An hour later, Forrest has looked through my paper and given me pointers that started as cramped notes in the margins and ended up as a half a page of feedback, all of which felt both obvious and like something I wouldn’t have been able to see without someone else pointing it out. Katia and I have our laptops next to each other, coding, my phone face down on the table. It buzzes—Lexi, and I tell her I’ll text her back. Barb, and I tell her that I’ll be late to church.
Monster in Law: When will you be deigning to join us?
I resist the urge to type,How about never?
Me: Just as soon as I’m free.
Brayden texts, letting me know that there was a package delivered for me. I tell him to just put it inside the house—I didn’t order anything but maybe it’s a belated wedding gift. I don’t even know why he’s bothering to text at all.
Brayden: Got it
Brayden: Having fun at class?
I send him back a picture of the code on my screen, a bundle of half-considered garbage that I’m still in the process of fixing, but he doesn’t need to know that. Brayden responds a second later with a message that makes me stare at the screen for a solid minute, making sure I read it right.
Brayden: How did I end up with such a smart, beautiful wife?
…So, that’s new.
And I’m not sure how I should respond, so I just turn my phone down on the study-room table and hope Forrest and Katia don’t ask why I’m blushing.
I assumedchurch on a weekday would be the same as church on a Sunday morning, but when I arrive, the security officer staffing the door points me to a smaller auxiliary room. Inside sit a dozen women, all variants of Barb: thin, perfectly coiffed and lipsticked, eyeing me like I should skip the pretense and proceed directly to the fiery inferno or wherever.
“Ladies,” Barb says, “you remember Savannah. She married my Brayden.”
As if Brayden was her property that she was temporarily leasing to me. I switch mentally fromenduring a dull sermontoentering a hostile negotiation. At least this puts me on familiar ground. I’ve watched my father go into rooms with men he hated, and who hated him, and come out with them believing that they were the best of friends—all while he plucked the best parts of their business away from them.
“It’s nice to see you all again.” I seat myself in the only open chair, directly across from Barb. All the other women have Bibles with them. I assumed that would be something the church provides, but each of theirs has its own patterned cover and personalized decorative bookmark. Something about that makes me think of showing up to Dr. Ghorbani’s class on the first day not knowing I was supposed to do the reading. But no, that’s already conceding defeat. I fold my hands neatly on the table in front of me and stare Barb down.
“There should be a spare study Bible around here somewhere,” Barb says, “seeing as how you don’t have your own.”
The women around me murmur, some glancing toward my purse obviously filled with schoolbooks, none of which are thegood book. I accept the worn study Bible, its gilt edges frayed, then turn to the chapter and verse the woman next to me has open.
“Savannah,” Barb says, “why don’t you read for the group starting with…” I brace myself. “Matthew 5:28.”
I scan the page. Read the passage aloud. “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.”
“What do you think that means?” Barb asks me. A question. A trap.
My heart—my lustful, adulterous heart—starts beating faster. Does Barb know? I wouldn’t put it past her to rig cameras in our house or pay off a neighbor to report on which cars comeand go. Had someone seen Asher come into our house that night, baseball bat in hand, then come out later, shirtless, and drive away in full view of a motion-activated streetlight?
I skim the verse again. I don’t think that much about religion, and if I did, it’d probably come out to any just God wants people to be nice to each other—all the stuff that comes earlier in Matthew about mercy and righteousness—and not whatever Barb is doing to me. What I might be doing to Brayden.
“Sometimes we hurt people as much with our intentions as our actions,” I say finally.
Barb gives me a sharp look. “Not that we as women have a responsibility to prevent men from straying from their God-given path?”
Oh. She thinks I’m leading her son—who I’m married to and not sleeping with—into a depravity filled with things like abandoned diets and exposed elbows and graduate degrees. I think of Asher in the kitchen, who’d been equally ready to swing a baseball bat in my defense and help me shove wet towels in the laundry. About Brayden who called mesmartandbeautifuland who seemed somehow proud I was earning a master’s.
I don’t know what path I’m on, but I know it’s one that takes me out of this suffocating little room with these suffocatingladieswho’re more interested in seeming good than being it. “I think people choose their own paths,” I say and ignore the disdain of the women around me. “And that sometimes we have to trust what’s in our own hearts.”
I just wish I knew what mine was telling me.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Savannah
When I get homefrom the game later that day, there’s a package sitting on the desk in my room. A plain brown box with a few labels on the outside that the post office must have added…and no return address.So not a wedding present…
