Transformation and understanding, that’s what Marianne was thinking about writing to Janine Gray on a hot Tuesday morning in July. They’d developed an email correspondence during the break in classes—Marianne had initiated it, afraid that Lorraine wouldn’t keep up with her students, but she found that she looked forward to Janine’s emails, which were sincere and searching, and she tried to put her own sincere and searching thoughts into her replies. Somehow they’d gotten on the topic of character in poetry, and how much you could know the mind of another person. Impossible. That was what Marianne was thinking about writing to Janine, because it was what she had been thinking: about Eric, who had grown increasingly distant, and about her mother, who was always both distant and present. She wanted to say more than that, something about the way our preoccupations grew and changed, how our perceptions became part of the truth. But she was missing her mother, and so that’s what she wrote in her email—how her mother would always be a kind of mystery to her, dying when Marianne was seventeen and just about to ask her things, about sex and love and art. Janine was so lucky to have this time with her daughters, who sounded like lovely and smart young women, and they were lucky to have her too—she would not be a mystery they spent the rest of their lives trying to solve.

She pressed Send, and that was when a new email arrived. She clicked on the link:

Middlesex County, Va. Two local ministers, Darryl and Ruth Boyette, are taking their message of love and life on the road this summer. The couple will leave their flock at Healing Waters Baptist Church to join this summer’s Tour of Life, appearing with prominent religious leaders and pro-life advocates across the Southeast to raise money for crisis pregnancy centers.

“We want to share a message about the sanctity and beauty of life,” said Darryl Boyette, senior minister at Healing Waters. “This is a message of love for teens in trouble. Well, not in trouble. And not just teens. Anyone expecting a baby.”

Ruth Boyette, who has served the church in a counseling and ministerial role for two years, is slated to speak at several major events about her own family background. Boyette’s mother was counseled to end her pregnancy when it was discovered that she had breast cancer. “I wouldn’t be here if my mother hadn’t made that sacrifice, if she had listened to the medical establishment instead of her heart,” she said.

Darryl Boyette has been senior minister at Healing Waters for two years. Ruth Boyette began attending services as a teen, and joined the ministry in 2010 after her marriage to Darryl. Her late mother, Theresa Stuart, was a beloved art teacher at Eastern High.