Page 160 of Divine Temptations

I tore the page out carefully so the spiral fringe didn’t jag like a wound. The sound was louder than it should have been. I folded the paper once, then again, then pressed the crease with my thumbnail until it held.

The guitar case was where it always was, tucked between the dresser and the closet. I grabbed it, and with the suitcase in one hand and the guitar on my back, I eased my way back down the stairs.

Daddy hadn’t moved. His breath still rasped, shallow and steady. Up close, the whiskey smell climbed into my sinuses. The bills had shifted under his cheek, and a small ridge of paper pressed into his skin.

I stood in the doorway and let fear wash through me all at once. It came hot and fast—images of him waking, of his voice climbing, of the old words taking root in me again like kudzu. I stepped forward and set the folded note next to his hand. My fingers grazed the back of his knuckles. His skin was warm,papery. For a second I saw my mother’s hand resting over his in church, and then the image popped like a bubble.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

He didn’t stir.

I straightened. Picked up the suitcase handle. Shifted the guitar strap where it bit into my collarbone. The edges of the note caught the lamplight and glowed a little.

“I love you,” I said, because even if it wasn’t the language of our house anymore, I wanted it on the record. Then I turned and walked away.

Chapter Eleven

Lucien

The streetlight outside sliced my bedroom into pale bars, and the phone burned a rectangle into my palm like it was taking my temperature and finding me feverish. A dull headache pulsed behind my eyes—the kind you earned from tequila shots and beer. Sarah had hugged me outside Fallout, and told me to stop being a romantic with a martyr complex.

Then I’d come home and done what any fool with a broken heart and Wi-Fi would do—fallen down a YouTube rabbit hole of Reverend Calvin Tanner’s greatest hits.

In every clip, Calvin’s voice had that lacquered shine you only get from a lifetime of telling other people how awful they are. He thundered fire and brimstone, then smiled like a shifty salesman. And always—always—off to the side, a little downstage, sat Jimmy with a guitar in his lap.

Jimmy was the picture that told the truth about the room. Perfect posture. Shirt ironed within an inch of its life. Hands poised. Eyes fixed somewhere that wasn’t here. A dutiful son. A prop you could order in bulk if you had the catalog for that kind of cruelty.

Jimmy didn’t crack a smile in more than three hours of footage.

I scrubbed my thumb across the progress bar like I could rewind enough frames to catch him by surprise, to find even one blink where his mouth remembered how to curve. All I got for my effort was the same tight line of a man pretending to be a still life. The ache in my chest turned over and showed me another edge.

“Oh, Jimmy,” I mumbled to the empty room. “What did he do to you?”

The phone tried to slip out of my grip when the next video auto-loaded—a revival tent, humid and shining, the congregation swaying like wheat under wind. Calvin paced with a wireless mic, breathless on the word sin, reverent on blood, triumphant on victory. The camera cut to Jimmy during a chorus, and I paused it. Zoomed in until the pixels bled, until his eyelashes were little blocks and the bruise-colored circles under his eyes came into focus.

I wanted to rescue him.

The thought was so sudden and childish it almost made me laugh. Put on boots, drive through the night, and show up at whatever door he was trapped behind. I wanted to scoop him up like a storybook hero, kick down the castle, and fly him to safety.

I pressed the phone to my sternum and closed my eyes. “You’re not a superhero.”

I forced myself to put the phone down, and I got to my feet. The headache did a little drumroll behind my temples as I padded down the stairs. I grabbed the bottle of aspirin off the window frame over the sink and shook out a couple of tablets. Then I swallowed them down, scooping water in my palm from the faucet.

If Jimmy was spying on the Satanic Temple, I couldn’t ignore it, no matter what my feelings for him were. The quiet, weird,stubborn little community we’d cobbled together out of misfits, seekers, and atheists was important. We’d built something here, and it had a heartbeat. And I was supposed to keep it safe.

It was my job to be suspicious. To protect the timid kids who came in with sleeves pulled down over their wrists and the older men who still made nervous jokes about hell with their eyes shining like they were already living in it. We weren’t animals in a zoo, just people who wanted to live our truth, and I’d protect us no matter the cost.

Perhaps his father had sent him undercover, and he’d walked into my life with a hidden agenda. If Jimmy was spying—the right thing to do was push him away gently and lock the door.

The truth sat there with me, ugly and unavoidable: I wanted the scales to fall from Jimmy’s eyes like in that Bible story—light, clarity, relief—and for him to see what I saw: that men like his father weren’t shepherds. They were prison guards.

Guilt isn’t faith, and fear isn’t holy.

“This is so unfair,” I muttered, leaning forward until my forehead kissed the cabinet door.

Back in the bedroom, my phone still glowed on the nightstand, half the screen frozen on Jimmy with a guitar. What could I do? I couldn’t chase him. But I could make the Temple safer than his father’s house. Perhaps I could write an email with no pressure in it, telling Jimmy that every door I possessed was open to him.

The headache had eased into a gray throb. I lay back and pulled the blanket up, then pushed it down, then gave up and turned onto my side to face the nightstand. The paused video still showed Jimmy not-smiling. I tapped the screen, let it play for ten seconds more, and paused again when Calvin’s hand came down hard on the pulpit in slow motion.