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Back We Were Killers Once Save as PDF
Chapters (65)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Notice
  3. Dedication
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty–one
  25. Twenty–two
  26. Twenty–three
  27. Twenty–four
  28. Twenty–five
  29. Twenty–six
  30. Twenty–seven
  31. Twenty–eight
  32. Twenty–nine
  33. Thirty
  34. Thirty–one
  35. Thirty–two
  36. Thirty–three
  37. Thirty–four
  38. Thirty–five
  39. Thirty–six
  40. Thirty–seven
  41. Thirty–eight
  42. Thirty–nine
  43. Forty
  44. Forty–one
  45. Forty–two
  46. Forty–three
  47. Forty–four
  48. Forty–five
  49. Forty–six
  50. Forty–seven
  51. Forty–eight
  52. Forty–nine
  53. Fifty
  54. Fifty–one
  55. Fifty–two
  56. Fifty–three
  57. Fifty–four
  58. Fifty–five
  59. Fifty–six
  60. Fifty–seven
  61. Author’s Note
  62. Acknowledgments
  63. Also by Becky Masterman
  64. About the Author
  65. Newsletter Sign-up

Carlo sighed. “About a month before my ordination. And after. We were lovers well into the time I had my own church. I couldn’t stop, but Jane was a better person than I.”

Now who’s the sucker?

“At some point she said she couldn’t go on that way, being secretive. But I tell you, Brigid. There was nothing sordid about it. Jane was my grande passion. At the time, I had to make a choice between God and Jane, and I chose Jane.”

Of course he did. After all, Jane was a saint. It may be apparent by now that I am not.

If he could understand how I felt just now, he was too lost in his Carlo thoughts to see it. No matter what he said, what I heard was that a person only has one grande passion in their life, and that I was not Carlo’s the way he was mine. I had to get us off this train of thought before the track ran out.

“Do you like fly-fishing?” I asked, assuming a negative on that.

“God, no. I don’t even like anyone who does.” He looked at me with an expression that clearly was not connecting my question to anything we’d been talking about. Maybe there were so many photos of him and Jane having fun that he had forgotten this one. Or maybe, I thought hopefully, the trip was such a disaster that he’d forced it from his memory.

“I saw a photo of Jane when I was cleaning up the mess after the burglary,” I said. “You were fly-fishing. I never took you for a sporting kind of guy.”

He still wasn’t warned. “Ah, that vacation.” He turned his left palm up and pointed to his thumb. “See that scar? I caught a hook there.” And smiling at the scar that he would always have, “I would have done anything for her,” he said, clearly without thinking through his words before he spoke them.

That did it. The rings, the intellectual pet names, the shared ministries, the book she had written, her baking skill, for fuck’s sake, the photograph with the laughing face that he would have done anything for, and then the coup de grace, a tragic death. I had the whole picture now. Carlo’s grande passion had brought together romance, mutual faith, and loss, an almost combustible erotic combination.

I could tell that was the moment I lost my poker face, and he knew it because his face finally mirrored mine. There was nothing he could say, and he had the grace to realize this and move on to our original topic. There was nothing else to do. You can’t apologize for a feeling.