It’s been five months since the shootout at the motel and the end of the Fiends. In the aftermath, Antonia and Elijah threw away their leathers and dumped the Harley. Elijah shaved his beard and cut his hair; Antonia grew hers long and has taken to wearing embroidered Mexican dresses and turquoise jewelry. New identities, new beginnings. They’ve had a few.

They took a night flight from New York to London and another to Rome, where they’ve been for a week. Every afternoon at 4:30, when the winter sun sets, they leave their hotel to visit sites on Antonia’s list, and every one of them has been more beautiful than she imagined. Her knees shook in the Sistine Chapel, the Trevi Fountain made her dizzy, and now this, Michelangelo’s Pietà. The marble figures are so lifelike, she wouldn’t be surprised to feel a pulse if she put her fingers to Mary’s throat, wouldn’t be shocked if Jesus’s flesh was warm to the touch.

The sculpture is surrounded by bulletproof glass. A few years ago a madman attacked it with a hammer, breaking off one of Mary’s arms and her nose. Luke used a hammer when he went crazy too. Went crazy and beat little Abigail to death. Went crazy and murdered wee James. She came home right after, had been to the grocer, was carrying a sack of onions and potatoes. Luke greeted her naked, bloody, raving. “Hello, wife. I’ve done for your piglets, and now I’ll have you.” Because she’d threatened to leave him, to take the children and go.

She went crazy herself then, got hold of a kitchen knife and stabbed him twenty times. If she hadn’t discovered that she had killing in her that day, that she could kill and not care, would things have been different? If she hadn’t been shown that all men were beasts, would she have so readily become a rover, a beast of all beasts?

She blinks away the questions. She blinks away the past. Those babies died of the pox. Her eyes climb a column to the church’s vaulted roof, to the dome hazy with scented smoke from an earlier Mass. All the pain of her life has been worth it if that’s what it took to get here, to see the candles flickering like fireflies in front of the chapels.

She and Elijah walk to the statue of St. Peter. Visitors, kissing rosaries and crossing themselves, are lined up to touch its foot. They join the queue.

“You’re not getting religion, are you?” Elijah says.

“It’s tradition,” Antonia says.

When it’s her turn in front of the statue, she gazes at its toes, worn shiny and shapeless by the caresses of countless pilgrims seeking mercy. Fools, she thinks, before reaching out to stroke the foot herself.