Is there someone else?”
Kingsley stiffened slightly. What could he say to that? He had to tell her about Søren. But he couldn’t. Søren had said he would explain in time. As much as Kingsley loved his sister, his loyalties had become Søren’s that night in the forest.
“Kingsley…” Marie-Laure put her hands on either side of his face and stared at him with more darkness and determination than he’d ever dreamed his slight sister possessed. Somehow she’d felt his tremor of fear pass through him, the fear that he would tell her even against Søren’s wishes. “He is your friend. Tell me what you know. Is there someone else?”
“There might be.”
She wrested herself from his arms and stood up.
“Marie-Laure…what is it? What—”
Her spine went ramrod straight. Her face hardened like the granite that filled the hills around them. Her eyes blazed. There might be.... Those words ignited a fire in Marie-Laure’s eyes. It burned so bright that Kingsley feared for his own safety. Such fury could burn the world down and leave nothing but ashes.
“If that is true…if there is someone else…then I will walk the world if I must…”
She stopped to breathe. Her tears had ceased. She gazed down at Kingsley and looked not at him but through him.
“Marie-Laure?” Kingsley could barely recognize her.
“And I will kill the bitch.”
NORTH
The Present
A forty-minute drive separated Nora’s home from Søren’s rectory. Once more Kingsley cursed the madness that kept the most important people in his life so far from the city, where he wanted them. A priest of Søren’s upstanding reputation, education and erudition should have been in New York preaching to the educated masses or teaching at the Jesuit University…not wasting his talents in a domesticated small town with only the most bourgeois of sinners about him, committing sins so banal they weren’t even worth the bother to absolve. Kingsley wondered at times if Nora and Søren lived outside of New York because he lived in it.
“Merde.” Kingsley swore bitterly as a wedding procession at the edge of Wakefield halted his progress. A horse and carriage carrying a blushing bride and her plain-faced groom trotted slowly through an intersection, a hundred smiling, laughing guests following on foot.
If only Marie-Laure and Søren had had such a wedding—a daylight wedding with guests who greeted their marriage with joy and not bitter jealousy. If only the love had been mutual and not one-sided. If only…
At last the wedding procession passed by, and Kingsley sped all the way to the rectory. Once there he barely turned off his engine before racing into Søren’s home without knocking. His body still ached with every step. Even as teenagers Søren had never brutalized Kingsley so thoroughly as he had last night. Kingsley wanted to believe it was proof of love, but he wasn’t the fool he’d been as a teenager. Now he knew the difference between lust and love. Back then they were one and the same.
Kingsley didn’t find Søren in the rectory, but he didn’t despair. He’d seen the black vintage Ducati parked just outside—Søren’s one mode of transportation. He couldn’t have gone far. For the first time in years, Kingsley entered Sacred Heart, feeling the weight of guilt pressing down on him as he took in the candles, the shrines, the tiny chapel of perpetual adoration. His was not Catholic guilt. It went far deeper than religion, deeper than faith. It went as deep as his own blood, the blood that ran in the veins of his sister, the blood he’d betrayed the day he’d goaded her young husband into kissing him, knowing full well she would see them together.
Søren wasn’t in the sanctuary. He wasn’t in the chapel. Finally, Kingsley found him in his secretary’s office. At her desk Søren sat with a printout of what appeared to be a newspaper article in front of him.
“Mon père…” Kingsley said, and Søren looked up at him.
Søren held out the piece of paper and Kingsley took it. He scanned the date—January 1980. He read the headline, Canadian Runaway Missing for Three Weeks—Feared Dead. He stared at the picture of the missing girl. She had long brown hair, a lithe figure…a dancer’s body. Had they removed the missing girl’s face, she would have been interchangeable with his sister... Christian’s words came back to him. That valley where the hermitage stood…it had been an underground railroad for runaways. And suddenly he knew how it had happened. Marie-Laure had found the runaway and seen her chance. Seen her chance and taken it.