He gave them his private contact information and made them promise to call at any hour if they needed anything at all. When he extended his hand to Hannah’s mother, she took it in both of hers, then bent and lay her forehead against it for a few seconds. “God bless you for coming, Reverend. It will mean the world to John to know you were here.”
“Well, I—I’m just glad I was in town,” he said, reclaiming his hand awkwardly. “I was supposed to be in Mexico this week, but my trip got postponed at the last minute.”
“The Lord must love our father a great deal, to have kept you here,” Becca said. Like their mother’s—and, Hannah supposed, her own—her face was soft with reverence.
Aidan ducked his head like a teenaged boy being praised for how much he’d grown, and Hannah realized, with some astonishment, that he was not only genuinely embarrassed by their adulation but that he also felt himself to be unworthy of it. The swooping sensation came again, stronger this time. How many men in his position would be so humble?
“Yes,” Hannah agreed. “He must.”
Aidan’s port chimed, and he glanced at it with evident relief. “I’d better get back,” he said. “Alyssa and I will pray for John, and for all of you.”
Alyssa and I. The words clanged in Hannah’s head, reminding her that Aidan Dale was another woman’s husband, a woman who had a name, Alyssa, and who worried about him the way Hannah’s own mother worried about her father. By wanting him, Hannah wronged Aidan’s wife as surely as if she lay with him. Shaken and ashamed, she shook his hand, thanked him and said goodbye. That night when she got home, she prayed for a long time, asking God’s forgiveness for breaking His commandment and imploring Him to lead her away from temptation.
Instead, He sent Aidan Dale back to the hospital the following day, and the one after that and nearly every day for the next week. Hannah’s mother and sister were in raptures over his continued attention to their family. Such an important man, with such a large flock to tend to, and yet here he was, praying with them daily! Hannah’s own feelings were a tangle of elation and despair. She knew that God was testing her and that she was failing the test, but how could she not, when it was so cruelly rigged? Aidan (whom she was careful to call Reverend Dale, despite his protestations) brought them light and hope. He made Becca smile and took some of the fear from their mother’s eyes. And once their father was off the painkillers and clearheaded enough to remember what had happened to him, Aidan spoke quietly with him, once for almost two hours, lending him the strength to beat back the terror, rage and helplessness Hannah saw in his face when he thought she wasn’t looking.
The morning the bandages were to come off, Aidan arrived early and waited with them for the surgeon. He said a prayer, but Hannah was too anxious to follow it. She stood by the bed and stroked her father’s hand, knowing how desperately afraid he must feel at this moment. He’d always prided himself on being the kind of man who could be counted on, a man to whom others looked for advice and support. Dependence would wither his spirit, and the thought of that, of her father being diminished or broken, was almost as unbearable as the thought of losing him.
The surgeon arrived at last, and they all clustered around the bed while he cut off the bandages. The three women stood on one side, the doctor on the other, Aidan at the foot. Hannah’s father opened his eyes. They seemed unfocused at first, and then they settled on her mother.
“You look beautiful,” he said finally, “but you’ve gotten awfully skinny.” They all erupted then, laughing through the tears as they kissed and hugged him.
“Thank God,” Aidan said. The huskiness in his voice made Hannah glance up at him. His expression was grave, and he was looking not at her father but at her.
Then his eyes dropped, and he smiled and said, “Congratulations, John,” leaving Hannah to wonder whether she’d imagined the thing she’d seen in them, the swoop of want and need and belonging.
SHE MADE IT TO THE NINTH day before she asked. She hated to do it, but it was either that or become one of the screamers.
“I’d like a Bible,” she said, addressing the wall with the food compartment. Then she waited. Lunch came: two nutribars, one pill. No Bible. “Hey,” she said to the wall, not quite shouting. “Is anybody listening? I want a Bible. The warden said I could have one if I asked.” Reluctantly, she added, “Please.”
It arrived with dinner. It was the original King James Version, not the New International Version that Hannah had grown up with. The leather cover was cracked, the pages dog-eared. The New Testament was more worn than the Old, except for Psalms, the pages of which were so tattered and smudged she could barely make out some of the passages. But the verse she sought was all too legible. “But I am a worm, and no man,” she whispered. “A reproach of men, and despised of the people. All they that see me laugh me to scorn.”
Her mother despised her now, she’d made that plain the one time she visited Hannah in jail, shortly before the trial began. By then Hannah had been incarcerated for three months. Her father had come every Saturday, and Becca whenever she could get away, but Hannah hadn’t laid eyes on her mother since the day of her arrest. So when she walked into the visiting room and saw the familiar figure sitting on the other side of the grimy barrier, she started to cry, wrenching sobs of anguish and relief.
“Stop your sniveling,” her mother said. “Stop it this instant or I’m walking right back out that door, do you hear?”
The words fell on Hannah like stones. She pushed back her tears and drew herself up, returning her mother’s wintry gaze—the eyes, the face so like her own—without flinching. It struck her that if an artist were to sketch their two silhouettes just then, they’d be mirror images of each other.
Even at fifty and even in a plain beige dress, Samantha Payne was a striking woman. She was tall and full-figured, with a dignified carriage that had led some to call her proud. Her large eyes were black, accented by bold slashes of brow, and her dark hair was no less luxuriant for being threaded with white. Hannah had inherited every bit of this bounty and then some. Over the years, she’d endured many a lecture from her mother on the folly of earthly vanity. She and Becca had sat through them together, but it had been apparent to them both that Hannah was the primary object of these admonishments.
“I’m not here to comfort you,” Hannah’s mother said now. “I have no more sympathy for you than you had for that innocent baby.”
Hannah could hardly breathe against the weight of her mother’s words. “Then why did you come?”
“I want to know his name. The name of the man who dishonored you and then sent you off to abort your child.”
Hannah shook her head involuntarily, remembering the feel of Aidan’s lips on her skin, kissing the inside of her elbow, the tender instep of her foot; of his hands lifting her hair off her neck, raising her arms, pushing her legs open so his mouth could claim every hidden part of her. It hadn’t felt like dishonor. It had felt like worship.
“He didn’t send me,” she said. “It was my decision.”
“But he gave you the money.”
“No. I paid for it myself.”
Her mother frowned. “Where would you get that kind of money?”
“I’ve been saving it for a while. I … I thought I might use it to start my own dress shop someday.”
“Dress shop! A store for Jezebels and harlots is more like it. Oh yes, I found all the sinful things you made. I cut them to pieces, every last one of them.”
Another brutal, unexpected hail of stones. They hit Hannah hard, rocking her back in her chair. All her creations, destroyed. Though she’d known she could never wear them openly, the mere fact of their existence, of their prodigal beauty, had buoyed her during the long, dreary days of her imprisonment. Now, she would leave nothing that mattered of herself