All at once everyone was on their feet and shuffling out as if carrying heavy loads. At the door some of them shook his hand, but others filed past. They already knew what they were going to do and they would offer him no Judas kiss.

Some who paused to shake Asher’s hand goodbye looked sad. He had hurt them. He hadn’t wanted to. Others looked troubled because they knew what would happen. They all knew this would be the last of his preaching here, for defying the church. Only Kathi Hoskins hugged him. “Thank you,” she said.

Lydia and Zelda slid past but Justin broke through, pushing past the legs of folks until he reached his father.

Jimmy and Stephen had waited to be last.

Jimmy shook Asher’s hand, holding on to it tightly. “We didn’t want to cause you any trouble,” he said. “We just thought that it might be safe to come here because we could tell you were a good man, even if your wife didn’t want us about. And so we thought—”

“I’m ashamed of how they acted,” Asher said.

“Hey there,” Jimmy said, looking down. “Here’s the little man that led us out of the wilderness.”

“Hidy,” Justin said, then scrambled down the steps to the car.

“That was a brave thing you just did,” Jimmy said. “We should’ve never moved out here and thought it would be any different. We’ve been living in a motor home, trying to rebuild.”

“We’re not about to let anybody run us off,” Stephen said.

Jimmy looked so tired, like he had been fighting all his life. The grief had cut his face with deep furrows around his mouth and across his forehead, but his eyes shone out from the hurt. Asher thought of Luke and wondered if the troubles of his last few years showed on his face like this, too, knowing he had put some of those marks on his brother’s skin.

“I wish things were different,” Asher said.

Jimmy nodded. He glanced at Stephen. “I know this is asking a lot, Pastor Sharp. But we wondered if—not right now, but sometime in the future—you’d consider marrying us. Maybe next year, once we get our house built.” Jimmy was twisting a baseball cap between both hands. “It’d mean a lot to me, personally, to have a preacher do it, and you’re the only one I ever knew of to stand up for us, to really put it on the line like that.”

Asher had always heard about people breaking into cold sweats and now he knew it was true. Suddenly his body felt drenched.

“We’d want it out at our house,” Jimmy added. “Not here at the church. Just us.”