She touched the blood. It was dry, but still sticky. “What are you doing here, Dad? Whose car is this?”
“It’s a parishioner’s car. I’m here for the boy.”
“And your neck?”
“I was doing some work around the parsonage. A bucket fell off the ladder. What’s with all the questions?”
“You know how I feel about this.”
She meant the boy, and her father knew it. Gideon liked church for good reason, but Elizabeth had her own demons, and the rules had grown clear over time. Church was for Sundays. The rest of the week her father stayed away.
“How do you feel about his private room? Or the money we’ve raised for his medical bills? You don’t think his father has that kind of cash, do you? That’s the church at work, your mother and all the people you no longer see fit to value.”
Elizabeth shrugged off the guilt; it was nothing new. “Did you ask Gideon to call me?”
“Things have taken a turn.” He shrugged. “Complications. Timing.”
“I don’t know what any of that means.”
“It’s all wrapped up together, childhood and innocence and trust.” He opened the door and held it for her. “Come on inside.” The dirt was as she remembered it, the greasy rags and bits of engine. “He’s in the bathroom.”
“I’ll wait.”
“It’s not like that.” He indicated she should walk with him. “Not in the shower or anything. The boy felt unwell and wanted to be in there just in case. He knows you’re coming.” Her father gestured again and let her move in front. He was to the left, one hand reaching for the knob as she settled into the hollow place between his arm and the door. “There’s such love in a child,” he said. “And that’s the thing I tell myself. Everything that happens. The road that leads from here.” His hand touched the knob. “It’s all about the innocence.”
“Are we still speaking of Gideon?”
“Gideon. Family. The next hour of your life.”
Her father opened the door, and Elizabeth saw it like a blur: Gideon and an injured girl, blood and skin and bright, silver tape. She saw it all and, in the span of a heartbeat, felt the world collapse to something inexplicable and cold. She didn’t know what was happening; couldn’t possibly. But the battered eyes were Channing’s, and that meant nothing in the world was as she’d thought. She moved on instinct to duck and turn, to find space to figure this out. But he was behind her and ready. He drove her into the doorframe with one hand and used the other to push something hard and slick against her neck. She got a foot on the frame, but knew even then she was too late. Energy ripped into her neck, and he followed her to the floor, keeping the charge against her skin as she twitched and drummed and felt a scream that never left her throat. Her body was burning, on fire. She smelled the charge and through the bathroom door saw Gideon, openmouthed, and Channing, the girl, whose own scream was every bit as trapped as hers.
*
The preacher stood, breathing hard. He felt old, but the feeling would pass. What he’d told Elizabeth was true. It really was about the love—what he’d done, what he was doing—and nothing was stronger than a father’s love for his daughter.
Not God’s love.
Not his wife’s.
He’d cherished his daughter more than all of those things combined, more than breath or faith or life itself. She’d been the world entire, the warm, bright center.
Of course, this wasn’t his daughter.
Not the one he loved.
He nudged her with a foot and heard the same voices in the dark of his mind, the lot of them disharmonic and thin, saying, “Stop now, turn away, come back to God.” But he’d learned years ago that the voices were but pale remnants of cast-off morality, mere ghosts that knew nothing of loss or grief or betrayal’s lancinating pain. He’d been a young father with a wife and his own church. His daughter had loved, respected, and trusted him. They were as God meant them to be. The family. The child. The father.
Why did she turn away from that?
Why did she kill her unborn child?
Those were the cornerstones of the great betrayal, and he confronted them every time he tried to sleep: the lowered eyes and false acquiescence, the secrets and lies and the blood on his porch. She was supposed to be in bed, yet he’d found her there, half dead and womb-stripped and unrepentant. His hands bore the stain even now, the red in the cracks only he could see. His daughter’s blood. His grandchild’s. She’d defied her own father, and God had let it happen, the same God who’d allowed the butchery in the first place and delivered her heart, in time, to Adrian Wall. The betrayals were so large they drove even light from the world. What room remained for the father who’d first held her? For the man who’d raised and taught her, and whose own heart, even now, was broken?
No room, he thought.