I knew he was in his late seventies but he’d aged well in the way that handsome men sometimes do. Though he was completely gray, he still had a full head of hair that was cropped close to his skull. Wire-rim glasses framed his dark eyes, intensifying rather than diminishing the power of his gaze, which still had the capacity to unnerve me so thoroughly. Even after all that time, what I felt most strongly in his presence was shame.

“Delilah,” he said, standing up. “It was you, after all. I thought I’d imagined it.” So he’d recognized me when we caught sight of each other the last time I’d been here.

I couldn’t help but marvel then at how a lifetime wasn’t long enough to break the hold some people had on you. After all, I was only fifteen when I’d first laid eyes on Father Thomas and fallen so desperately in love with him.

It had been a Sunday and my mother wasn’t joining me for church because she had to stay behind and help with the harvest. Da had insisted I stay to help too, but Ma had told me to go and that she’d deal with the fallout. On impulse, just before I reached my usual place of worship, I ducked into the nearby Catholic church for mass instead. Having learned that the Dutch Reformed Church only accepted men in the service of the Lord, I’d become disillusioned with the limitations of it, and having recently read about nuns, I wanted to find out more about Catholicism. Forgoing my own faith’s devotions to sneak into those of another’s was the most rebellious act I’d ever committed up to that point.

Father Thomas was standing in the pulpit that morning as I slipped into the back of the church a few minutes after mass had already begun. I was struck first by the breathtaking stained-glass windows depicting biblical scenes behind him, and then by him as the rainbow colors painted him with diffused light, lending him an aura of otherworldliness.

He spoke with a grave conviction, like a man truly possessed of the Holy Spirit, and radiated such majesty that it was impossible not to be entranced by him. Judging by the rapt faces of his congregants, most of whom were women, I knew I wasn’t the first person to fall under his spell. Without a doubt, he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, and I fell as much in love with him that day as I did with the mesmerizing rituals of his faith.

And now, after all those years and everything that had happened in the interim—even after Father Thomas had served as my judge, jury, and executioner by taking my son from me, and then excommunicating me from the church—some specter of that feeling remained.