“Søren?”
“Should I have taken you to my mother?” He looked at her once, then returned to petting the cat.
“Maybe,” she said. “And maybe I would have loved being with her. But, knowing me, I would have run away eventually and come back to you.”
That got him to smile. A little. A very, very little.
“I got your postcard,” she said. “That split-second I thought you had left again, I think my heart stopped.” She laughed at herself. “Then I saw the postmark and it started again.”
“I won’t leave without telling you again. There was something I wanted to say to you, but it wouldn’t fit on a postcard. I only wanted to say it to you when you were ready to hear it.”
“What is it?”
“What I wanted to say was this. If you ever asked me to choose between you and the Church…”
“I would never—”
“I know you wouldn’t. But if you did, I would choose you. When I was trying to stop you from calling the media, it was only because I was afraid it could come to that. If the Church turned on you, accused you of something, made you the into their scapegoat—”
“I know you’d leave them if they did that to me.”
“I wouldn’t leave them. I would destroy them.”
He met her eyes so she could see he meant it. The threat hung in the air, sweet as perfume, and she fell in love with him again, like she had a thousand times before, like she would a thousand times again before their story was over.
The cat rolled over again, leaving a hundred black hairs on the bed. The spell was broken.
“Blood, come, and cat hair on the antique white counterpane,” Søren said with a sigh. “I’ll have to ask for black sheets as a housewarming gift.”
“It’s fine. It’ll all come out in the wash.”
The cat began licking her own stomach. It was not a graceful procedure.
“Cats are very strange,” Søren said.
“You like your housewarming gift?”
“I do. Both of them.” He picked up the handcuffs, twirled them once, just to show her who was boss. He was. Of course he was. Now. Always.
“Wait. I forgot the last present. Stay here.” Nora grabbed her panties off the floor and her tank top, pulled them on. “Hope it’s still warm.”
“Warm? Eleanor, what’s warm?” he called after her.
She ignored him, went into his kitchen, returned with two mugs. He’d put on his clothes again and sat in the armchair, the cat still on the bed, cat-napping. She sat on the floor at his feet and offered him one of the mugs.
“Drink,” she said. He stared at her. “Please?”
He drank. At the first sip, his eyes widened. Though he was fifty-one years old, it was a wounded eleven-year-old boy’s eyes that met hers.
“Sometimes you need hot cocoa, even in New Orleans in September.”
He held the cup in his hands, cradling it as tenderly and carefully as he’d ever carried a communion chalice.
“You’re nothing like your father,” she said, “and you’re full of shit if you think that.”
He smiled behind his mug and said softly, “Thank you.”
She held out her mug. “To Father Henry,” she said, “a very good priest.”
They clinked glasses and drank.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Cyrus drove by Nora’s house that morning to check on her. He found her standing in her front yard, looking up at her beaded oak tree. He parked, got out and leaned on her fence. She wore a long swishy witchy black skirt and white tank top. She looked pretty, if a little tired. But they were both tired. It would pass.
“You,” Nora said, acknowledging him without taking her eyes off her tree. “What are you doing here? You should be at honeymoon practice, right?”
“Is that a thing?”
“I just invented it, but it’s a thing now.”
Crazy like a fox.
“What are you doing to that poor tree?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
“Mercedes took a set of my rosary beads, and she took all the sad and bad energy out of me and put them in the beads. Now I’m supposed to find a tree to give the beads to. Trees, she says, breathe out what we breathe in—oxygen, and trees breathe in what we breathe out—nitrogen. So she figures that if we exude bad energy, trees take it and absorb and then release it as good energy. I realize how insane that sounds, but it’s worth a shot, right?”
“That kind of makes sense. You and the Good Witch are getting kinda tight? Something going on there I need to know about?”
“I have two men in my life already.”
“So that’s a maybe?”
Nora only smiled. Good to see her smiling again.
“If all your bad jujus are in your beads,” he said, “maybe you ought to take them far away from your house.”
“I was thinking that, too. Know a good tree that could take some pain?”
“I know the best tree in town. You wanna see it?”
“Definitely.”
“Come with me.”
They drove to the house on the corner of Annunciation and Rose. They didn’t go into the house and they never would again. Time to move on. St. Valentine’s must have thought so, too. There was a For Sale sign in front.
“This way,” he said and pointed down the street. They set out walking.
“How are you handling this?” she asked. “Better than me, I hope.”
“I’m remembering why I swore I’d only work for women and children.” He laughed softly at himself. “But I’m okay. Paulina’s feeling really hurt. Bad.”
“I’m sure she is. Is there any new news coming?”
“Archbishop’s releasing more names of abusers tomorrow. It’s starting to steamroll,” he said. “But no more case talk. What’s goin’ on with you? How’s things with you and the Viking?”
“We’re all right,” she said. “A little shaky, but we’ll make it.”
“That’s good. I like him for you. I’d like him more for you if he wasn’t a priest.”
“Well, you might get your wish. Or not. Still figuring that one out.”
“I need to meet the other one though. Gotta give him my stamp of approval,” he said, punching his fist into his palm.
“I get to see him Tuesday,” she said as they passed houses that were growing bigger and fancier as they got away from Rose Street. “But I’m going to France. He’s not coming here.”
“You’re leaving?” It surprised him how much that bothered him.
“Just to be on the safe side,” she said. “In case my name shows up in the news.”
“How long you gonna be gone?” he asked.
“As long as I have to be. A couple weeks. A month or two. If the shit hits the fan, I’ll see you in a few years.”
He couldn’t blame her for being worried. The story had already gone national—CNN, Fox News, New York Times. He’d had to turn off his phone Friday because of all the calls coming in from the media. In the next few weeks, things were only going to get hotter as more victims came forward, more names were named. Probably a good thing for Nora to get out of Dodge.