CHAPTER FOUR
Twenty Years Ago
St. Bartholomew’s stood in full summer light, its stone walls pale against a blue sky streaked with meandering white clouds.
The church bell had rung half an hour earlier for noon Mass, and now the place had settled into its afternoon quiet.
Flowers spilled from beds along the front path.
Fresh-cut grass lay in green lines where someone had mowed that morning.
Bees moved lazily through a patch of lavender near the side wall.
Nothing about the church felt dark. It felt rooted.
Safe. The kind of place people trusted with their vows and grief and children’s names.
Selena walked along the side path with Connor at her shoulder, a folded wedding brochure in one hand and irritation beginning to gather in the other.
Connor had his sleeves rolled to his elbows and his tie shoved loose, as if even dressing properly for a meeting with Father Wells had been more concession than he liked making.
Sun caught in his brown hair, which he’d at least slicked back instead of letting it dangle over his face like he usually did.
His boots scuffed at the ground. At twenty-one years old, he moved with the loose, confident energy of somebody who believed the world would either bend or get out of his way.
Most days, watching him felt like watching weather.
Today, that weather was turning argumentative.
“You’re not hearing me,” Selena said.
Connor looked over at her. “I’m hearing you just fine. I just don’t agree with you. And you don’t like that.”
“It’s not difficult, Connor.”
“It is if you’re me.”
She stopped walking.
Connor took two more steps before noticing, then turned back with a half-smile already preparing itself, the one that usually got him out of trouble with everyone except her.
It almost worked.
Almost.
Behind him the church rose high and handsome, its front steps neat with age and care, the stained-glass windows burning softly where the sun found them.
Selena had loved this place for as long as she could remember.
Baptisms, Christmas services, funerals, school pageants in the hall downstairs, candlelight Mass on winter nights.
It was woven through her life so completely she could not imagine standing anywhere else in a white dress.
“That’s where I want to get married,” she said, pointing toward the church doors as if he had somehow missed the building. “Right there. In that church.”
Connor spread his hands. “And I’m saying I think it’d be better outside.”
“Outside where?”
He glanced toward the road as if a perfect meadow might materialize out of nowhere to prove his point. “Somewhere open. Somewhere with air. Somewhere that doesn’t smell like hymn books and furniture polish. Father Wells gives me the creeps, anyway.”
A laugh escaped her before she could stop it. “That’s not a reason, and Father Wells is a good guy.”
“I hear different.”
“You just don’t like him because he called the cops on you and your buddies when you guys tried to shoot a horror film in the cemetery.”
“That could have been my ticket out of here,” he replied.
“Connor, you’re just fishing for a reason to say no because it means you’re not in control.”
He stepped closer, lowering his voice into mock seriousness. “Selena, I love you. You know I do. But every time I go in there, I feel like somebody’s about to hand me a bulletin and ask if I’ve thought enough about my immortal soul. If I’ve mended my ways.”
“That says more about you than the church.”
“You like my unmended ways.”
She tried not to smile. The effort lasted three seconds.
Connor saw it and pressed his advantage. “Picture it. Late afternoon. Trees. Open sky. Good weather.”
“What if it rains?”
“Then everybody gets wet.”
“That’s your plan?”
“I like to leave some things up to chance.”
Selena folded the brochure tighter. “You already got to pick the reception venue.”
Connor made a face. “Because the community center is the only reception venue we can afford that isn’t your parents’ backyard. And I’m not letting your old man have that over on me. I’d never hear the end of it.”
“There are other options.”
“Name one.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it.
Connor nodded once, too satisfied with himself. “That’s what I thought.”
Selena started walking again, faster this time. Gravel crunched beneath her sandals. A dragonfly skimmed low across the grass near the side steps, and somewhere behind the church two children shrieked with the manic joy only summer seemed to pull out of kids.
Connor caught up easily. “Besides, you don’t really want your whole family and half the town staring at you in there.”
“I absolutely do.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s beautiful. Can’t a girl have her day?”
“You can find beautiful outside.”
“Not like this.”
His brows lifted. “So now we’re ranking kinds of beautiful?”
“Yes.”
“As pointless pursuits go, that’s right up there with counting dandruff in Father Wells’s beard.”
She stopped again, turning to face him properly. “Connor, you picked the reception hall. A hall that smells like mint air freshener and bingo cards.”
“It does not smell like bingo cards.”
“It absolutely does.”
“That’s just because old men play bingo there on Thursdays.”
“And old men smell like bingo cards.”
He laughed once, in spite of himself, then caught it and tried to look stern. “The point is, we don’t need the church as a venue.”
“Outside isn’t the only option.”
“I picked the only option we can pay for without your father looking at me like I’m a financial disease with my hands out looking for some loose change.”
Selena winced. “That’s not fair.”
Connor’s mouth tightened a little. “He thinks I’m a freeloader.”
A breeze shifted through the churchyard and stirred the leaves overhead.
The temperature had climbed through the morning, and the stones underfoot held heat now.
From the road came the rattle of an old truck passing by.
Beyond the low fence at the far side of the church, a group of children ran through the grass with plastic water guns and dripping balloons, yelling at one another in the wild, breathless way kids did when supervision had wandered too far off.
Selena looked back at Connor. His expression had changed in that quick, familiar way. Something real had slid in beneath the joking.
“Dad doesn’t look at you like that,” she said.
Connor gave a small shrug. “Only every time money comes up.”
