I sat on the damp tile in the dark and thought about a man who preached abstinence from his pulpit. Who quoted Song of Solomon in the morning. Who pressed his mouth to my temple and called mesweetheartwhile there was a pile of folders hinting heavily to human trafficking sitting on his desk.
Who had, apparently, been having unprotected sex with me for two months.
But I guess that's the Christian way, isn't it.
The laugh that came out wasn't funny at all.
I didn't go back to sleep.
I sat on the bathroom floor until the damp became too much and then I moved to the edge of the tub and sat there instead and watched the window go from black to gray to the pale gold of a Louisiana morning.
Judah knocked at six.
“Mercy.” His voice through the door. Even. “You've been in there a while.”
“Stomach,” I said. “Go ahead and shower in the other bathroom.”
A pause.
“I'll make coffee,” he said.
His footsteps moved away down the hall.
I looked at my reflection in the mirror above the sink. The woman looking back at me had been in St. Francisville for three — almost four months. A woman who might be pregnant with a preacher’s child out of wedlock.
I turned the tap on and splashed water on my face. Hall’s words rang in my ears.
They think of it as a system, not a crime.
I thought about what it meant to bring a child into a system.
I thought about what it meant if the child was a girl.
I turned the tap off and went downstairs.
Judah was at the stove, his back to me. He'd already poured my coffee. It was sitting at my place at the table, the exact temperature he knew I wanted it, which he'd learned without asking because that was how he learned everything about me.
I sat down.
He set the plate in front of me and sat across, opened the paper and we had breakfast in silence. I drank my coffee and looked at the man across the table and thought:
I have to find out first.
Before I did anything. Before I decided anything. Before I let the thing that was building in my chest — not panic, something colder than that — become action.
I had to know.
“I need to run to the pharmacy,” I said.
He turned a page. “I'll drive you.”
“I have my car.”
He looked up. That assessment. Those pale eyes finding the thing I was trying not to show.
“Okay,” he said.
He went back to the paper.
