“He knows some things. And he knew of your parents.”

“So you’re really suggesting I pick up and go down there?” Sherry asked incredulously.

“I thought I said that yesterday. You weren’t listening?”

“For how long?”

“Until you have had enough. A week, a day, a month,” Helen said.

“Just up and fly all the way to South America for a day? It takes a full day just to get down there.”

Was she serious? Of course she was serious! Maybe God was calling her as he had called her parents nearly twenty years ago.

But the irony of the thought. Helen was right. Sherry had spent eight years running from her past and now she was suggesting Sherry just step back there. Like it was some kind of booth at a fair she could walk in and out of at will. But it wasn’t some booth—it was the house of horrors and the last time she’d gone in there the lid had locked shut.

But then that was Tanya Vandervan. She was Sherry Blake. The changing of her identity suddenly struck her as absurd. Goodness, her mind couldn’t see what her hair or eyes looked like. The mind was on the wrong side of the skull, where the visions and nightmares wandered around at night.

The silence was stretching.

“You’re free to go now that you’ve left the hospital,” Helen said. “Do you think this is by chance? Think about it, Sherry.”

She did. She thought about it, and the thought that returning might bring justification to her leave of absence from the hospital felt strangely warm. “So just buy a ticket and show up on Father Teuwen’s doorstep?”

“Actually, I’d get word to him. But basically, yes.”

Sherry sat for a long time and tried to wrap her mind around this call of God’s. But the more she thought about it, the more its madness faded.

She spent most of the day with Helen, who took it upon herself to make some phone calls. Sherry mostly sat in the big armchair, crying and asking questions and slowly, ever so slowly, warming to the idea that something very, very strange was happening. God had his purposes, and somehow, she had been pulled into the middle of them all.

DAVID LUNOW sat in the director’s office with legs crossed and palms wet. He had been brought in to discuss Casius, of that he was sure. The large desk Friberg sat behind was made of a wood that reminded him of oak. Of course, it couldn’t be oak—oak was too cheap. Probably some imported wood from one of the Arab countries. Two high-backed chairs faced the desk. Mark Ingersol sat in one, David in the other. He couldn’t remember spending so much time with the brass.