Page 41 of Where the Roses Bloom (Gospels & Grimoires #1)

WHERE THE SINNERS PRAY

It all started after my mother died.

Or…two months after my mother died, since that's how long it took for someone to tell me.

I was fresh out of seminary and eager to follow whatever path God was about to put me on.

The world was full of possibilities. Yes, maybe I was spending a little too much time thinking about a lonely, sad man I’d only met once, in a town about a thousand miles from what I thought was my destiny… but I knew those feelings would fade.

I would get that diploma, start interviewing, find a church…and that would be that.

Ministry. Life.

Then I got the message:

June - it's been a while! I was so happy to see that you got done with divinity school…

amazing how you moved on after leaving Carencro, I know high school was hard what with your folks and the so-called demon and all that.

I'm out of the church now too, but heard your mama died.

Hope you're coping okay. Congrats again. -Cassidy

She was little more than an acquaintance from my childhood church—or, to be blunt, cult —and she had no idea the kind of bombshell she's just dropped on me. I hadn't heard from Cassidy Mouton in well over a decade…and she was the one who told me my mother died.

Not any of my four little sisters.

Not my dad, who I had to assume was still kicking around—unless, of course, he wasn't.

Not any of my cousins or aunts or uncles…

…nope. Just another girl who had been excommunicated.

And now I was standing at my mother’s grave.

Like most people, my feelings for my mom were complicated.

Unlike most people, I hadn't seen her in fifteen years because she was part of the church I’d run from at eighteen.

I had good memories of her, but they were outweighed by so many that were far from that…

memories of gardening or baking cookies intermingled with those of her crying as she helped our preacher tie me to a chair, as they withheld food for days, Mama telling me she was sorry while they cut me and choked me and tried to “expel my demons.”

I had to stop that train of thought before it swallowed me whole.

“You know I was just depressed, right?” I whispered to her grave.

The breeze stirred the grass but didn’t answer.

I crouched beside the headstone, careful not to let my skirt drag in the red dirt. It wasn’t a fancy plot. No marble angels. No weeping cherubs. Just a name I hadn’t spoken in over a decade, carved into a slab that leaned a little to the right.

EUGENIA FONTENOT

Born 1965. Died 2025.

No inscription. No verse. No scripture.

Just stone.

I wondered who picked that. Whether it was Daddy or the church elders, or maybe one of my sisters, all grown now. I wondered if they cried. If they sang.

If they missed me.

My throat ached with the weight of everything I hadn’t said. I pressed two fingers to the stone, cool and rough, and let the silence hold me.

“You let them do that to me,” I said quietly. “And you told yourself it was love.”

It wasn't what I expected to say…but that was grief, wasn't it?

At this point in my career, I had counseled dozens of people through grief, and I knew they found themselves saying the strangest things.

They didn't always speak eloquently or kindly.

It wasn't poetic. Sometimes they felt compelled to laugh or tell jokes.

But me? I was angry.

Angrier than I'd ever imagined I could be after years and years of thinking I'd grappled with this pain.

“You were supposed to protect me,” I whispered, “and instead you made everything worse. And when I told you what he did…”

I stopped, not wanting to even think about that preacher—that man who had strayed so very, very far from the teachings of Jesus, who had…

I swallowed hard .

Closed my eyes.

Saw my mother's face and remembered how people had always said we looked just alike…and realized they were right. That face? It was the same one I saw in the mirror every morning.

I opened my eyes.

“I've logic-ed my way into forgiveness, or at least I thought I did,” I said, laughing softly.

“You know the first thing I did when I got to college was learn everything I could about cults?

How they get people to do what they want…

how they control you. I wanted to try to get you and the girls out.

But it was pointless, wasn't it? There was never a chance.”

I laughed again.

“That one time I sent you a book,” I said, “and you just sent a picture back of it burning. Yeah…love you too, Mama.”

The wind stirred again, but the heat didn’t break; it just felt like a blowdryer, awash in sticky, suffocating, hot air.

I stood slowly, brushing my hands off on my black dress, then reached for the little mason jar of zinnias I’d brought with me. Bright orange, sun-yellow, fuchsia pink. She used to grow them in the front yard, said they were the only flowers tough enough to survive a Louisiana summer.

I placed them at the foot of the headstone and whispered, “God have mercy.”

Not because she needed it.

Because I did.

The car was boiling by the time I climbed back in, the seatbelt buckle hot against my palm.

I rolled the windows down, stuck my hand out, and just…

sat there. I’d thought it would be a little day trip—maybe try to catch up with a few folks, swing through Lafayette, grab a beer at the old saloon where some girls from school and I had once snuck out to before it all went to shit.

But I didn’t want to go home .

Didn’t want to go back to New Orleans, or to Lafayatte, or to that bar, or anywhere.

And then?—

“Head east on I-10 for five hundred and ten miles,” a robotic voice said.

I jumped and looked down at my phone. It was lying untouched in the passenger seat, face up, the screen glowing. Somehow, navigation had activated all on its own, with an address I hadn’t put in for nearly a year.

Destination: Willow Grove, Georgia.

I stared at it, heart thudding nearly to a stop.

I hadn’t searched for that address; hadn’t even opened my navigation app.

The last time I’d been to Willow Grove, I’d told my friend Delilah Jessup that I wished her all the best, but that I probably wouldn’t be back, given that I was just about to graduate and get an assignment and start my new life.

But here it was: directions back to Willow Grove, Georgia.

Specifically, to an old, abandoned church…and the sad, lonely man who lived there. The one I hadn’t stopped thinking about more than I should.

“Very funny,” I muttered, tapping the screen to exit.

But when I did, the app flickered once and reopened itself.

“Head east on I-10 for five hundred and ten miles.”

I stared at the words, the little car on the map ready to take off. This wasn’t a command…not really. It wasn’t a suggestion either. It was more like something knew that this was what I needed.

To talk to someone who had lived closer to grief than anyone else I’d ever met.

To the man with eyes like empty houses, who watched me work like he didn’t believe in miracles but wanted to .

I narrowed my eyes in the direction of my mother’s tombstone, brow furrowed. “Did you do this?” I asked.

No answer .

Until my phone, once again, said, “Head east on I-10 for five hundred and ten miles.”

And this time, I let it guide me.

Find out what happens in:

WHERE THE SINNERS PRAY

Book 2 of Gospels & Grimoires