The crowd murmurs its Amens. Heads bow. Hands clasp.
And in the space between one Amen and the next, vivid memories surface.
Ronan’s tender voice against my hair.You deserve the world.
Nora’s hand on mine at the café table, warm and welcoming.
Saoirse’s eyes, holding recognition without pity—one survivor reading another.
The lavender honey latte, sweet on my tongue. Belgian chocolate, seventy percent cacao, melting against the roof of my mouth. The sound of my own laughter bouncing off the walls as I sat girl-gossiping with friends.
The weight of Ronan’s hand holding mine in the dark. The press of his mouth against my temple. The way he said my name as if it mattered. As if I mattered.
Father’s voice drones on, scriptural citations stacked atop one another. He quotes Leviticus. He quotes Proverbs. He speaks of the purifying flame and the unworthy vessel and the righteous hand that corrects the wayward child.
And inside me, a tiny fracture widens into a cavern. I feel it in the center of my chest—a physical rending, as though something fused to my ribs for nineteen years has torn free.
Father is wrong. I know it now.
Not mistaken. Not harsh-but-loving. Not a shepherd guiding his flock through difficult terrain.
Wrong. Deliberately wrong. Cruelly wrong. A man who weaponizes scripture to own people, who built a prison and calls it paradise, who brutalizes women and claims it is God’s will.
My hands curl into fists in the earth.
Father does not love me. Father has never loved any of us. Love does not leave open lash marks from a whip. Love does not starve. Love does not lock a girl in a three-foot-tall shed and call it reflection.
I know what love is now because a man with eyes the color of a July pasture and an easy smile showed me.
The roar of engines splits the morning air.
Heads snap toward the unfinished road. Three vehicles barrel up the rutted track, trailing clouds of dust and gravel—two black SUVs and behind them several motorcycles with leather-clad riders.
The Flock scatters. Women grab children and pull them close. The male members surge forward—and then Father barks an order I have heard him give in drills but never in practice.
“Women and children to the front!”
The brothers of the Flock shove their wives, their children, and their sisters into a human barricade and scramble toward the tree line behind the half-built chapel, and finally, I see them for what they truly are. Cowards, all of them—hiding behind the bodies of the people they claim to protect.
The SUVs skid to a halt. Doors open. Men pile out—some in suits, some in leather, all of them moving as if the plan had been drilled until it was instinct.
And Ronan is among them.
He bisects the chaos without running, but his stride eats the distance as if the ground beneath him is pulling him forward. His shirt is wrinkled, and his hair is wild. His right hand is wrapped in white gauze stained pink at the knuckles.
His eyes find me, and the look on his face?—
I have seen biblical depictions of saints in agony. I have never seen anything close to what crosses Ronan O’Rourke’s face when he spots me kneeling in the dirt in a gray shift with my hair covered and bruises darkening my face and arms.
He drops to his knees in front of me. His hands cup my face—shaking, both of them, a fine tremor he cannot seem to control.
“Prudence.” My name breaks apart in his mouth. “Baby. Look at me.”
I cannot. My old conditioning is screaming—head down, eyes down, do not look a man in the face. But, moreso, I am ashamed.
“Look at me,” he commands in a forceful tone.
I lift my head. His eyes are red-rimmed and blazing with a ferocity that makes my ribs ache.
