My face burns, her words so eerily similar to Eric’s. I don’t want my mom and I to be a repeat of her and Moony. I want better for us, but I don’t know how to get there. “I’m sure there’s a compromise,” I say. “I just have to find it. I’ll contact the diocese tomorrow and see what they say about it.”

She fixes her eyes on some distant point beyond the windshield. “No.”

“What do you mean no?” I can’t believe I’m actually trying to compromise, and she’s shooting me down.

“I don’t want you to do that. Just…give me some time. I’ll figure something out. I don’t want them involved.”

The way she says “them” sticks in my ears. Like her voice goes hollow on the word, dips down, bottoms out. “What do you have against the church anyway?”

She brushes me off with a glance. “Nothing. It’s not my style. Or yours. I don’t need people telling me how to think. Can’t you just google it or something?”

“I guess.”

We drive the rest of the way in silence. I open my mouth more than once to ask a question, draw her out. But there’s no way to get to the information I need to know without being obvious. Hey, Mom, where were you all those months in high school that you disappeared? So I shut it again every time, the weight of Moony’s remains pinning my thighs to the seat.

I can’t sleep that night or the next. Instead, I lie in bed feeling both the presence of Moony’s ashes and the jar from Izora Jo like a warm buzz of energy through the mattress. I wait hours for my mother to finally wind down and go to her room for sleep. And when she at last closes the door behind her, I pull out my phone and start googling anything I can on church-related scandals in Louisiana between the year before she graduated and the year after. I come across the obituary listing for Father Terry Michaels again, and screenshot the obit to show Daniel. And eventually I find an article on the nun I saw in Damien’s yearbook, Sister Margaret Scott. It’s about her murder. They don’t name the school, but it does say she was a whistleblower in a statutory rape case involving several plaintiffs that never went to trial.

My chest tightens around the word “rape.”

An equation is coming together in my mind: the photo plus my mother’s words, her uncanny fear, and now this. Could she have been involved in the scandal, one of a number of unnamed plaintiffs? Could that explain the pregnancy? Her secrecy?