Chapter 1
Delilah
I had spent twenty-five years being good.
That is the kind of sentence you write down once and then sit with, because every word in it is true and the truth of it is a tax I had been paying my whole life.
Good daughter. Good student. Good piano teacher.
Good Christian girl who wore modest dresses and modest shoes and modest expressions and never, not once, gave her father a reason to lean across the dinner table and say, Delilah, we need to talk.
I was excellent at being good. I had a kind of genius for it, the way other women had a genius for tennis or numbers or making strangers laugh.
I knew how to fold my hands in my lap during the long pastoral prayer so that nobody could see the bitten skin around my thumbnail.
I knew how to greet the elders at coffee hour with a smile that revealed exactly the correct number of teeth.
I knew which hymns to play loud and which to soften, and how to follow the choir director's tempo even when the choir director was wrong, and how to laugh at my mother's friends' jokes about the heat without laughing too long.
I was excellent at being good.
I was also, on the night Ezra Dorsey knocked on my door at eleven-eighteen p.m., dying of it.
I want to explain my father. People look at him and see a man who carries a Bible like a weapon, and they aren't wrong, exactly, but they aren't right either.
Vernon Crane had not always been a pastor.
Before the collar, he'd been a detective.
Fifteen years investigating the kind of men whose names ended up in newspapers next to the words charged and deceased.
Iron Vow MC had been his obsession. He'd kept a board in his home office — I was not allowed to see it, but my mother described it once, in the offhand way she described things she had been told not to describe — with photographs and string and the kind of intensity you usually only saw in movies.
Then a case went wrong.
That's the phrase he used, on the rare occasions when he used any phrase at all.
The case went wrong. Not I made a mistake.
Not We lost an informant. Not A girl died.
The case went wrong, in the way weather goes wrong, in the way the saints sometimes go wrong, with no fault assigned and no one accountable and only the cold record of what had been and could not be undone.
He retired. He took six months in the desert at a Bible school in New Mexico that, my mother told me, did not have running water for the first three weeks.
He came home with a collar and a calling and the certainty of a man who had found, at last, an authority his old one had failed him.
He took over the Community Church when I was twelve.
I want to say I remember the change clearly.
I don't. The change had been happening before I had words for it.
My father had always been quiet, the way men trained to listen for lies were quiet — not absent, but watchful.
After the collar, the watchfulness deepened.
Where other fathers might have been late, mine was early.
Where other fathers might have forgotten, mine remembered.
Where other fathers might have shrugged, mine prayed.
He prayed for me a lot. I knew this because I overheard him doing it.
My mother, Ruth, was — is — gentle. That is the word for her and the only word she has been allowed to wear.
She is gentle the way a river is gentle: the softness of the surface conceals a current most people never see.
I loved her desperately. I feared becoming her in equal measure.
There is a difference between gentleness chosen and gentleness assigned, and I had watched her wear an assigned softness for as long as I'd been alive.
So I played piano because my father approved.
I taught Sunday school because my father expected.
I wore the cardigans and the skirts and the low-heeled shoes, and I never once raised my voice in the kitchen, and I never once told my father that I had questions about the universe that the Book of Romans did not answer.
But I wrote.
I wrote in a leather journal I kept hidden in the bench of the upright piano in the back of the church, where the felt under the seat had a small slit my mother had mended once and I had carefully unmended.
I wrote in the early mornings when my parents thought I was practicing.
I wrote in the late evenings when my parents thought I was lesson-planning.
I wrote on Wednesday afternoons in the empty sanctuary while the choir prepared and the sunlight came through the stained glass and lit my hand the color of bruise and apricot.
I wrote about desire. I wrote about doubt.
I wrote about standing in the church my father had remade and wondering, with the particular shame of a question that won't go away, whether the ceiling above me was a shelter or a cage.
I wrote a poem once about a single key on the piano that had stopped working, the F sharp two octaves above middle C, and how I had learned to play around it for so long that I no longer heard the gap.
I wrote a poem about my mother. I wrote a poem about a girl I had been in seventh grade, who had cried once in the bathroom for reasons she could not explain to herself, and how I had grown into a woman who could not let herself cry without first locking the door.
I wrote, last spring, a poem about a man on a motorcycle.
I had seen him exactly four times. Always at a distance.
Once on Route 9, passing me on my way back from a recital.
Once outside the diner, helmet off, laughing at something one of his friends had said.
Once at the hardware store, buying paint thinner, not noticing me at all.
Once, memorably, in the heat of August, riding alone with the sun behind him so that he was a silhouette and the chrome was a halo and the rumble of his engine, when he passed, made my chest do a thing my chest had been told not to do.
I knew who he was. Everyone in Ember Falls knew who Ezra Dorsey was.
The painter. The pastor's old enemy's brother. The man who had earned a road name like a punchline. The kind of man my father had spent the latter half of his life writing sermons against, even when the sermons did not mention him.
I wrote about him in metaphor. Always metaphor.
I called him the rider. I called him the man with hands the color of varnished wood.
I called him a roar, which was wrong, and which he would later inform me, in handwriting I had not invited into my journal, was wrong, and the wrongness of which would feel, in retrospect, like the first true thing anyone had ever told me about myself.
On Tuesday, I'd taken the journal to his shop.
Not on purpose. I am not the sort of woman who carries her secret heart into the building owned by the man it secretly belongs to.
I had simply not had time to hide the journal before my piano lessons, and I'd needed my keys, and I'd swept the contents of my dresser into my bag, and I'd driven to Halo Custom Works for an oil change because my sedan had reached the mileage at which my father insisted on routine maintenance.
I'd seen him. Of course I'd seen him. He was the only one there.
I want to record, for the sake of accuracy, that Ezra Dorsey in person was worse than Ezra Dorsey in metaphor.
He had not noticed me, which gave me four full seconds to notice him: the dark hair pushed back from his face; the smear of cobalt on the back of one wrist; the loose, easy way he moved around the counter, like a man who had never been startled in his life.
He looked up. He smiled the smile that was supposed to be heaven-sent, which was, on closer inspection, just a smile a young man wears when he has never been told to stop smiling.
He'd said, Miss Crane. He'd said it without any of the small obsequiousness that other men in town reserved for the pastor's daughter. Just my name. Like a fact.
I'd said something. I do not remember what. I had paid, and I had taken my keys, and I had walked out into the afternoon, and somewhere between digging my wallet from the bag and digging my keys from the wallet, I had set the journal on the counter and forgotten it.
I realized at home. Standing in my bedroom. Reaching into my bag for the journal because writing was the way I came down from being near someone whose face I had memorized in profile, and feeling nothing but loose pens and a tin of mints and the sudden, awful absence of weight.
I sat on my bed.
I sat on my bed for a long time.
I'm going to be honest about the panic. I don't want to dress it up either.
The panic was a small animal in my chest, and it ran in tight, frantic circles, and the circles were the shape of every word I had written in that journal.
The doubts. The longings. The poem about my mother.
The poem about the man on the motorcycle.
The line I had written one Wednesday afternoon, alone in the sanctuary, that had felt at the time like a small private prayer and now felt like a witness statement.
If my father reads this, he will not know me anymore.
That was the part I could not breathe past. Not the embarrassment.
Not the violation. The fear that my father — Vernon Crane, who loved me the way men love things they have built with their own hands — would open that journal and meet a stranger, and that the stranger would be me, and that I would not be allowed back into the family I had grown up in.
I had called the shop. No answer. He closed at six. I had told myself, in the kitchen, with my mother humming in the next room, that I would drive over in the morning, first thing, before he had a reason to look at it.
Then, at eleven-eighteen p.m., a knock came at the side door.