I think about Nan sobbing into her Kleenex, the gentle way my mom leaned into her pain instead of away, the way she said I know as if she really, truly did. What if she understood Nan because she was a sexual assault survivor too? What if they shared more than having lost a baby? And then I remember that even in the face of that unbearable grief, she’d admitted to the belief that the child was better off dead because the father wasn’t a good guy.

I refuse to let myself believe it without more proof. I don’t know. I don’t know, I repeat again and again. I don’t actually know.

On the third night, I fall into a restless sleep after searching Father Terry Michaels’s name online again. Maybe he gave a comment to someone. Maybe he knew the people involved. Maybe he was involved. When I open my eyes, I am not on my pullout sofa in the apartment in the Quarter, but sitting in a classroom full of empty desks. At the front of the room, the High Priestess is writing something on the chalkboard, something very important for me to read. Her veil is the color of the witching hour but stiffer now, like a nun’s habit. I try to make out the words, but the room seems to lengthen, pushing the board and its message farther and farther away. My vision swims and blurs. The room begins to fill up with the mist I remember from my last dream. I try to rise from the desk, but something is pinning me by my shoulders to the seat. It is then that I realize the thickness in the air around me is not mist but smoke.

I choke on hot, ash-laden gulps of it. I look up and straight into the eyes of the man with the peppermint schnapps. For a second, his breath fills my lungs with a wind full of cool relief, and then he is gone, and Father Terry stands in his place, his black frames leaning over me as he stares at me with hard eyes the color of pale stones. His smile is too wide and white to be real, and garish in its insistence. “Where are you going, Mary?” he says. “School isn’t over yet.”

I wake up thrashing in my sheets with my mother hovering over me in a panic. “Cat, Catia! What’s wrong, baby? What’s going on?”

Her hands are on my shoulders, pinning me to the bed, trying to keep me from flailing. “Let go of me!” I shout before it sinks in—what is happening, who she is, where I am.

I push her off of me and sit up. “I’m fine,” I tell her, trying to catch my breath, unraveling the sheets from my arms and legs.

“Are you?” she asks, eyes full of concern.

“It was just a nightmare.”