Alright maybe I did.
I sighed. “I have the September intake—”
“Will be here Friday.” She stared at me over her gold-rimmed glasses. “Go home, Mercy.”
Home was the manor now. I imagined the long road back to it and regretted I had moved out of the apartment that was mere ten minutes away from the church.
The estate was empty.
Judah was in Baton Rouge. Some meeting he'd mentioned at breakfast without detail — I hadn’t paid attention to it. He’d mentioned names that meant nothing and numbers that made no sense. But I knew he’d be back by evening.
I went to the kitchen and drank water standing at the sink, looking out at the garden. I thought about the lavender I had planted in the church’s garden. It was taking — slowly but surely, despite my best tries to kill it. Or keep it alive. I forget which exactly I was trying to do.
Whatever Judah wanted — I wanted the opposite of it.
The nausea had settled to a low background hum. Not gone exactly, more like subdued by wakefulness and everything that came with it. I rinsed my glass and stood for a moment deciding whether to go upstairs and sleep like Darlene had told me to.
I didn’t think I would fall asleep — I felt too awake. Too alert.
So I went to the Judah’s study instead.
I didn't have a reason. That was the honest answer. I'd been in the study before — it wasn't off limits, nothing in the manor was explicitly off limits except the cellar door, and even that had only been a look and acome back to bed— but I'd never been in it alone. Never sat in it with the whole empty house around me and no particular place to be.
I sat in his chair.
It was dark brown leather, old. I settled into it and put my hands on the armrests and looked at the room from his angle — the window, the bookshelves, the cross on the wall, the desk surface.
I thought about his father. His father's father. The Beaumont men who had sat in this chair before him, in this house, in this town. Old money, Billy had said once. I never had really thought about whatoldmeant in this context, but I felt it was a number with lots of zeros.
I wondered if any woman had sat in this chair before. Given the history of this country — that was fairly unlikely.
The chair held the shape of all ofthem.Themen.
I sat in the chair and looked at the desk and thought about inheritance. What got passed down. What got kept.
The folder was at the edge of the desk, half pushed under a stack of correspondence. A corner of it showing — cream paper, handled often. I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't been sitting here, at this angle, with nothing else to look at.
I reached for it, not thinking — not expecting anything. Just doing something to do something.
It wasn't labeled. That was the first thing. Every file in the church office was labeled — Darlene's system, obsessively maintained, a place for everything. This had nothing on the tab. Just cream cardstock, slightly worn at the edges.
I opened it.
A single sheet. Printed, not handwritten — but the handwritten notations in the margins were his. I knew his handwriting all too well by now. His loops, his drooping As.
I read it once without understanding it.
Read it again.
A name at the top. A girl's name I didn't recognize. Below it: physical description. Height, weight, hair color. Then a columnthat took me a moment to parse — medical notations. Blood type. Vaccination record.No prior—and a clinical term I had to read three times before I accepted what it was describing. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought I’d stumbled into a doctor’s office and was reading some medical history of a patient.
I kept studying it.
A number. Two digits in the upper right corner, circled in his handwriting.
15.
I set that sheet down.
