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I woke up wrong.
Not gradually.
Immediately wrong. My body making decisions my brain hadn't caught up to.
I managed to get to the bathroom in time.
Barely.
I knelt on the cold black tile and spewed up everything I had managed to swallow the day before and waited to see if there was more to come. There was. Then there wasn't. I sat back against the tub and pressed my forehead to the porcelain, breathing through my nose until the room stopped tilting.
Food poisoning, I thought. Something from last night.
The heat did things to food in Louisiana that it didn't do elsewhere — Darlene had warned me about that in my first week; I had only half-listened, thought myself mightier than a stomach ache because I was from Mississippi and I knew what heat meant.
I didn’t know squat.
I got up. Got dressed. Did it slowly, in stages, stopping twice. The lace was on the chair — a new set — and I looked at it and thought: not today. Put on cotton instead.
Wanted to put on nothing at all. It was that bad.
Eventually I went to work.
The drive to the church took ten minutes and I spent eight of them with the window down and my face in the air like a dog.
Darlene took one look at me and pointed at the chair across from her desk.
“Sit,” she said.
I sat.
She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead, which was such a maternal thing to do that something in my chest contracted. “You're pale as milk,” she said. “When did it start?”
“This morning. I think it's something I ate.”
She made a sound. “Mrs. Fontenot's grandchildren have been down with something since Thursday. Half the congregation's had it.” She was already pulling her keys from her drawer. “Go home. Rest. Drink water, not coffee.”
He shot me a long look.
I didn’t drink coffee that much.
She kept looking.
Alright maybe I did.
I sighed. “I have the September intake—”
“Will be here Friday.” She stared at me over her gold-rimmed glasses. “Go home, Mercy.”
Home was the manor now. I imagined the long road back to it and regretted I had moved out of the apartment that was mere ten minutes away from the church.
The estate was empty.
Judah was in Baton Rouge. Some meeting he'd mentioned at breakfast without detail — I hadn’t paid attention to it. He’d mentioned names that meant nothing and numbers that made no sense. But I knew he’d be back by evening.
I went to the kitchen and drank water standing at the sink, looking out at the garden. I thought about the lavender I had planted in the church’s garden. It was taking — slowly but surely, despite my best tries to kill it. Or keep it alive. I forget which exactly I was trying to do.
Whatever Judah wanted — I wanted the opposite of it.
The nausea had settled to a low background hum. Not gone exactly, more like subdued by wakefulness and everything that came with it. I rinsed my glass and stood for a moment deciding whether to go upstairs and sleep like Darlene had told me to.
I didn’t think I would fall asleep — I felt too awake. Too alert.
So I went to the Judah’s study instead.
I didn't have a reason. That was the honest answer.
I'd been in the study before — it wasn't off limits, nothing in the manor was explicitly off limits except the cellar door, and even that had only been a look and a come back to bed — but I'd never been in it alone.
Never sat in it with the whole empty house around me and no particular place to be.
I sat in his chair.
It was dark brown leather, old. I settled into it and put my hands on the armrests and looked at the room from his angle — the window, the bookshelves, the cross on the wall, the desk surface.
I thought about his father. His father's father. The Beaumont men who had sat in this chair before him, in this house, in this town. Old money, Billy had said once. I never had really thought about what old meant in this context, but I felt it was a number with lots of zeros.
I wondered if any woman had sat in this chair before. Given the history of this country — that was fairly unlikely.
The chair held the shape of all of them. The men.
I sat in the chair and looked at the desk and thought about inheritance. What got passed down. What got kept.
The folder was at the edge of the desk, half pushed under a stack of correspondence. A corner of it showing — cream paper, handled often. I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't been sitting here, at this angle, with nothing else to look at.
I reached for it, not thinking — not expecting anything. Just doing something to do something.
It wasn't labeled. That was the first thing. Every file in the church office was labeled — Darlene's system, obsessively maintained, a place for everything. This had nothing on the tab. Just cream cardstock, slightly worn at the edges.
I opened it.
A single sheet. Printed, not handwritten — but the handwritten notations in the margins were his. I knew his handwriting all too well by now. His loops, his drooping As.
I read it once without understanding it.
Read it again.
A name at the top. A girl's name I didn't recognize. Below it: physical description. Height, weight, hair color. Then a column that took me a moment to parse — medical notations. Blood type. Vaccination record. No prior— and a clinical term I had to read three times before I accepted what it was describing. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought I’d stumbled into a doctor’s office and was reading some medical history of a patient.
I kept studying it.
A number. Two digits in the upper right corner, circled in his handwriting.
15.
I set that sheet down.
There was another folder underneath. I didn't decide to open it. My hands did it while the rest of me was still processing the first one.
Different name. Same format. Same columns. Same clinical accuracy, the same language you used for things rather than people.
12.
I put that one down.
My hands were very steady. I noticed that in a distant way.
Third folder.
I understood the format now. I knew what I was looking for without wanting to. Name. Description. Medical. The number.
14.
I sat in Judah Beaumont's chair in Judah Beaumont's study in the house his family had owned for a hundred and fifty years and I went through the folders one by one. Each one the same. Each one a name and a body reduced to inventory notation and a number in the upper right corner in his handwriting.
16. 11. 15. 13.
I didn't let myself think the word yet. The word was there — it had been there since the second folder — but I wasn't ready to think it and my mind was, apparently, still willing to grant me a few more seconds without it.
Then I got to the last folder in the stack.
The name at the top was Celeste.
I sat very still.
Dark hair. Five foot four. The medical column. The destination — a city I recognized, far enough away to mean something, close enough to have been reachable from St. Francisville on a single night's drive.
