She looked at Petrus and he held her gaze for a long time. His brow lifted mischievously. “I knew a priest who died for a village once. He was crucified. Would you like to feel the love he felt, Tanya?”

Feel love? The silky voice of B. J. Thomas crooned through her ear, Hooked on a feeling.

“Yes,” she said.

Petrus smiled and closed his eyes.

Tanya looked away. Abdullah still sat across the way, staring at them. The birds still called in the afternoon heat. A warm breeze swept over her—a breeze laced heavily with the odor of sweet gardenia flowers. Like the gardenias around Helen’s house. The ones from Bosnia.

Tanya’s heart hammered. She felt the scent caress her nostrils and then sink into her lungs. Heat surged through her bones, like an electric shock.

She gasped and fell back to the grass.

The euphoria followed almost immediately, swallowing her whole. An ecstasy unlike any she had ever felt. As if her nerves had been injected with this drug—God’s love flowing through her.

But it wasn’t simply her nerves or her bones or her flesh. It was her heart. No, not her heart, because her heart was just flesh and it was more than a drug that wrapped itself around flesh.

It was her soul. That thing in her chest that had long ago taken to hiding in her bowels. Her soul was doing backflips. It was leaping and twirling and screaming with pleasure.

She threw her arms wide on the grass and laughed out loud, thoroughly intoxicated by the love. She felt hot tears run down her cheek as if a tap had been turned on. But they were tears of ecstasy. She would give her life to swim in a lake of these tears.

In that moment she wanted to explode. She wanted to find a lost orphan and hug him tight for a whole day. She wanted to take her tears and sprinkle them on the world. She wanted to give. Give everything so that someone else might have this feeling. It was that kind of love.

Then an image of a cross stuttered through her skull and she caught her breath. Her arms were still spread wide in laughter, but her chest had frozen. A man bled on the towering wooden beams. It was a priest. No, it was Christ! It was God. He was loving. All of this came from him. These tears of joy, this euphoria that had raged through her bones, her soul doing backflips—all because of his death on those beams.

The image burned into her mind like a red-hot branding iron.

And then it was gone.