Father does not answer. I believe he is doing arithmetic in his head.
What Iknowis that this man and Father are locked in a battle of wills, and this man is not one who likes to lose. I would venture to guess that Mr. O’Rourke rarely if ever loses any battle.
Housemother Ruth steps forward.
She has not been given permission. I see the instant she realizes it—her foot lands in the dirt and her mouth is already moving, outrunning sense—and I watch her eyes widen as she hears her own voice.
“She cannot be alone with a man unless she is wed to him, Father, but if they are joined in holy matrimony?—”
Ruth stops.
Father’s piercing eyes have found her face.
I have seen the look he gives her only twice before. Once toward Sister Esther before she disappeared. Once toward Sister Temperance just before she was sent to the north barn for a month of fasting, and returned weak and ill.
Housemother goes white under her bonnet. Her mouth closes. She steps back into the line of sisters as if she could unsay what she has said by putting her feet where they had been a moment ago.
But the words hang in the still air above the Flock, and every pair of ears has heard them.
Mr. O’Rourke turns his head.
Through my lashes, I see his profile in the gray morning light—the straight line of his nose, the clean-shaven jaw, the faint lift at the corner of his mouth that is not quite a smile.
“Then marriage it is. Let’s do it. Marry us,” he says.
My head snaps up.
I forget that lifting my head, that looking a man—any man—in the eyes is sinful and forbidden. I forget everything. I starestraight at the stranger’s profile, since he has not turned to look at me.
Marriage.
The thing I was supposed to do with Father. The thing that goes with a white dress and a wedding night in his private rooms and a future of unending pain. The thing I have been trying to accept since Housemother told me my “blessing” had come.
“That is not—” Father begins.
“Let me be very clear,” The stranger’s voice is so low and menacing it sends a shiver down my spine. “She is leaving with me, unwed virgin or not. Your only choice is whether or not you lose face in front of yourFlocktoday.” He says the wordflockas though it’s something dirty and vile.
A full minute passes. Then another.
Father is cornered, and I have never in my nineteen years seen Father cornered. His smile is still in place—the Flock is watching. But his hands have come apart. They hang at his sides, and his thumb presses rhythmically against his forefinger.
He cannot say no. Not in front of the Flock. Not after Ruth has spoken the rule aloud. Not after he has spent a lifetime teaching and enforcing rules.
“Of course,” Father says. “A blessed occasion.”
His voice has become something new. Smooth on top. Gritty underneath.
Mr. O’Rourke turns and offers me his hand.
I have not touched a man’s hand—ever.
Men and women rarely touch in the Enclave unless they are married, and even then, only in the private rooms, never in the yard, never where the Flock can see. His hand is large and flat and clean, and it hovers in the air six inches from me.
I stare at it.
My knees are locked. My shift is clutched so tightly in my fist that my fingers ache.
His voice drops. Low, only for me. “It’ll be alright.”
