How odd they’d both ended up back in New Orleans.

Or was it destiny?

They’d patched things up as well as could be expected, and Cammie’s things had wound up in the attic over her garage. “What will I do with them?” Val had asked her as she’d helped Cammie stow the cartons under the rafters. It had been hot as hell that day, the small space sweltering, spiders and wasps already claiming space.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re sure you won’t want anything?”

“Not now, and if I do, I can come and get it.”

First Cammie, then Val, had climbed down the rough ladder that was built into one side of the garage. Val had pulled the trapdoor shut.

“You’ll be in the convent.”

“I know, but it’s not a prison. I can come and go as I please.”

Val had dusted her hands as they’d walked out the garage door and into the bright Louisiana sun. “I kinda got the idea that once you were in the convent, that was it. There wasn’t much getting out.”

“Maybe back in the Dark Ages. But Sister Charity has told me I can work in the clinic at St. Elsinore’s or with the kids there, if I want to.”

“Do you?”

Cammie had shrugged. As if it hadn’t mattered. “I haven’t the faintest idea. But trust me, Val, if I want to leave, I will. It’s God’s house. There are no locks on the doors.”

Now Val wondered about her sister’s insistence that there was freedom at St. Marguerite’s. It seemed unlikely since Camille herself had referred to the mother superior as “the warden.”

So the locks were all in the minds of those inside the cathedral and convent’s walls. Is that what Camille had inferred?

Valerie wasn’t convinced.

What was the often quoted line? She stood under the shower, and the old pipes moaned again as it came to her. “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage . . .”

As she rubbed the kinks from her neck, she thought of Camille’s diary, the graphic images of sex and submission. Was it possible that she’d confused her obedience to God with submission to men? Had sex and religion been all mixed up in her mind? Were sin and sex synonymous? No, that didn’t make any sense. But what did? Those cryptic notes to herself?

The heart shape with the single word CALLED inside?

And what about TO BF 2 M&M? To best friend two Em and Em. So why didn’t the message read 2 BF 2 M&M. Why was “to” not put in numerical form like the rest? And wasn’t it BFF? Best friends forever?

She didn’t really know the lingo.

The other message bothered her even more.