Epilogue - Tone #5
Sister Marina turned her head slightly, as though hearing a bell only she had expected.
“Close the shutters,” she said.
One of the younger sisters obeyed immediately.
Wooden shutters slammed into place over the windows.
Sister Joanne began working.
“Blankets. Warm water. Scissors. I need light.”
The sisters moved quickly.
I stepped back to give them space as Sister Joanne took a pair of scissors to the woman’s torn dress. The blades slid through the ruined fabric in neat, efficient cuts.
I looked away.
Then I took another step back. Then another, until the door was at my shoulder and the cold iron handle pressed into my palm.
There were things a priest could not allow himself to witness.
There were things a man had no right to see.
So I turned my face to the corridor and let the sisters do what mercy required.
Sister Joanne finished wrapping the woman’s wrists and pulled the blanket higher.
“She needs rest,” she said. “If she vomits, wakes confused, or loses consciousness again after waking, we will have to risk a doctor. I can do much, but I cannot perform miracles.”
“That is his department,” Sister Marina said, nodding toward the crucifix.
Sister Joanne snorted. “He has been selective lately.”
The woman stirred.
All of us went still.
Her fingers twitched against the blanket. Her lips parted. A rough breath slipped out, thin and broken. Then nothing.
Sister Joanne checked her pulse again.
“She is exhausted. Let her sleep.”
I nodded. There was nothing more I could do here. That should have relieved me. Instead, it left me standing in a room with blood on my cassock and an unfamiliar pressure behind my sternum.
“I should return to the church,” I said.
Sister Marina’s head snapped toward me.
“No.”
I looked at her. “Sister—”
“No,” she repeated.
“She is safe here.”
The old woman stared at me as though I had said something embarrassingly stupid.
“Safe?” she asked.
“In the convent, yes.”
“Do not insult me, Father.”
Sister Joanne glanced between us, then gathered the bloody cloths and instruments. “I will check the the other patients,” she said, which was another way of saying she would give us privacy while pretending not to.
She left with the younger sisters. The infirmary became very quiet.
Sister Marina stood between me and the door. She barely reached my shoulder. She might as well have been made of iron.
“This is not a frightened girl running from a bad husband,” she said.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” I kept my voice even. “I brought her here because you can hide her.”
“For tonight, perhaps.”
“Longer, if necessary.”
“No.” Her eyes sharpened. “Not from Coccico.”
My jaw tightened at the name. She saw that too.
“They will not stop at the convent door,” she said. “Men like that do not fear God. They only fear witnesses. And whatever they want from her, it made them chase a bleeding woman into a church during a storm. Think, Father.”
“I am thinking.”
“No. You are running.”
That irritated me. Mostly because it was true.
Running was cleaner, easier to explain to oneself in the morning.
I looked toward the bed.
The woman lay motionless beneath the blankets, bruised face turned slightly toward the wall.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
Sister Marina stepped closer.
“I want you to understand what you have carried here.”
“A wounded woman.”
“A war.”
The rain struck the shutters harder, as if agreeing.
“She needs help beyond bandages and prayers,” Marina said. “She needs someone who can find out who she is, what they want, and how close they are. She needs protection from men who will not ask politely next time.”
“I can contact people.”
“Church people?”
Her tone told me exactly what she thought of that idea.
“I have buried women who were told to trust proper channels. I have washed bruises from girls whose fathers made donations to bishops. I have hidden mothers from husbands who sat in the front pew every Sunday and wept during hymns. Do not bring me rules tonight, Father. Rules are what violent men use when they have already bought the men who enforce them.”
The room seemed to narrow around us.
I thought of the Coccico ring.
The bowed heads.
The sign of the cross made with bloody knuckles.
Sister Marina lowered her voice.
“You know this.”
I looked at her sharply. She held my gaze.
For one chilling second, I wondered what she knew. What she had guessed. What she had seen in me over the years when I thought my quiet life had become convincing.
Then the woman on the bed made a sound. A broken, frightened sound.
I turned instantly.
She was moving weakly beneath the blankets, her fingers clutching at the sheet. Her eyes fluttered open, unfocused and glassy with pain.
Sister Marina moved to one side of the bed.
I approached the other.
The woman’s gaze darted around the room, wild and disoriented. The shutters. The crucifix. The lamps. The habit at Sister Marina’s throat. My black cassock.
“No,” she rasped.
“You’re safe,” I said, lowering my voice.
Her eyes found mine. Recognition flickered.
She tried to sit up and cried out, one hand flying to her ribs.
“Don't move,” Sister Marina ordered.
The woman ignored her and reached for me.
Her fingers caught my sleeve. Weak. Desperate. Terrified.
“Please,” she whispered.
“I’m here.”
“Don’t leave me.”
The words came out so raw that something inside me recoiled from the pull of them.
I had heard people beg before. For mercy. Money. Forgiveness. For their lives. Begging had many faces. Some were ugly. Some were false. Some were nothing more than another form of manipulation.
This was none of those. This was a person standing at the edge of death and recognising the shape of the only hand near enough to reach.
I looked at where her fingers clutched my sleeve.
There was blood under her nails. Her skin was torn at the knuckles.
She had fought.
“You’re safe now,” I told her.
It was the priest’s answer. The gentle yet useless answer.
Her eyes widened. A violent tremor went through her. “No,” she said. Her grip tightened with what little strength she had left. “I’m not.”
The woman swallowed, and tears slipped sideways into her hair.
“They will kill me.” Her voice cracked. Then she said the words that closed around my throat like a chain. “Just like they killed my father.”
The room emptied of air.
Her hand went slack on my sleeve. Her eyes rolled back.
“Signorina?” I said.
“She has fainted,” Sister Marina said, already checking her pulse.
But I barely heard her.
Just like they killed my father.
The words repeated inside me, each time darker than before, the pattern arranging itself with obscene clarity.
She was fatherless. A hunted life dropped bleeding at my altar.
Sister Marina stared at me across the bed.
“You understand now,” she said.
I did. That was the problem. I understood too well.
The holy thing to do would have been to trust the law. Trust the Church. Trust the systems built to protect the frightened and punish the wicked. But I had seen wicked men build systems. I had seen them donate to them, dine with them, marry into them, bless them, and use them as cages.
For years, I had built peace from repetition. A life narrow enough to keep the past from entering. And now the past had found me anyway.
I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Sister Marina was still watching me.
“What will you do, Father?” she asked.
Father.
The word felt heavier than it had an hour ago.
I gently freed my sleeve from the woman’s hand, then covered her fingers with the blanket.
“I will make a call,” I said.
Sister Marina’s eyes sharpened. “To whom?”
I looked at the crucifix on the wall.
Christ hung in carved silence above us, His ribs exposed, His head bowed beneath the unbearable weight of mankind’s endless talent for cruelty.
For years, I had knelt beneath that cross and begged Him to make me good. Kinder. Cleaner.
I wondered if God had ever intended to answer that prayer. Or if tonight, He might need me to be something else.
Slowly, I turned back to Sister Marina.
“Someone I prayed I would never need again.”