Sanctified Sin

August

He left his cologne on the pillow and a voicemail on the wrong phone.

That’s how it started.

“You’re such a good girl for me, baby. I wish she touched me like you do.”

The words didn’t detonate. They didn’t scream. They settled—slow and smoky—until her ribs felt like cinders and her stomach like soaked gasoline.

Eden didn’t cry.

Didn’t throw the phone.

Didn’t even breathe heavy.

She just stared at the screen while the summer heat pressed against the windows like it was trying to listen in. She let the betrayal coat her like ash.

And then she got up.

Washed her face.

Put on his favorite sundress.

And went to church.

Because it was Thursday.

Because the quarterly audit was in six days.

Because if she was going to burn the whole damn thing down, she needed to know what kind of kindling it was made of first.

The sanctuary still smelled like guilt.

Even after the candles were snuffed out and the choir robes were pressed and packed away, it lingered—in the carpet, in the wood, in her throat. The smell of devotion gone sour. Of secrets soaked into the upholstery. Of her own obedience rotting in real time.

She stood beneath the stained-glass cross like she was daring it to blink.

In her hand was a manila folder. Tabbed. Color-coded. Heavy.

Eden had always been detail-oriented. She took pride in it. Even now, her handwriting was still neat, her tabs still labeled, her rage still organized.

$72,568.

That’s what had been siphoned out of the church’s benevolence and missions funds—quietly, discreetly, fraudulently—into an LLC account under her name. A consulting firm she had never heard of, never signed for, never consented to.

But there it was. Her name. Her forged signature. Her silence, assumed.

A perfect little scandal dressed in Sunday best.

He didn’t just cheat. He stole. And when the time came, he would watch her take the fall for it. A pastor’s wife gone rogue. A bitter woman with control issues. A jezebel. A liar. A whore.

He had laid the breadcrumbs.

He kissed her cheek after sermons.

He thanked her from the pulpit.

He made sure she always smiled on camera.

And behind it all, he used her name like a cloak.

When she finally confronted him—sitting across the kitchen table with the evidence laid out between them like a final communion—he didn’t flinch. Didn’t apologize. Didn’t even look sorry.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said. “You’ve never needed as much as I have.”

Needed what? Sex? Control? Power disguised as piety?

Eden didn’t answer. She just stared at the man she’d given a decade of devotion to, and felt something uncoil in her chest.

It wasn’t heartbreak.

It wasn’t fear.

It was hunger.

Not for revenge—no. Revenge was cheap. But power? Ownership of her own name? Her own desire? Her own voice?

That was something she hadn’t tasted in years.

She’d fasted long enough.

Her whole life had been one long performance—wife, mother, moral compass. She’d scrubbed herself raw with grace and tucked herself into the corners of his shadow so well, she forgot what it felt like to cast her own.

But she remembered now.

She remembered the girl she used to be before she married God’s favorite fraud. The girl who loved hard and laughed louder. The one who danced barefoot to old records and talked about sex without shame. The one who knew exactly what she wanted and how to take it.

She wasn’t dead. Just buried.

And tonight, Eden Cross was digging her the hell out.