“No, she does that even with me: Nora, Miss you! Come visit us soon. Love, Your Grace. It’s a joke.”
“Ah—‘Your Grace.’ Aristocracy nonsense. So what’s wrong then? That he asked for the picture? It’s really not unusual for the father of a child to want to have a picture of his child. He hasn’t met his boy yet, has he?”
“Not yet. Next year. S?ren wants to wait for reasons he hasn’t told anyone. I think he wants Fionn to be old enough to remember him in case, you know.”
“In case it’s their only meeting?”
She nodded, swallowed visibly. He had touched a nerve, a soft spot. Good. It meant they were getting closer to the heart of the matter.
“A photograph of his son in his Bible shouldn’t be much of a surprise. So why did it bother you so much?”
“The picture is of Grace nursing Fionn.”
“Ah, I see.” Stuart nodded and rubbed his chin in understanding. “A very private and intimate picture. Hence the blushing.”
“A private and intimate picture he asked her to send him. And that’s a big deal because Grace is so modest that she never nursed Fionn in public. She never even nursed him in front of me or her own mother. Only alone or in front of Zach, her husband.”
“And in that photograph.”
“A photograph which he kept in his Bible along with Kingsley’s love notes and my list of questions and the bookmark I made him. He keeps his heart in that Bible. There are no other pictures in there, and we have dozens of pictures of Fionn. But that picture…”
“That must have stung,” Stuart said, employing the art of the English understatement.
“Stung? Ever had your genitals whacked with a wet whip?” she asked.
“That bad?”
“That bad. And the worst part?” Eleanor sat up again and faced him. “I don’t even know why it bothers me. It’s a beautiful picture. Absolutely gorgeous. Grace is luminous in it. Fionn is…a miracle. And even more than that, he’s S?ren’s son. Of course he wants to keep a picture of Grace and his son in his Bible. I just didn’t expect it to be that picture. I just…” She held up her hands. “I didn’t expect to find it in his Bible. If he’d shown it to me, it wouldn’t have hurt. But he didn’t show it to me. Why can’t he hide creepy fetish porn from me like a normal boyfriend?”
“Did you just use the words ‘normal’ and ‘boyfriend’ when referring to Marcus?”
“I forgot myself. Sorry.”
“Let me ask you this—do you think he was deliberately concealing this photograph from you? Or had he simply not shown it to you yet?”
“If he were deliberating hiding it from me, he wouldn’t have put it in his Bible. If he wanted to hide it from me he would have kept it in his room at the Jesuit house. No women allowed in there.”
“So he wasn’t hiding it from you but he never showed it to you?”
“Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything other than he wanted to protect Grace’s privacy. Except it does mean something because it’s in his Bible. And it’s the mother of his child with his child and she’s nursing him. I just wish I knew why it hurt. I don’t want kids. I was overjoyed when I learned about Fionn. I wasn’t shocked at all they’d slept together, considering what we’d all just been through. I even sent her to him. And, to be perfectly frank—”
“Please, be frank.”
“While they were together, I was in the next room fucking Kingsley, and Wes was fucking S?ren’s niece Laila down the hall. Your typical post-traumatic event life-affirming fuck fest, right?”
“But of course.”
“I’m not jealous they slept together—God knows they both needed each other that night. I’m not jealous she had Fionn. I’m not jealous they had a child together, and that I didn’t have his child. So what is it? It’s not like me to not know myself. Why do I feel this way? Why does this hurt? I’m losing it, Father Ballard. No, I’ve lost it.”
He might have laughed at her words if he hadn’t seen the look in her eyes. This was a woman in pain. “You know, a wise man once said, ‘Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a gap.’ ”
“Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a gap,” she repeated. “Sounds like St. Ignatius.”
“Jerry Seinfeld actually.”
Her eyes widened and she looked at him with new appreciative eyes. “You’re his opposite, you know. You and S?ren? You are ontological opposites.”
“I know him well enough to take that as a compliment.”
She put her hand on her forehead and exhaled heavily. “It’s a compliment,” she said. “Definitely a compliment.”
Stuart stood and she looked up at him in a question.
“Sit, sit,” he said. “Stay there.”
He picked up his chair and moved it closer to her. When he sat again she had composed her face back into that beautiful mask but the pain was still in her eyes. He reached out and held open his hands to her. She slipped her hands into his and he held her trembling fingers.
“Pain is knowledge,” Stuart said again. “Adam and Eve fell when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge. That fall hurt. You saw that picture and it was a bite of knowledge that you wish you’d never tasted. Isn’t it?”