CHAPTER SIX
“HEWANTSTOmarry me,” Cecilia said.
It shocked her how hard it was to get the words out of her mouth. Possibly because saying them out loud gave them weight. It made them real. Particularly here, in the kitchen of the abbey where she had eaten so many meals in her time. And now cleaned it as if it was still her own.
Maybe some part of her thought it was.
Mother Superior sat at the long, communal table fashioned of weathered wood where the sisters gathered, her hands cupped around a steaming-hot mug of tea. Cecilia remembered when her hands had been tough, but smoother. Now they were gnarled with the arthritis she never complained about, and something about looking at those familiar, aged hands with those dangerous words floating in the air between them made Cecilia’s chest ache.
“Does this surprise you?” Mother Superior asked. Mildly enough.
But then that serene, decidedly calm tone of voice of hers was one of her superpowers. It made grown men quail before her. It made novitiates tremble. It had made Cecilia cry, more than once.
Today she scowled into the sink she was scrubbing down, and absolutely did not feel the slightest prickle of unwanted moisture behind her eyes.
“Yes. It astonishes me, in fact.” She shook her head as if she could shake away all the competing, complicated feelings that had been clattering around inside her since that moment outside on the field when he’d looked at her with that unsettling, raw expression on his face. Then had said what he’d said. “If I’m honest, I think it offends me.”
But that wasn’t the right word, either. It had felt like a sucker punch, directly into her gut. She’d been faintly amazed that she hadn’t doubled over.
A huge, wild ache had ripped opened wide inside her, a crevice so deep and so wide that she’d been terrified for a moment that she might actually topple off the side of the world and disappear inside it. Her heart had pounded so hard, even high in her throat, she’d been terrified she might get sick.
Instead, she’d turned on her heel and walked away from him on legs gone wobbly, not sure she wouldn’t simply crumple into the cold ground. But she had to get away from Pascal. At once. Because she thought that if she didn’t, she might pull down the mountains all around them with the force of her reaction.
He’d followed, of course.
And there had been too much noise in her head for her to process the things he’d said. The reasons he’d laid down before her like proof. Or some kind of cold, cut-and-dry temptation that was supposed to speak to her somehow when there was thatache.
“I’m not dignifying that with a response,” she’d said. When she could manage to speak at all.
“There can be only one response,” he’d replied. She whipped her head around to stare at him, perhaps imagining that she could shame him out there in the fields she knew too well. The wind had cut into her like knives, but his presence was a far deeper wound by far. How could he imagine otherwise? “I will wait for it, Cecilia.”
She was well aware that this time, hiswaitingwas a threat. That had been two days ago.
“Why should you be offended?” Mother Superior asked in her maddeningly unbothered way that Cecilia knew full well wasmeantto set her teeth on edge. “What we know about Pascal is that he likes to solve his problems in the most direct way possible. We know what happened when he felt lonely here. Dante is the result.”
And it was a measure of how agitated Cecilia was about other things that she forgot to react with her usual mix of emotions at that oblique reference to that morning she had woken up to discover Mother Superior at the foot of a bed she shouldn’t have been sleeping in and her whole life changed.
“We know what happened when he left here, and launched himself at the world,” Mother Superior continued placidly. “And I’m not the least surprised that his return, wherein he learned that he had a son, should lead to this. It solves all of his problems, elegantly.”
“I don’t wish to be his problem,” Cecilia bit out, her eyes on the sink. “Or have anything to do with solving it for him.”
Mother Superior laughed that raspy, lusty laugh of hers that served to remind anyone who heard it that she was, in fact, a woman made of flesh and blood like anyone else. No matter how holy she seemed the rest of the time.
“Child, you have been a problem for that man since the moment he woke up after his accident and saw you there at his bedside,” she told Cecilia. “Left to his own devices, he would have taken you with him when he left the first time.”
It took a moment for the full meaning of those words to penetrate. When they did, Cecilia set down her sponge, carefully. Very, very carefully. Then she took her time turning and wiping her hands on the apron she wore wrapped around her waist. She was not surprised to find Mother Superior’s wise, kind gaze level on hers.
Waiting, she could see. But without a shred of trepidation or concern.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked, though her voice shook, and worse, she already thought she knew. Hadn’t Pascal himself hinted at this in the church? “What do you mean,left to his own devices?”
“You did not join us for Morning Prayer,” Mother Superior told her, her calm tone scraping down the length of Cecilia’s spine like fingernails. “When I went looking for you, I found you in his room. You were still asleep, but he was not.”
“Are you… You’re not saying…?”
“I merely asked him what his intentions were,” Mother Superior replied, that mild gaze not only steady on hers, but distressingly compassionate. “He was a man recovering from an accident who had clearly become well again. I suspected that meant he would not wish to stay with us, tucked away as we are from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, he’d taken it upon himself to despoil a novitiate. I merely wondered what his plans were.”
“His plans,” Cecilia repeated as if she couldn’t comprehend what the other woman was saying. When she did. Too well. “You asked himhis plans.”