She pressed her hands to her face, breathed hard. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

He knew what she was thinking. “I’m trying not to think it. He and Paulina were friends.” It was unbearable to imagine his Paulina alone with a man who would—

No. Cyrus wouldn’t go there until he had to.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.

Cyrus didn’t know what to do. He wanted to take her hand, squeeze it, tell her he was sorry. But he didn’t know quite how to do that yet, with any woman who wasn’t Paulina.

“I did what you dared me to do,” Cyrus said. Nora turned her head, looked at him, eyes wide.

“You did?”

He nodded. “Worked, too. I shouldn’t tell you that.”

“You should always tell me things like that. Did she enjoy herself?”

“Yeah. Loudly.”

“Good woman. Good man.” She held out her fist. He bumped it if only to make her smile again.

“Back before Paulina, when I was with a girl and we’d had a good date and we were back at her place…if we were fooling around and she said ‘no’ to going any further, I’d say that was fine and then I’d immediately get up to leave. I wasn’t mean about it. I played it cool like, ‘I get it. You’re tired. I’ll let you sleep.’ She’d be upset I was leaving so she’d give in so I’d stay. I thought I had game,” Cyrus said. “Now I know I was manipulating them. I’ve never told anyone that.”

He went on. “With Paulina, it was nothing like that. It was good. Good for her. I was just honest, and if she’d said ‘no’ I would have stayed and held her all night and been happy to do it. I just wish I knew it could be like that twenty years ago.”

“If I told you all the shitty things I’ve done to people,” Nora said, “we’d be here all night.”

“You’ve been putting it on the line all week to help me figure this case out,” he said. “Maybe you’ve done some shitty stuff in your life, but you’ve done some good stuff, too.”

“Maybe this is my penance, too.” She gave him a tired smile.

“I guess I ought to take you home.”

She sat up straight and looked at him again. “No, I want to go back to the house. Someone had to have seen someone near his car, right?”

“You sure about that?” Cyrus asked.

“What if the Butterfly needs our help?”

There they were, Cyrus thought, two fuck-ups with so many sins in their past, they’d need an army of priests and a five-gallon bucket of holy water to absolve them both. Since they didn’t have any priests or holy water, they would find the Butterfly and make sure she was safe. They couldn’t do a God damn thing about their pasts anyway tonight. But they could do this.

Chapter Forty-One

They didn’t talk on the way to the house. Cyrus’s mind ran with the possibilities. The Butterfly, whoever she was, had stuffed the pink envelope into the mailbox. Someone might have seen her. Cyrus pictured a beautiful young woman, probably in her twenties, someone with a shitty boyfriend or an abusive husband. The kind of troubled young woman who’d had a bad relationship with her father and would latch onto a kind older man, a kind older priest. She’d pour out her heart to him and he’d comfort her and tell her how beautiful she was and how she didn’t deserve to be treated the way she was…and all the time Father Ike was falling for her, falling hard, so hard he couldn’t stop thinking about her, how much he wanted her, how much she tempted him. But he was a good man and he refused to give into temptation.