For David.
Maybe for Sara too. I suspected she needed this as much as my brother.
Hours ticked by. Day gave way to night. And still we stayed.
We spoke to him. He didn’t respond much but I knew he heard us.
And when the elders came back for him the next morning Sara made us hide. I didn’t want to.
I didn’t care if they saw us.
“If you want to help him, you have to pretend, Bastian. It’s the only way,” Sara pleaded.
She was right.
We watched Clement and Stanley unlock the door and drag an unresponsive David back to The Retreat.
Sara put her arm around my waist as we waited for them to leave. I leaned into her. Needing her comfort.
“We’ll save him,” she promised softly in my ear. “We will, Bastian.”
And I believed her.
Because love was greater than blind faith.
Something had changed in me.
Something big.
It had been coming for a while.
Since that day at the gate when I had convinced Pastor Carter to let Bastian inside.
That one moment had altered the course of my entire life. I had fought it. I had resisted it. But I knew that I was different now.
The night spent out at The Refuge with Anne and Bastian was the turning point. The moment when I could no longer deny that something was very, very wrong at The Retreat. With The Gathering.
Any other person would have known that years ago. Being told I had to marry should have been the final straw. But my choices had been made for me for so long, I had stopped trying to think for myself.
Until Bastian forced me to see things in a new way.
Whatever it was, it scared me. It had been a long time since I questioned anything. Least of all the very foundation of my faith. The very foundation of my life.
But seeing David Scott being dragged away to The Refuge had triggered horrible, paralytic feelings inside me that I had thought buried deep.
The truth was those kind of feelings never stayed buried. Not true ones. Not ones that changed you from the inside out.
David was different after that. His depression total and all consuming. He stopped coming to Daily Devotional. He spent hours upon hours with Pastor Carter. He stopped talking to Anne.
He stopped talking to Bastian.
“I thought he might get better when he came here,” Bastian said a week later. We were raking leaves to be burned. I felt tired and achy. The effort to lift the rake almost too much. I hadn’t been sleeping very well. Mom came in and out all hours of the night.
I had dared ask her what was going on, as it was unusual for her to sleep so little.
“We are in preparation, Sara. You know this,” she answered furiously. Her moods were manic. She dipped and soared at a rate that I couldn’t keep up with.
“For The Awakening?”
