Page 86

Three words. No explanation. Just ink and implication.

I pull up the website on my laptop, the screen’s glow the only thing cutting through the heavy dark of the kitchen. The homepage is everything I expected, too clean, too curated. Smiling families. Glossy pews. A god polished until he gleams.

I scroll.

Then stop.

There he is.

Older, heavier, but unmistakable.

Levi Harris. Elder. Community Leader.

His face beams in a group photo outside the sanctuary. His hands are folded, back straight, eyes hollow. The caption doesn’t lie. Millwood. A small town an hour’s drive away. A place just close enough to hide in plain sight.

I jot down the address, my handwriting sharp and tight.

Behind me, I hear it, my father’s ragged breath, struggling from the other side of the door. Wet and uneven. A body trying to keep up with a soul that’s already slipping away.

But it’s not him I hear in my head.

It’s Levi.

It’s that voice, smooth and rotted, whispering scripture like poison.

He thought he made me.

Now I’m coming to unmake him.

I hesitate at the door to his office, my hand resting on the knob. For a moment, I wonder if he’s even in there. Maybe this has all been a nightmare and my father died a long time ago and I haven’t woken up yet.

But I hear it.

That slow, labored breath. A wet rasp pulling through lungs that deserve no air.

I push the door open. The damn cleaner is sharper here, thicker, clinging to the air like bleach-soaked rot. He’s slumped in the chair by the window, bathed in gray light. His withered hands twitch weakly against the armrests. His chest rises and falls like something deflating. And his eyes, those dull, glassy orbs, are locked on me.

Always watching.

I step in, slowly, the soles of my boots creaking across the floorboards. In my hand, the journal, the one I dug from the dirt beneath the bench, hangs like a weight I finally know what to do with.

“Look at him,” I murmur, holding up the photograph. The air swallows my voice, but he hears it. He always hears me. “Levi Harris. Elder at Green Pastures Revival. Is he still at it? Smiling in church photos. Playing the holy man while he hides in plain sight. Did one of your sheep abandon your flock to start their own? At least the others moved away from the practice, but not him, huh, Father? He’s found a new herd to taint.”

His gaze flickers toward the image, then back to me. His mouth opens but no sound escapes, just the soft, desperate wheeze of a dying god.

“I found him because of you,” I continue, low and flat. “Your journal. Your sermons. Your sick little blueprints for salvation. You always were a meticulous record-keeper.”

I cross the room and toss the photograph onto the table in front of him. It lands face-up, the glossy surface catching the light. He flinches. Fingers twitch. Like he’s afraid it might burn.

“You preached forgiveness,” I say, crouching to meet him eye to eye. “You said God sees everything. Judges everything. But you couldn’t wait for Him, could you? You had to take the pulpit and the gavel.”

His lips part in another breathless groan. A wet, broken sound.

I lean closer. “You told me once, ‘The Lord breaks those he loves.’”

Pause.

“So, tell me, Father, does He love you now?”