“You know what history shows us happening to men like Lev?”
I try not to laugh. “Someone wants to kill Lev Warren?”
“Look around you. Look at how many are here. The current administration and its supporters think the greatest threat to national security are the kind of principles The Project is built on and they know Lev saw them coming.”
I glance back at Foster. He’s working over a middle-aged man while a family of four waits behind him. An uneasy feeling washes over me.
“Are Foster and Amalia armed?”
“Let’s sit there.” Dana points to a bench five rows from the front. We’re about ten minutes out from the sermon, the room filling in a halting fashion as each person is processed by security and I keep looking for her—but I still don’t see Bea.
The energy continues to build as people seat themselves and once the tent is full, the frenzied, fevered pitch of voices becomes dangerously taut, marching toward a crescendo I’m afraid will somehow snap us all in half. And then, in what feels like the second before it would, a quiet descends. Something happening at the back of the room. My palms sweat. Lev Warren may be inextricably tied to my life, a stain on it—but I’ve never actually been in the same place as him before. I twist around in my seat.
It’s not him.
Not yet.
A tall, lithe white woman with long, crinkly red hair stands at the tent’s opening. Casey Byers, Project spokesperson. NuCola heiress. Rumor is her trust fund got The Unity Project off the ground before membership could sustain it. She wears a white dress that drapes softly over the curves of her body and a gentle smile on her face.
All I see is teeth.
I sink down low in my seat as she makes her way up the aisle.
She reaches the front of the room and surveys us all warmly.
“Welcome.” Her voice is soft, demanding the absolute silence of the crowd just to hear it. “My name is Casey Byers. I’ve been with The Unity Project from its earliest days. It was only a handful of us back then. Bunch of kids, really. We’d gather in the barn you see up the hill to talk about Lev’s vision. God’s vision. I imagined you all here with me then and now … here you are.” She pauses. “It’s a certain type of person that finds themselves at this sermon. Perhaps you’re hurting, angry, confused or alone. You yearn to be seen. I want you to know that I see you. I see you because I was you.”
She holds for an appreciative—if a little bit extended—round of applause.
“My life was without meaning before The Unity Project. I had everything and wanted for nothing but I was incomplete. I was empty and I wanted to be free of my emptiness. I escaped into sin, numbed myself with vice. I hoped—” Her voice wavers a little. “I hoped that I would die before anyone realized how worthless I knew myself to be.
“But then Lev Warren Saw me.”
She closes her eyes.
“And I realized how starved my soul was and how desperate it was to believe in something greater than myself—and to be believed in. I can’t talk you through what you’re about to experience. No words could do it justice. Lev Warren witnessed me through God’s eyes and I was no longer afraid, I was no longer hurting and I no longer felt alone. I walked the path of Warren’s Theory and I am redeemed. My life has purpose. I live with hope. I am complete. The Unity Project now offers that same opportunity to you. Faith without works is dead. Our faith is vibrant and alive.”
She opens her eyes and her gaze shifts just slightly past us.
“Let him show you,” she says.
A hushed, heavy awe settles over the room and then someone starts to wail—a keening sound above all else. What happens next is chaos; people fold themselves around him, hoping to be witnessed. I don’t even glimpse Lev before he disappears into their collective faith. I can only track his progress by the rippling of bodies as he makes his way slowly toward the front. As soon as he’s close enough for me to parse, a hand grips my arm, pulling me violently from my seat. I instinctively reach for Dana but her back is to me; I call her name but she doesn’t hear. Lev’s devotees pay no mind to the girl struggling to break free of this punishing grip and I have this thought that if I died right here, right now, no one would notice.
It’s Foster. He guides me roughly down the outside row until we’re through the tent’s opening and back outside, where the cold air shocks my skin and burns the inside of my lungs, waking me up to just how sick with its own revelry it was in there.
“Get your fucking hands off me—”
He says nothing and he doesn’t take his hands off me until we’re far enough away from the tent. By then I’m ready to tear his throat out with my teeth.
“Fuck you. Don’t ever touch me—”
Stop. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I’ve been a feral and tearstained girl in The Unity Project’s presence before. I will not be her today.
“Lo.”
I open my eyes, quickly passing my hand over my face.
Casey.
Foster moves aside, and there she is. I’m such an emergency, she didn’t even have time to grab a coat. She doesn’t look cold. She looks like a painting. The wind pushes her hair away from her face and if the sun was just so and the sky was clear, the light would halo her head and make everything about this moment even more of an insult.
“I want to see Bea.” It’s pointless to say anything else.
“Does she want to see you?”
“Bring her out here and let’s ask.”
Casey doesn’t say anything.
“Bring her out here.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Then point me in her direction.”
When Bea stopped talking to me and wouldn’t take my calls, Casey was left to deal with my aftermath. I never made it easy on her and I’m not sorry that I didn’t. I was beset with a kind of fevered persistence it’s hard for me to imagine being led by now. It was a pure, raw fire. The calls, the emails, a final, painful confrontation that should have only been between me and my sister but left me begging for my family to a proxy instead …
“Foster.” Casey turns to him. “Lo is leaving. Can you get her phone?”
He nods and heads to the house. Casey’s eyes slowly travel up and down my body, and I hate the way it feels. She can be unsettlingly parental at times; nails the classic Mom ’n’ Dad mix of patient disappointment I barely got a taste of before my own mother and father died.
I raise my hands, as if in surrender.
“Look, I’m not here to make trouble.”
“Oh, really?” she asks. “Is that why you’re telling your boss to poke around, exploit our grief, our pain, our loss?”
My heart stops.
“You keeping tabs on me, Casey?”
Or is Bea.
“I have to say, despite all I know of you, Lo, I never imagined you’d be capable of something so ugly and so cruel—sensationalizing Jeremy’s death to get Paul Tindale sniffing around here, hoping to sell a few more subscriptions to his failing magazine—”
“If people are dying in The Project it might be worth a feature.”
Hearing Paul’s name out of her mouth sickens me.
She glances beyond me, at the sound of the screen door as it opens and rattles back into place. Foster is heading back to us now, my phone clutched in his hand. As soon as it’s passed back into mine, I know this conversation will end and I haven’t gotten anywhere close to what I wanted. Casey returns her attention to me.