“My father looks at everybody like that when money comes up.”
“That’s supposed to help?”
She sighed. “You know what I mean.”
“I do.” Connor dragged a hand over the back of his neck, then looked past her toward the church doors. “I’m not saying I won’t marry you in a church because your father annoys me. I’m saying I can’t see myself standing in there pretending I’m religiously devout while everybody watches.”
“Who said anything about pretending?”
“I just don’t want to have to fake anything on the day. I want the day to be ours. Real. Ya know?”
His tone pulled another reluctant smile from her. Then it faded.
“You really hate the idea that much?”
Connor studied her face for a moment before answering. For all his swagger, he always got quieter around anything that mattered. “No,” he said. “I hate the feeling that if we don’t get this right from the start, it puts us down the wrong road.”
Selena blinked at him.
That was more honest than she had expected.
A little of the heat went out of her. “Connor.”
She stepped closer until their shoulders nearly touched. “Listen to me. We’re not doing anything wrong as long as we’re together. We’re getting married to each other. That’s the part I care about most.”
Connor glanced back at her.
She held his gaze.
“And,” she added, “I want to do it here.”
His expression said he was considering it, though still not on her wavelength.
Selena opened her mouth to push the point again, but movement from the far side of the yard cut through the moment.
One of the kids had broken from the pack and was running backward, laughing, water gun in hand.
Another child chased him with a bucket, both of them too occupied with war to watch where they were going.
Connor saw it one second too late.
A wall of water hit him across the side and chest.
It slapped loud against his shirt and soaked him from shoulder to thigh. For a beat he simply stood there, dripping, face blank with disbelief.
The children froze.
Then one yelled, “Run!”
They scattered at once, shoes hammering over the grass, shrieking with laughter as they fled around the far side of the church.
Connor turned slowly to watch them go.
For a single dangerous moment, he looked genuinely furious.
Selena tried to hold it in. She really did.
The sight of him standing there in wet jeans and a clinging white shirt, hair dripping at the temple, expression hovering between outrage and humiliation, finished her. Laughter burst out of her before she could stop it.
Connor looked at her, his face red.
That only made it worse.
Selena bent forward, one hand braced on her knee, laughing hard enough she could barely breathe. “Oh my God.”
“It’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“I just got ambushed by a couple of reprobates.”
“You used to be one of them, remember?”
“Yeah,” he said, wringing his sleeve. “I still am. Where is the sheriff when you need him?”
Another helpless laugh escaped her. Connor kept trying to look mad, but the edges were going. He glanced down at himself, water still dripping from his fingertips, then back toward the corner where the children had disappeared.
“You hate cops,” Selena said.
“Doesn’t mean they aren’t useful for locking up kids… I know those little monsters,” he muttered. “I’m pretty sure one of them is Webb Haskins’s boy.”
Selena wiped at her eyes. “You should’ve seen your face.”
“You’re enjoying this too much.”
“Maybe.”
A grin finally broke through his irritation, reluctant and crooked. “You’re lucky I love you.”
“You keep saying that like it’s bad news.”
“It is for me. If I keep giving in to everything.”
She stepped in and took his hand.
The wetness of his skin cooled hers immediately.
Connor looked down at their joined fingers, then back at her, and something in him settled.
The mock anger went out of his shoulders.
The church bells did not ring. No choir sang.
It was just the two of them in the side yard with children shouting somewhere out of sight and water drying on his clothes under the sun.
Connor let out a breath. “I have a funny feeling you’re going to get your way.”
Selena squeezed his hand. “As long as it’s at least half of the time.”
That brought the smile back to his mouth. “Fifty percent I can do.”
“Only fifty?”
“You want honesty or romance?”
“At the moment, I want a church wedding.”
Connor shook his head, amused despite himself.
Selena turned with his hand still in hers and looked up at St. Bartholomew’s. Sunlight lay soft across the tower. The windows glowed. The place felt older than either of them, older than every argument they would ever have, older than every promise they could make.
“It’s so pretty,” she said.
Connor followed her gaze. “I’ll give you that.”
“It’s a place where wonderful things happen.”
He laughed quietly. “That sounds like something Father Wells would put in the bulletin.”
“Maybe he’d have good reason. Please, Connor… Let’s get married here…”
He sighed. “Okay.”
“You promise?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I promise.”
Warmth sat in her chest then. Not the easy thrill of being twenty-one and in love, though that was there, too.
Something steadier. A sense of future, perhaps.
Of a life beginning. Selena looked at the tower windows and pictured herself walking down the aisle, her father on her arm, her mother wiping tears from her eyes.
Connor waiting up front trying not to look restless.
The image held.
Then it shifted.
At first she thought a cloud had crossed the sun, but the light on the stone had not changed. Something moved behind the upper tower window. A shape, narrow and dark, close enough to the glass that it seemed to blot out the brightness beyond.
Selena stilled.
The outline sharpened.
A face appeared.
Not Connor’s. Not Father Wells’s. Not anyone living.
Gaunt cheeks pressed thin over bone. Eyes sunk deep in hollow sockets. Skin gray-white and stretched tight, lips parted just enough to show darkness inside the mouth. The face looked dead. Not injured. Not sick. Dead, and looking straight down at her.
Cold ran through Selena so quickly it felt like falling.
Her fingers tightened around Connor’s hand.
The churchyard vanished. Summer vanished. All that remained was that face at the window, fixed and terrible and impossibly there.
A hand touched her shoulder.