“Can I ask you something, Reverend Mother?”

“Of course.”

“Do you know why Tilly didn’t take her vows?”

Sister Ruth tapped her pen against the puzzle book. “I do.” She scribbled an answer into the boxes of a vertical column.

As Sister Ruth’s loyal silence settled in the van, she didn’t press.

“I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if you asked her yourself, Kate. You were always so close.”

She cringed. When there hadn’t been so much as a “Hello” exchanged in all that time, Hey, Til, why didn’t you end up committing to a life of poverty and abstinence? seemed inappropriate.

The wooden rosary beads around Sister Ruth’s waist jingled as she turned the page, deciding against attempting a difficult-level game of sudoku. “It’s a shame you couldn’t have gone to the same university, especially considering that you both studied teaching. You would have just loved a Catholic university, Kate. Such a small campus, like a family. You would have felt right at home.”

She bit her tongue. She wouldn’t have. Spending her teen years cloistered on Lords was enough Catholicism for three lifetimes, thank you very much. The memories of her adolescence—post her parents’ divorce—were wonderful. She’d spent winter mornings slowly walking the rolling green hills of Lords, wasted summer evenings jumping from the pier into the crashing waves of the cove. Still, she’d felt suffocated. St. Joan of Arc had been the most loving, nurturing, picturesque prison possible, but a pretty prison was still a prison. University had been the opportunity to reinvent herself she craved. At first, being apart from Tilly had felt like she was missing a limb, but after a few months of separation, she’d moved on.

“And the vicar seems like a lovely man,” Sister Ruth said. “Anglican,” she added, “but lovely.”

Kate clicked her jaw. “So she didn’t just hitch a ride with him down here from the city this morning? They know each other?”

Sister Ruth sighed. “I’m not sure, Kate. I don’t know a thing about it.”

Perhaps that had been the greatest surprise of all, even more than learning Tilly hadn’t taken her vows. Seeing Tilly in a habit would have been easier to digest—vows were expected, predicted, the fault in their stars. But this vicar thing? It had come barrelling out of nowhere and knocked Kate for six. Something about the fact that Tilly had followed a vicar from Melbourne to Mornington didn’t sit right with Kate. It irked her to think what a perfect coincidence it happened to be that the same week the vicar was to be invested at the Anglican parish on the peninsula, Tilly’s contract at St. Matthew’s just happened to finish, enabling her to return to St. Joan’s as a temporary teacher.

If Tilly hadn’t joined the sisterhood, did that mean she was with the vicar? The thought of Tilly with a man, any man, be it a vicar or the goddamn Marlon Brando of Melbourne, was a concept difficult to swallow. Kate had heard the sisters say the vicar had children. A boy and a girl—young. That he just so happened to be recently widowed joined the dots. Tilly had always latched to a problem like flies to molasses, made it her job to fix things—situations, sadness, people. Sad people in sadder situations. The whole thing just reeked of some sort of Von Trapp situation, and the fact was simple: no one could solve a problem like Matilda.