“Whose idea was it?” I ask quietly.
She offers a faint smile and lets her gaze drift around the church, slow and thoughtful. The place feels caught between what it was and what it’s becoming. Rows of old pews have been pushed back to make space, their polished wood dulled with age, while folding tables line the walls, stacked with flyers and half-opened boxes. There’s a quiet sense of purpose in the air, like the building is holding its breath.
They’ve converted it into an outreach centre after outgrowing their old premises—too many people, too many needs for a space that was never meant to carry that much weight. Now this place waits for its next life. A place for hot meals and whispered confessions. For tired hands and bruised hope. They’re close to opening, close enough that you can almost imagine it full—voices echoing, doors swinging open, the silence finally broken.
“I wish I could take credit,” she muses. “But it was my best friend. Lily Snow.”
“Lily? I haven’t met her.”
Bethany hesitates. There’s something careful in her expression now. “I don’t know that you will. But if you do… you should consider yourself lucky.”
The way she speaks about her friend is reverent. Like someone talking about a person who changed the trajectory of their life. Maybe she did; I don’t know Bethany well enough to comment on that.
“She went through something terrible,” Bethany continues, then corrects herself. “Not one thing. Several. The firsthappened when she was sixteen. It nearly destroyed her. What stayed with her wasn’t just what happened—but how alone she felt afterward.”
I inhale slowly. My throat tightens before I can stop it.
“She hated the idea that other people felt the same way,” Bethany says. “Untreated. Unseen.”
I know that feeling. I lived inside it.
“So she started VOC. Victims of Crime. Therapy. Counselling. Group sessions. A place to process grief instead of letting it calcify.” She pauses. “Then she started thinking about the families.”
She glances down, collecting her thoughts. “Her mother lost her job because everything revolved around Lily’s recovery. There was no support for her. No one talked about the fallout. That’s where outreach came in.”
Secondhand trauma. The phrase lands exactly where it should. Like my mother. Like my father. There was no net for them. No system to catch what grief shook loose. They just… faded. Quietly. One after the other.
And I understand, with a clarity that hurts, that the person I became—the sharp edges, the obsession, the need for justice at any cost—wasn’t inevitable.
It was untreated grief. Left alone too long, until it turned into something else entirely.
“Lily and Imet our first day of university,” Bethany tells me when I ask.
We’re standing near the back of the church, sunlight slanting through the tall windows, catching dust in the air. The place feels lived in. Used. Loved.
“We were both enrolled in journalism. My father thought itwould be good for me to be… exposed to reality,” she adds, dry. “So he made me room with someone.”
She glances at me, already anticipating the rest.
“If you didn’t know, Justin and I?—”
“Are trust fund babies,” I finish for her.
She smiles, not offended.
“Exactly.”
I look around again. The folding tables. The noticeboards. Flyers pinned with quiet urgency. It’s hard to reconcile this place—this work—with people who never had to worry about survival. Who were insulated from consequence by money and proximity to power.
“Meeting Lily,” Bethany continues, “was the best thing that ever happened to me. Tous.” She doesn’t need to clarify that she means Justin, too. “She didn’t shame me for what I had. She didn’t envy it, either. She just… showed me there was more. Softly, quietly, without really ever trying. Just by being Lily; that was her magic.”
She pauses, as if choosing her words carefully.
“I didn’t realise how shallow my life had been until she stood in it. Not because I was cruel or careless. But because I’d never had to think beyond myself.”
Bethany steps away from me then. Two slow steps. Then she turns in a slow circle, taking in the church as it is now—rewired, repurposed, alive with intention. She looks peaceful. Not proud. Just settled and content.
“How lucky am I,” she speaks into the space around us, “to have been born into wealth. To never want for anything. Who decided that? What makes me more deserving?”
