“Guess they don’t,” Cyrus said, rubbing his chin. “You didn’t want to tell me how you two met. I now know why.”

“We met in church.”

“Twenty-three years,” he said. “How the hell did you two not get caught?”

She grinned. “Location, location, location. Tiny parish in a small town. And with the priest shortage, Søren didn’t have to share the parish house with any other priests. Which is good. That place was tiny. But it was far back from the church, trees everywhere, and to get to it, you had to drive in from a side street. Very secluded. That helped. We also fucked at Kingsley’s house a lot.”

“You must have been young when you met him.”

“I was,” she said. “I don’t like talking about it. People think things about us that aren’t true. I was two weeks away from my sixteenth birthday when we met. But we didn’t start sleeping together until I was a junior in college. Twenty years old. I’m not saying that makes us angels or anything but…you know.”

“He’s not a pedophile.”

“Exactly.”

Cyrus took a couple deep breaths. This was heavy, but he’d carried heavier secrets.

“Yeah, I’m definitely not telling Paulina that,” Cyrus said. “She’d make some phone calls on him.”

Nora laughed softly. “Too late. He’s already been suspended. Forced leave of absence for a period of no less than one year.”

“Cause of you?” Cyrus asked.

Nora ran her fingers gently over the binding of Ike’s old Bible again.

“Søren has a son—Fionn. He’s three now.”

“He has a son? But you don’t?”

“This would be so much easier to explain if you were a freak, too. You sure you aren’t?”

He laughed. “Last I checked.”

“I’ll give you the short sweet vanilla version. First, it wasn’t cheating,” she said. “We’re in an open relationship. Always have been. He didn’t have sex with other people, but he did kink with them which can be much more intense and intimate than sex. Meanwhile…I actually had sex with other people.”

“This is the sweet version of the story.”

She took a deep breath. “Something…bad happened. I was nearly killed. Him, too. We were both staring death in the face. I’m not exaggerating. There were guns to our heads.”

“Shit,” Cyrus said. “How the hell did that happen?”

“Men like Kingsley, they have pasts. His, in particular, is filled with some very dangerous people. One of them caught up with him. Wanted to destroy us—King, Søren. Me. Thank God we got out alive.”

“Jesus.” Cyrus shook his head.

“You’ve been shot,” Nora said. “You know what a near-death experience does to you. You see things you’ve never seen before. You feel like you better get your life together while you still have it.”

“I hear you. If I hadn’t gotten shot…I don’t even want to think about it.”

If he hadn’t gotten shot, there’d be no Paulina in his life. Funny how the worst thing that happened to a man could turn out to be the best thing sometimes.