I shook my head. I hadn’t eaten since a few nervous bites of toast at breakfast but I felt more satiated than I had in years. We set off for home and, perhaps because it was dark, or because Ruth had to face forward with her eyes on the road—I was too cowardly to look into my sister’s eyes—but I started talking. I needed to drain the poison from me and tell someone exactly what had happened.

Perhaps it was knowing that I wasn’t the only one it had happened to, but I felt compelled to share it then in a way I never had before.

“Ruth?”

“Yes?”

“Something happened to me that I want to tell you about.”

“Okay, you know you can tell me anything.”

And despite everything, how much I’d always resented her and how different we were—despite the fact that we’d never been close, and that she’d infuriated me with her self-absorption—I knew she was right.

And so I started telling her the truth about how Daniel was conceived and everything that followed. As I spoke, it all came back to me, everything that happened on that day, and afterward, when Father Thomas discovered my pregnancy. In my mind’s eye, I saw him enveloping me in a hug as I stood to go, and how his expression changed so swiftly when he realized what my swollen belly pressed against him signified. He’d stood frozen for a moment, horror written on his face.

“What have you done, Delilah? What have you done?” he whispered.

Gone was the novitiate name that he’d called me a mere half an hour before. I was no longer Sister Mary Teresa to him. I’d reverted to Delilah, “the destroyer of men’s powers.”

“I’m—I’m sorry, Father,” I stammered.

“Sorry?” He looked at me as though I was the embodiment of Satan, sent there by his enemies to annihilate him. “You’ve completely and utterly ruined me and yet all you can say is that you’re sorry?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Be still! I don’t want to hear another word out of your whorish mouth, do you hear me?”

I nodded, trying to check the terrified tears that were falling, but failing miserably.

His hands rose to his face and he began pacing, muttering to himself all the while. When he finally stilled, I could see that his expression had cleared like the sky after a storm. The shift was as sudden as the one I remembered from that day all those months ago and I marveled at how he could so swiftly move from one persona to the next like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.