Beneath the confession
She must have been looking for me.
“Jordan?” She crossed to me quickly, searching my face. “What happened?”
I pulled her onto my lap without thinking, burying my face in her neck. She smelled like rain and the faint trace of our earlier sin. For a long moment I just held her, feeling the steady beat of her heart against mine.
“Agnes,” I finally said, voice rough. “She told me everything.”
I voiced it to her too—the heretic buried beneath us, the staged miracles, the archive of confessions, and Vittorio’s games. And then the part that made my voice crack: my mother, the bishop, and me. I mean, I told her every single thing.