The number in the upper right corner, circled in his hand.
17.
I closed the folder.
I put it back where I'd found it, under the correspondence, the corner showing at the same angle. I put my hands flat on the desk. The wood was warm from the afternoon sun coming through the window.
I sat in his chair for a long time without moving.
The word was there now. I was thinking it. I couldn't stop thinking it.
I knew what the cellar smelled like.
I knew why the flyer had come down.
I knew what a gold cherry meant when a man handed it to a woman at a party full of men with old money and older habits, and I knew what it meant that Judah had gone still when he'd seen it pinned to my dress.
15. 12. 14. 16. 11. 15. 13. 17.
I got up from the chair.
I walked out of the study and down the corridor and stood at the top of the servant's stairs. At the bottom, the cellar door. The iron handle. The cold air I'd felt once before coming up through the gap.
I didn't go down.
I already knew.
I went upstairs instead. Lay down on the bed — his bed, our bed, the bed with the fresco ceiling and the generational money in every fiber of it — and stared at the cherubs faded to indeterminate shapes above me.
The nausea came back.
This time I didn't think it was something I ate.
He came home at seven.
I heard the car on the gravel and had approximately thirty seconds to decide what to do with my face.
I was on the sofa in the sitting room, the TV on, some home renovation program I hadn't been watching.
I pulled the blanket higher. Tucked my feet under me.
When he appeared in the doorway, I was the picture of a woman who had spent a quiet sick day doing nothing of consequence.
It wasn’t surprising I was good at this — at pretending — when the household I’d grown up in had demanded for theatrical piety. I'd learned it young.
“You're up,” he said.
“Feeling better.” A smile. Easy. “Darlene sent me home at nine.”
He looked at me for a moment — that assessment he did, the one that felt like being read — and then he came into the room and set a paper bag on the coffee table. Then a second one. Then a pharmacy bag he'd folded over at the top.
I looked at the bags.
“Ginger candy,” he said, nodding at the pharmacy bag. “For the nausea. And these—” the first paper bag “—are from Sucré. The ones with the lemon. Darlene said you hadn't eaten.”
“You called Darlene.”
“She called me.” He was already moving to the kitchen with the second bag. “She worries.”
I looked at the pharmacy bag. At the bakery bag.
15. 12. 14. 16. 11. 15. 13. 17.
“Thank you,” I said.
He came back from the kitchen with a glass of water and set it on the table next to the bags and then sat on the coffee table across from me, close, his elbows on his knees. Still in his Baton Rouge clothes — dark jacket, the good shirt. He looked tired in a way he didn't usually let show.
His hand found my ankle through the blanket and he rested it there.
“How long were you sick this morning?” he asked.
“Just the once. I think it was something I ate.”
He nodded slowly. “The heat's been bad this week. Things turn fast.”
“That's what Darlene said.”
His thumb moved against my ankle. That small arc. The same motion as always, automatic, like breathing.
“Did you rest?” he asked.
There it was.
I looked at him. At the tired around his eyes. At the hand on my ankle. At Judah Beaumont, pastor, bookkeeper, the man who had pressed his mouth to my temple in front of his congregation and called me sweetheart.
Who had a folder with Celeste’s name on it and a circled 17 in his handwriting.
“I watched TV mostly,” I said. “Fell asleep for a bit upstairs. Nothing exciting.”
He looked at me.
Two seconds. Three.
“Good,” he said.
He squeezed my ankle once and stood and shrugged his jacket off, draping it over the arm of the chair. He loosened his collar. Sat back down on the coffee table and reached into the bakery bag and produced a small wax paper parcel and held it out.
“Eat something,” he said.
I took it.
The lemon pastry was good — bright and sweet; it cut through nausea without demanding anything.
I ate half of it and he finished the rest. The television murmured something about open floor plans and natural light, and the sitting room held us both in its amber lamp glow like nothing in the world was wrong.
“How was Baton Rouge?” I asked.
“Long.” He leaned back on his hands. “The diocese budget committee takes four hours to do two hours of work.”
“Sounds familiar.” I smiled despite myself.
So did he. “The Henderson grant came through, by the way. Full amount.”
“That's good. The September intake needs the storage expansion.”
“I know.” He looked at me. “You wrote a good proposal.”
I finished the pastry. Folded the wax paper small. The television said something about load-bearing walls.
Judah reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear.
There it was. That gesture.
I let him do it. I sat in his blanket on his sofa in his house and I let him tuck my hair back and look at me with those pale eyes that saw everything and had apparently not seen what I'd done today, and I thought: this is what they all do.
Everyone in this town. They sit in the warmth of it and they let the man do the gesture and they don't ask the question.
I understood them now. That was the terrible part.
I understood exactly how it worked.
“You should sleep,” he said.
“Probably.”
He stood. Held his hand out.
I took it. Let him pull me up. Let him walk me up the stairs with his hand at my back.
He tucked me in. Actually tucked me in — pulled the sheet up, pressed his mouth to my forehead, the same spot, always the same spot.
“I'll be up later,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
He left the door open the way I'd told him I liked it, because I'd grown up in a house where closed doors meant something, and he had remembered that without being reminded.
At times I caught myself thinking that this Judah could not be the one who had those files in his study. It couldn’t be so. This Judah was attentive and calm, and…
I lay in the dark and listened to him move through the house below me. The study. I heard the study door.
I closed my eyes.
I had lied to Judah’s face and he had tucked me in and brought me lemon pastry. And tomorrow I was going to have to do it again and the day after that and I didn't know yet how many days I had before one of us broke.
I put my hand flat on my stomach.
The nausea was still there.