“I just don’t know what to say to people.” The pew is hard against my back, but it’s a reminder that I’m here. Out in the real world instead of holed up somewhere else. “I never have.”
“And you think I do?” The quip is more factual than sarcastic.
We stare off in silence. The vaulted ceilings and crosses are pretty. I came to a service once, after I first met Father Francois, but I’m not sure religion is for me. I’m not sure about heaven or hell. I just know I like to think of Sammie somewhere safe on the other side.
“The Met doesn’t have to arrest Cade,” Hadrian says. “We could find another way.”
I know the right call, though. “It’s about justice for the other girls.”
“What is justice?” Hadrian’s green eyes meet mine. There’d been a meeting like this once before, just the pair of us. Deciding to take a man’s life. That had been justice.
“Not everyone is like us.”
Hadrian doesn’t reply, his eyes going back to a large cross near the altar.
“Hadrian?”
He tilts his head to indicate he’s listening.
I don’t plan on asking him. The words slip out of my mouth. The least important conversation to be having considering everything that’s going on. But I have to know. “Tell me about the first time you met my sister.”
His brows lift, the only sign I’ve taken him by surprise. “I saw her around campus.”
It’s not what I’m looking for.
“I’d seen her at a couple of things,” he says after taking his time examining the stained-glass windows around him. “At a debate. Some guest lecture. We were in different fields.”
She studied philosophy and history. He graduated with a business degree.
“One day I’m in a Tesco,” Hadrian says, messing with a button on his shirt. “And in the most Yorkshire accent I’veever heard before—barring yours, of course—someone says, ‘Well, that’s fucking annoying.’”
Hadrian contemplates, never rushing his words.
“I look over and there’s a woman with a bottle of wine in one hand, her body basically stuck in the freezer where she’s looking for her favorite ice cream.”
The tears don’t come, but grief presses into me. “Chocolate chip cookie dough?”
“They were out.” Hadrian frowns at this injustice. “She had to make do with mint chocolate chip.”
It probably pissed her off.
Hadrian has a far off look on his face as he thinks. “‘That’s fucking annoying,’ is what she said. And then she kicked the annoyance off like it was a mere pebble. It was so different from the grumblings I was used to.”
“You mean your grumblings?”
He nods, acknowledging it. “Sam was like Harry. Good at processing things. She’d make a note about something. ‘That made me happy and sad. I can’t fucking believe the nerve of that guy.’ Then she’d shake it off and go about her day.”
So unlike us. The two people who can’t deal with shit.
“Harry never tell you to go to therapy?” I ask.
“All the time,” Hadrian replies instantly. “I told him I had Father Francois for that.”
I’m not sure what led him to St. Agnes, but Harry once mentioned Hadrian had started visiting here when they were teenagers.
“Isolde,” Hadrian says, still staring off at the altar. “It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it? Cade going to jail.”
No matter how much I want him dead. “Yeah.”
