God, why have you placed Creighton in my life? Is he here just to help me through this time? To help me accomplish the task you’ve given me? Or is he more? He isn’t even a Christian.

A sound suddenly intruded upon my consciousness. My head jerked toward the door. Someone was at the top of the stairs.

I slipped the journal back onto the desk and turned just as Abby entered the room. I don’t know how I could have looked more conspicuous, sitting in her bedroom with nothing in my hands.

“Hi. Uh…how was your walk?”

She slumped into a rocking chair. “The walk was good. I had a talk with a young woman. Don’t worry. She wasn’t with the attorney general’s office. At least I hope not…”

I smiled—a nervous smile. “What did you talk about?”

She glanced out the window. “Jesus. Well, I tried to talk about Jesus. Never really got around to it, I guess.” Her eyes came back to me. “So…were you looking for something in here?”

“Yes. I…uh…” I glanced down at the journal. “I was looking for your notes about the backdrops for your Grid message. I saw you write them in your notebook.”

She picked up the journal and sat back in the rocking chair. “This is my journal, actually. Did you find what you needed?”

“No. I mean, yes. I think. Were there just four?”

“Yes, just four.” She opened the journal and began leafing through it. “Did you read any of the rest of it?”

“No. Well, not really. I leafed through it, looking for the list. I just saw some dates and that you had written some things.”

“Good.” She looked up at me. “You’re not supposed to read someone’s journal, you know.”

This was a good time to redirect the conversation. “Did you ever journal in the Inisi language?”

She shook her head. “Their language isn’t sophisticated enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“They have too few words. Many concepts they have no word for at all.”

“Such as?”

She thought for a moment. “Sheep. They’ve never seen a sheep. I couldn’t write, ‘We are the sheep of his—God’s—pasture’ in Inisi. Forgiveness. They have no word for forgiveness.”

“But surely they have the concept.”

She shook her head again. “Not until my family came.”

I looked at her unbelievingly. “What did they have before you showed up?”

“Revenge. The Inisi culture was based entirely on revenge.”

“Revenge for what?”

“For everything. Every bad thing that happened, such as sickness or an accident, was blamed on curses from other clans. So the victim would take revenge, killing someone from a rival clan—often children—or else kidnapping a woman for a wife or a child for a slave.”

“But wouldn’t that clan take counter-revenge?”

“Of course. The cycle never stopped.”