Chapter 2
1373 Words
Chapter 2: The Morning After Everything
ROXANNE
I had my whole life planned out.
Well — my parents had it planned. There's a difference, but in my house, that difference was never allowed to matter.
I was supposed to become a nun. Not because God had placed that specific calling on my heart, but because my parents believed offering me to the Church was the highest form of devotion they could perform. A transaction dressed up in scripture. I had spent over a year inside the convent walls, kneeling on cold stone floors, folding myself into the shape they needed me to be, learning prayers and silence and the particular art of disappearing into obedience.
And then, five days ago, everything inside those walls shattered.
Father Paul had been a respected name. Forty-six years of supposed celibacy. A figure the whole community held up like a standard. I had trusted that name the way you trust a locked door — without examining it too closely.
I should have examined it.
I should have run the moment he closed that door behind me.
I didn't. And now I was sitting on my bedroom floor with my back against the bed frame, knees pulled to my chest, still wearing the same clothes I'd changed into when I got home because the idea of standing long enough to find something else felt impossible.
They didn't believe me.
That was the part I kept turning over in my hands like a stone I couldn't put down. My parents — the same people who had pressed God's name into every corner of my upbringing, who had spoken about sin and purity and righteousness until those words lost all meaning — had looked at me when I told them what happened and chosen the collar over their own daughter.
My mother's voice had been the sharpest.
"You are a disgrace to this family, Roxanne." She hadn't screamed it. Somehow that was worse. "You stand there and point your finger at a man of God, a man who has served faithfully for decades, and expect us to believe—"
"I'm not asking you to believe anything." My voice had been steadier than I expected. "I'm telling you what happened."
My father hadn't even looked at me. He'd stared at the wall above my head like I was already someone he was trying to forget. "Go to your room," he'd said finally. "And don't come out until I tell you."
I had walked up the stairs without another word. Held my breath until I heard the click of my door closing behind me.
Then I'd slid down the wall and stayed there.
That was three days ago.
The nightmares had come every night since — not the vivid, dramatic kind you see in films, but quieter ones. Fragments. The sound of a door closing. The flicker of candlelight on stone walls. The feeling of being very small in a space that was suddenly all wrong. I'd wake up with my heart slamming and drag myself to the bathroom, turn the shower on as hot as it would go, and stand under it until the water ran cold.
It didn't help as much as I needed it to.
But I was still here. Still breathing. And if there was one thing a year inside convent walls had given me, it was this — the ability to stay quiet when everything inside you is screaming. To fold the pain somewhere deep and functional and keep moving.
So I kept moving.
Slowly. In the limited way the four walls of my room allowed.
I read. I prayed, though prayer felt strange and complicated now — like trying to have a conversation with someone in a room where something terrible had happened. I stared out of my narrow window at the street below and let the ordinary rhythm of it — people walking, a dog being pulled along on a lead, a woman arguing with her phone — remind me that the world was still turning.
I was on the windowsill, knees drawn up, chin resting on my arms, watching nothing in particular, when I heard voices downstairs.
My father's voice first. And then another.
Deep. Low. The kind of voice that didn't need volume to fill a room.
I stilled.
My father — a man who spoke to everyone with the quiet authority of someone who had never doubted his own importance — sounded different. There was a carefulness to his tone. A measured quality, like each word was being chosen with more effort than usual.
He sounded, I realized slowly, like someone being careful not to say the wrong thing.
My father was never careful.
Curiosity is a strange thing. It doesn't wait for you to decide whether it's wise. It simply pulls, and before I'd made any conscious decision, I was off the windowsill, crossing the floor on quiet feet, easing the bedroom door open just enough.
The landing looked down over the main sitting room below. I stayed close to the wall, out of direct sight, and peered through the gap in the railing.
My parents sat on the smaller sofa, their backs mostly to me. Across from them — unhurried, legs crossed at the ankle, one arm resting along the back of the seat like he owned the furniture and everything in it — was a man I had never seen before in my life.
My breath caught.
He was enormous. Not just tall — the kind of large that was about presence as much as size. Dark hair. A suit that probably cost more than six months of anything my family had ever owned. Rings on his fingers that caught the light. And even from this distance, even with the railing between us and the low murmur of conversation I couldn't quite make out —
He felt dangerous.
Not in the way drunk men outside clubs felt dangerous, or in the way certain dark streets felt dangerous. This was different. Quieter. The way a current under still water is dangerous — invisible until it has you.
I shifted slightly to see better.
And that was the moment his eyes moved.
Not to the door. Not to the railing either.
Directly to me.
Like he had known I was there the entire time and had simply been waiting for me to look.
My heart lurched. I pressed myself closer to the wall, but it was too late — he'd already seen me, and the unhurried way he held my gaze told me that very clearly. He didn't react. Didn't alert my parents. Didn't so much as change his expression. He just looked at me with those cold, still eyes, and I felt the weight of it like a hand pressed flat to my chest.
I should have gone back to my room.
I didn't.
Instead I stared back, because I had spent five days being small and ashamed and unseen, and something stubborn in me refused to flinch first.
His gaze dropped, briefly, to my mouth.
Then he shifted slightly in his seat, and with the smallest movement — barely more than a tilt of his chin — he mouthed two words.
" Go inside."
The audacity.
I held his gaze for another second, just to make a point, The man gaze hardened, a flicker to show that he didn't like that I wasn't obeying him but after a second of heavy eye contact, he returned his gaze to my parents as if I was just a breeze blowing by and then a floorboard creaked beneath my feet and my mother's head turned sharply toward the stairs.
I pulled back from the railing and retreated to my room.
My heart was going too fast. I pressed my back against the closed door and tried to reason with it.
He was just a man. A man my father was meeting with, which probably meant business — the kind of business I'd always been kept deliberately ignorant of. It meant nothing. He meant nothing.
But even as I told myself that, I could still feel the weight of that gaze.
Like it had followed me upstairs.
Like it was still watching.
- Writer
