19. Prudence
Prudence
My knees are in the dirt again—different dirt, wetter and darker, thick with the smell of freshly turned earth and raw lumber.
The compound in Wisconsin is half-built.
Frames of new buildings rise behind me, walls without roofs, doorways without doors.
The chapel is nothing more than a cleared rectangle of ground with a wooden cross hammered into the earth at one end.
But the whipping post is finished. Of course it is.
Father’s hand presses down on the crown of my skull, and my forehead drops toward my knees. My shift dress is coarse against my skin—the same rough fabric, the same dull gray. My hair is pinned beneath a cloth covering. My feet are bare in the cold dirt.
Everything from Ronan is gone. I left the phone that held Ronan’s voice and Nora’s number and Saoirse’s name with a tiny heart beside it.
I left the wedding rings. As for the lace undergarments, the cashmere sweater, and the soft leather boots Nicholas chose, all of that was stripped within an hour of my arrival, folded into a box I watched Sister Amity carry away.
I have been here less than a full day.
“Children.” Father’s voice glides over the assembled Flock.
“Before you kneels a cautionary example of the serpent’s reach.
Sister Prudence walked among the fallen.
She ate of their food. She wore their garments.
She lay in the bed of a worldly man and gave herself over to the pleasures of the flesh. ”
Murmurs ripple through the crowd. I keep my eyes fixed on the ground between my hands.
“And what did those pleasures bring her?” Father’s fingers press harder against my scalp. “Corruption. Shame. A spirit so stained by sin that she crawled back to us, begging to be made clean.”
I did not crawl. I walked. I walked because I believed his words—that I was a curse, that loving Ronan was damning him, that the fire waiting for me would consume him too unless I removed myself from his life.
But kneeling here now, with Father’s palm pinning my skull and the Flock’s obedient hum pressing in from all sides, I…I no longer know what I believe.
This does not feel like salvation.
Father releases my head and steps back. His voice lifts. “Seven days in the Reflection Room. Thirty lashes at the post. And a public confession before the assembled Flock, so that all may hear the wages of disobedience and be warned.”
Thirty? Twice as many as the fifteen he sentenced me to the day Ronan intervened.
I’m not sure I will survive. In the Reflection Room, food and water are forbidden. Seven days will leave me unable to stand or walk. Thirty lashes is excessive, but in an already weakened state, surely I will die.
Is that the point of this? Did Father coerce me back only to inflict, in front of the Flock, a punishment so harsh I cannot survive it?
The crowd murmurs its Amens. Heads bow. Hands clasp.
And in the space between one Amen and the next, vivid memories surface.
Ronan’s tender voice against my hair. You deserve the world.
Nora’s hand on mine at the café table, warm and welcoming.
Saoirse’s eyes, holding recognition without pity—one survivor reading another.
The lavender honey latte, sweet on my tongue. Belgian chocolate, seventy percent cacao, melting against the roof of my mouth. The sound of my own laughter bouncing off the walls as I sat girl-gossiping with friends.
The weight of Ronan’s hand holding mine in the dark. The press of his mouth against my temple. The way he said my name as if it mattered. As if I mattered.
Father’s voice drones on, scriptural citations stacked atop one another. He quotes Leviticus. He quotes Proverbs. He speaks of the purifying flame and the unworthy vessel and the righteous hand that corrects the wayward child.
And inside me, a tiny fracture widens into a cavern. I feel it in the center of my chest—a physical rending, as though something fused to my ribs for nineteen years has torn free.
Father is wrong. I know it now.
Not mistaken. Not harsh-but-loving. Not a shepherd guiding his flock through difficult terrain.
Wrong. Deliberately wrong. Cruelly wrong. A man who weaponizes scripture to own people, who built a prison and calls it paradise, who brutalizes women and claims it is God’s will.
My hands curl into fists in the earth.
Father does not love me. Father has never loved any of us. Love does not leave open lash marks from a whip. Love does not starve. Love does not lock a girl in a three-foot-tall shed and call it reflection.
I know what love is now because a man with eyes the color of a July pasture and an easy smile showed me.
The roar of engines splits the morning air.
Heads snap toward the unfinished road. Three vehicles barrel up the rutted track, trailing clouds of dust and gravel—two black SUVs and behind them several motorcycles with leather-clad riders.
The Flock scatters. Women grab children and pull them close. The male members surge forward—and then Father barks an order I have heard him give in drills but never in practice.
