Saint of Sinners

Chapter Four: The Third Day

Celeste

On the third day the storm finally softened enough that pale, watery sunlight made it through the chapel windows during Lauds. I stood in my place in the choir and sang the morning prayer and felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn't fully realized was tight.

They would leave today. Or tomorrow at the latest. The road down the hill would be passable by afternoon.

This was good. This was exactly what I had been waiting for since the moment I opened that side door three nights ago. I was glad. Completely, straightforwardly glad.

I sang the morning prayer and was glad about it the entire time.

* * *

Mother Bernadette found me after breakfast.

She was seventy-one years old and had been inside these walls for forty-three of them, and she had the specific quality of perception that came from spending four decades watching people try to hide things from God and from themselves. She looked at me the way she always looked at me when she knew something — with a patience that was almost unbearable.

"Walk with me," she said.

We walked the cloister garden in the thin morning sunlight. The roses had not survived the storm. I had been right about that.

"Our guests will be leaving," she said.

"Yes. I think today."

"Good." A pause. "You've been very attentive to the wounded one."

"He needed medical attention. There was no one else to provide it."

"No," she agreed mildly. "There wasn't."

We walked a few more steps. A bird had come out after the storm and was doing something optimistic in the olive tree near the wall.

"Celeste," she said. "You know I have never once told you what to feel. I don't believe that's in my power or my jurisdiction."

"I know."

"I have also never told you that your vows would make you less human. That was never the promise. The promise was that you would bring all of what you are — including the parts that feel things — into service of something larger than yourself."

I stopped walking. She stopped beside me.

"Mother," I said carefully. "I don't know what you think is happening."

"I think," she said, with the gentleness of someone delivering a truth they've been holding for the right moment, "that you are a twenty-three year old woman who has spent three years inside these walls and very little time in the world. And I think that a man arrived in this convent who looked at you like you were worth looking at, and something in you responded to that." She paused. "That's not a sin, child. That's just being alive."

I stared at the ruined roses for a long moment.

"It doesn't change anything," I said.

"No," she said. "It doesn't have to. I just want to make sure that in four days when you stand at that altar, you're standing there because it's truly what you want. Not because you're afraid of the alternative."

She patted my hand once and walked back toward the chapel, leaving me alone in the garden with the bird and the ruined roses and a question I didn't know how to answer.

* * *

I found Dante in the courtyard again. He was sitting this time — on the low wall near the fountain, which was a concession to the wound I chose to appreciate — talking quietly with the man from the gate whose name I'd learned was Nico. When he saw me cross the courtyard toward them, he said something brief to Nico, and Nico melted away with the practiced discretion of someone who had been doing exactly that for years.

I sat down on the wall a careful distance away.

"The road will be clear by this afternoon," I said.

"I know." He was looking at the convent garden — or what remained of it. "We'll leave before Vespers."

"Good."

A pause.

"Good," he agreed, with something underneath the word that I decided not to examine.

The sunlight was thin but real, and it caught the grey of his eyes and showed me something I hadn't seen in the infirmary lamplight — they weren't a flat grey, they had depth to them, layers, the way old stone did when it was wet.

I looked at the garden.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You're going to whether I say yes or no."

"That's fair." I paused. "Last night, outside the chapel. You said your mother prayed every morning. Do you ever — " I stopped. Reconsidered. "Do you ever wish you still believed in something?"

The question sat between us. He didn't answer immediately, which I had started to understand was how he operated — not silence for silence's sake, but actual consideration. He took questions seriously. It was one of the more disarming things about him.

"I believe in things," he said finally.

"Like what?"

"Loyalty. Consequence. The fact that every choice has a weight and eventually you carry all of them." He paused. "I believe that some debts can't be paid in money."

"That's almost theological."

"Don't tell my men that."

I laughed. It came out before I could moderate it — a real one, surprised out of me — and he turned to look at me with an expression I felt somewhere behind my sternum and absolutely should not have.

"You should do that more," he said quietly.

"Do what?"

"Laugh like you mean it."

I looked back at the garden. My heart was doing something that had no business happening four days before my final vows and I was dealing with it by looking very intently at an olive tree.

"Dante," I said. Carefully. "When you leave today — " I stopped.

"When I leave today," he said, equally careful, "you'll take your vows in four days and become exactly what you were always going to become. And I'll go back to being what I've always been."

"Yes."

"Yes," he said.

Neither of us said anything else for a while. The sun moved. The bird in the olive tree sang something uncomplicated and left.

When Nico came to tell him the cars were ready, Dante stood slowly — carefully, which told me the wound was speaking to him whether he admitted it or not — and looked down at me for a moment.

"Thank you," he said. "For the second time. And for the last time."

"You're welcome," I said. "For the second time. And the last time."

He held my gaze for one moment longer than was strictly necessary. Then he turned and walked across the courtyard toward the gate, his men falling in around him with the quiet efficiency of long practice.

I sat on the wall and watched them go.

The gate closed.

The courtyard was empty. The convent settled back into its particular silence — the one I had spent three years learning to live inside, the one that had always felt like enough.

I sat in it for a long time.

Then I went inside to prepare for Vespers, and I told myself that the tightness in my chest was simply relief.

I was almost convinced.

Almost.

* * *

He came back.

Not that night. Not the next day.

Three weeks later, on a Tuesday morning when the sky was clear and the convent garden had been replanted and my vows were seventeen days behind me, a black car came through the gates.

I was in the garden when Nico knocked on the door and asked — very politely, with his hat in his hands — whether Sister Celeste might have a moment.

I stood up slowly from where I'd been kneeling beside the new roses.

"Tell him," I said, with the composure of a woman who had spent seventeen days convincing herself she was completely fine, "that I'll be right there."

I brushed the soil from my hands.

My heart was not behaving at all.