48
When I finish, Elijah has his head in his hands. I touch his shoulder, and he looks up, his face haunted. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he whispers.
I search for the right words to explain something that’s fundamentally unexplainable. “I wasn’t capable of presenting it verbally then, in some kind of logical order. I didn’t tell you because I couldn’t have told you.”
Elijah searches my face. “But you can tell me now.”
“It’s taken a lot of therapy to get to this point,” I explain. “And meds. Those too.”
“And,” he asks carefully, “being a monk?”
“Yes,” I say, looking down through the gravestones to the stream and then the hills. We’re sitting in a place where centuries of holy men have been buried, a testament of crooked stones and round Celtic crosses, a testament to entire live
