CHAPTER 1
June
It all startedafter my mother died.
Or…two months after my mother died, since that's how long it took for someone to tell me.
I was fresh out of seminary and eager to follow whatever path God was about to put me on. The world was full of possibilities. Yes, maybe I was spending a little too much time thinking about a lonely, sad man I’d only met once, in a town about a thousand miles from what I thought was my destiny…but I knew those feelings would fade.
I would get that diploma, start interviewing, find a church…and that would be that.
Ministry.Life.
Then I got the message:
June - it's been a while! I was so happy to see that you got done with divinity school…amazing how you moved on after leaving Carencro, I know high school was hard what with your folks and the so-called demon and all that. I'm out of the church now too, but heard your mama died. Hope you're coping okay. Congrats again. -Cassidy
She was little more than an acquaintance from my childhood church—or, to be blunt,cult—and she had no idea the kind of bombshell she's just dropped on me. I hadn't heard from Cassidy Mouton in well over a decade…and she was the one who told me my mother died.
Not any of my four little sisters.
Not my dad, who I had to assume was still kicking around—unless, of course, he wasn't.
Not any of my cousins or aunts or uncles…
…nope. Just another girl who had been excommunicated.
And now I was standing at my mother’s grave.
Like most people, my feelings for my mom were complicated.Unlikemost people, I hadn't seen her in fifteen years because she was part of the church I’d run from at eighteen. I had good memories of her, but they were outweighed by so many that were far from that…memories of gardening or baking cookies intermingled with those of her crying as she helped our preacher tie me to a chair, as they withheld food for days, Mama telling me she was sorry while they cut me and choked me and tried to “expel my demons.”
I had to stop that train of thought before it swallowed me whole.
“You know I was just depressed, right?” I whispered to her grave.
The breeze stirred the grass but didn’t answer.
I crouched beside the headstone, careful not to let my skirt drag in the red dirt. It wasn’t a fancy plot. No marble angels. No weeping cherubs. Just a name I hadn’t spoken in over a decade, carved into a slab that leaned a little to the right.
EUGENIA FONTENOT
Born 1965. Died 2025.
No inscription. No verse. No scripture.
Just stone.
I wondered who picked that. Whether it was Daddy or the church elders, or maybe one of my sisters, all grown now. I wondered if they cried. If they sang.
If they missed me.
My throat ached with the weight of everything I hadn’t said. I pressed two fingers to the stone, cool and rough, and let the silence hold me.
“You let them do that to me,” I said quietly. “And you told yourself it was love.”
It wasn't what I expected to say…but that was grief, wasn't it? At this point in my career, I had counseled dozens of people through grief, and I knew they found themselves saying the strangest things. They didn't always speak eloquently or kindly. It wasn't poetic. Sometimes they felt compelled to laugh or tell jokes.
But me? I was angry.
