With this revelation came a fear I’d not expected. I’d always thought I was a good person, and yet look at what I’d done! I wasn’t as good as I’d deceived myself into believing. I wanted to fix it, to fix me. I didn’t like the thought of being someone who willingly hurt other people, but my actions told a different story. My transgression against Dianne stuck with me because I’d loved her—think of how many people I had wounded without ever knowing it, because I didn’t care about them enough to notice. The realization that I was capable of cruelty frightened me.

I felt a nudging, almost physical, toward the third book Greg had sent: a compact, leather-bound Bible, still in the small box the books had arrived in. It was the only one I hadn’t opened yet. Mental flow chart forgotten, I picked it up and noticed the small sticky notes peeping through the tops of the pages and clustered toward the back, labeled 1,2,3.1 unsnapped the clasp, opening cautiously, as if something inside might jump out. The leather binding creaked in that way new leather bindings do, and I marveled at how thin the pages were. I turned them, long, confusing names catching my eye, tiny numbers and footnotes dancing in the margins. I made my way to slip one, where a sentence was underlined in red. “For all have sinned … ” Sin. An archaic-sounding word, but it captured the way I was feeling, the hopeless distance between me and anything really and truly good. God.

Careful not to tear the delicate paper, I made my way to number two. Another underlined sentence. “For the wages of sin is death … ” I thought of Dianne, how my actions played into her demise. I thought of the victims of power-hungry people and their wars. So true, I mused. Their actions—their sin, I thought, testing out the word—caused the deaths of so many.

It took a moment to figure out the verse was referring to the death of the sinner, not to the death of other people because of sin. It was referring to me.

“But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ His Son.”

Greg had mentioned this verse. I remembered a picture he’d sketched at his desk on a piece of printer paper: a canyon with a man standing on one side and God on the other, with a cross in the middle bridging the gap between them. “The death of Christ gave us access to God, if we want it,” he’d said. “Just walk across.”

Too simple, I thought.

I turned more pages. Sticky number 3. Another red-lined verse. “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” A verbal version of crossing the bridge.

I felt a twinge of panic. I couldn’t do this.