“Women and children to the front!”
The brothers of the Flock shove their wives, their children, and their sisters into a human barricade and scramble toward the tree line behind the half-built chapel, and finally, I see them for what they truly are. Cowards, all of them—hiding behind the bodies of the people they claim to protect.
The SUVs skid to a halt. Doors open. Men pile out—some in suits, some in leather, all of them moving as if the plan had been drilled until it was instinct.
And Ronan is among them.
He bisects the chaos without running, but his stride eats the distance as if the ground beneath him is pulling him forward. His shirt is wrinkled, and his hair is wild. His right hand is wrapped in white gauze stained pink at the knuckles.
His eyes find me, and the look on his face—
I have seen biblical depictions of saints in agony. I have never seen anything close to what crosses Ronan O’Rourke’s face when he spots me kneeling in the dirt in a gray shift with my hair covered and bruises darkening my face and arms.
He drops to his knees in front of me. His hands cup my face—shaking, both of them, a fine tremor he cannot seem to control.
“Prudence.” My name breaks apart in his mouth. “Baby. Look at me.”
I cannot. My old conditioning is screaming—head down, eyes down, do not look a man in the face. But, moreso, I am ashamed.
“Look at me,” he commands in a forceful tone.
I lift my head. His eyes are red-rimmed and blazing with a ferocity that makes my ribs ache.
“He told me I was poison.” The words pour out of me, desperately. “That I was contaminating you. Every pleasure I have taken—”
“Stop.” His thumbs wipe away the tears on my cheeks. “Stop. Those words are lies from an evil, vile man. They are lies, Prudence. Every single one.”
“He said I am a curse—”
“He is a con man, a convicted felon. And he’s been selling girls and women into sexual servitude while he hides behind the guise of sanctity. He is a predator.”
The words land harder than a blow to my stomach.
I am shaking. My whole body vibrates as if the ground beneath me is splitting open.
“You aren’t poison,” Ronan says. “You’re not a curse.
You’re not contamination or sin or damnation or any of the stupid, asinine bullshit he branded into you.
” His forehead presses against mine. His breath is warm on my trembling lips.
“You are the bravest, kindest, most extraordinary woman I have ever known, and I would rather spend eternity in hell with you than in heaven without you.”
A sound tears from my throat—not a cry, not a word, something wrenched from the deepest part of me. My hands fly to his wrists and grip with a strength I did not know I possessed.
I hold on to Ronan O’Rourke the way a drowning person holds on to solid ground.
“Choose,” he whispers. “Not because I’m telling you to. Not because anyone is telling you to. Choose for yourself, Prudence. For the first time in your life.”
And I do. I choose.
I lift my head from his chest and stand. My legs shake, but they hold me. The women and children of the Flock huddle nearby, their terrified eyes on Ronan and me. It is to them I speak my next words.
“He told me I was unclean.” My voice does not shake. It carries with a clarity that surprises me. “He told me I was sinful and corrupt and that my body was a vessel of evil. He told every woman in this compound the same thing. Sisters, he has used our faith and devotion as a leash.”
I do not know if any of the women or children are truly hearing me. If they will accept what I am telling them as truth, but I feel I must say it.
“I was eight years old when I was locked in the Reflection Room for the first time. Eight.” My voice cracks but I continue.
“He is not a man of God. He is a man who uses God’s name to hurt people.
I reject his authority. I reject his teachings.
I reject every lie he planted in me, and I am never coming back. ”
My words settle over the compound. The women of the Flock stare at me—mouths open, eyes wide. I hope the seeds of what I just said take root. They deserve to be free too.
I turn back to Ronan.
This man—powerful, polished, dangerous—makes no attempt to disguise what I mean to him.
“Take me home,” I say.
He settles his jacket over my shoulders. It’s warm and carries his scent. His arm wraps around me and pulls me against him.
Behind us, Cillian is speaking to a broad, bearded man with lots of tattoos in a leather vest, but when Ronan guides me across the yard toward the waiting car, his brothers fall into formation around us—Cillian to the right, Declan to my left, Lorcan just behind my right shoulder.
A wall of O’Rourkes between me and everything I am leaving behind.
I am not being rescued.
I am rescuing myself. I am choosing to leave—walking out on my own legs, under my own power, with a man I have chosen with my own voice.
And I am never looking back.