Clairewasnotapious woman, and she never pretended to be. She was neither holy nor silent, and certainly not obedient. In her own mind, she was a disgrace, condemned to the church’s servitude not by divine will but by poverty.
Born to devout yet poor parents, Claire had grown up without luxuries, only endless prayers. Her parents went to church with bowed heads and empty hands, begging for fertile soil and mercy that never came.
Their crops weren’t as fruitful as past years, and as they noticed the lack of coin flowing, desperation set in.
Her brothers had served as altar boys, one after another.
Mateo, the eldest, had worn the title like a badge of honor until he came of age and turned to the plow.
Lyam, the younger, lasted a month before refusing to return. He never said why. Claire had seen the fear in his eyes, and the bruises her father ignored. Whatever haunted him at that altar, he chose his father’s scorn over the priest’s touch.
When both sons were lost to piety, all eyes turned to the daughter.
It came as a whisper, hushed exchanges about how it would’ve been better if they didn’t have a daughter, how it wasn’t profitable to keep her around. How would they pay for the dowry? Who would want a daughter like Claire? A disobedient girl who cared only about herself.
That was where they were wrong. Claire cared about others a little too much for her own liking. Enough to allow herself to see that her parents needed her for their own salvation. If her very existence stopped them from having a comfortable life, then she would become the sacrificial lamb if it meant their happiness.
Claire still remembered that night at the kitchen table. She remembered the flicker of a dying candle, her mother’s apron stiff with flour, her tears running down her cheeks as a subtle reminder that maybe—just maybe—her mother cared about her.
“We have no money, Claire. Nothing to offer your future husband,” her mother had said. Her father sat insilence, the smell of earth and sweat clinging to his fists on the table, his eyes unable to meet hers. “And I don’t think any man wants a woman without a dowry…”
As if Claire had ever wanted to belong to any man.
She had seen what marriage meant in her household. Marriage was her father’s temper, her mother’s quiet resignation, the bruises passed off as accidents. She had seen Mateo’s cruelty toward his “beloved.” If that was love, she wanted none of it.
To her, love was soft and tender, a loving caress to a broken soul, a promise of companionship through anything. Love was freedom, pleasure, warmth…
Love was to be seen, understood, and wanted regardless of what the other person saw.
That was the love she wanted, not the aberration she had seen in her home with her parents and her brothers.
But her opinion mattered little, since they had already decided her fate.
The convent.
She was to serve God, since nomanwould have her.
Yet sometimes, late at night, Claire wondered if there hadn’t been another reason for their decision. She had always loved to sing and dance in a way that defied her parents.
Once, they had caught her in the village square, dancing barefoot to the music of passing travelers. Nomads, her father had called them while spitting on the ground.Where her father saw evildoers, thieves, and harlots, Claire saw freedom.
Their tambourines clattered, their laughter rang through the air, and one woman with golden bangles had wrapped a scarf around Claire’s hips as she spun. For a heartbeat, she felt free. She felt like she belonged. She would’ve dropped everything she ever knew to chase that feeling once more and to be surrounded by it.
But when her father found her, the joy on her face had turned to fear. The scarf was torn from her body. The shame on his face had been worse than any beating. From that day on, she knew they feared not for her soul, but for her freedom. They would rather bury her behind convent walls than see her become one ofthem.
Sometimes she wondered if her parents had ever loved her at all, or only the idea of her soul as another offering to buy Heaven’s favor. Her mother’s nightly kisses had stopped after the announcement of her parting. Her loving ‘good nights’ had been replaced by silence. Claire liked to imagine it was an act of mercy to make leaving easier, so she wouldn’t miss her at all.
But it wasn’t easy. Not for her.
She remembered kissing her parents goodbye at the gate of the Convent of the Paraclete. The walls of the building were high. It had broken windows, which Claire knew would filter in the coldness when winter came. The hallsreeked of mildew and although the food wasn’t that bad, she felt out of place.
If the outside was bad, inside was worse. There were so many women discarded by the world. They were unwanted daughters, mistresses caught and punished, women who had loved other women in secret and now prayed for forgiveness that would never come.
It was not holiness that kept them there. It was survival.
Days blurred into one another, silent and airless.
Claire found herself suffocating more than once, woken up in the middle of the night by the night terrors of darkness engulfing her, of ropes wrapping around her so tightly she could not move an inch… She needed solace, anything that would pull her away from her new holy jail, away from the women who were scared to speak out—just like her.
