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CHAPTER FIVE
“WEARENOTin the habit of turning away petitioners in need,” said Mother Superior, her face as smooth and ageless as it had been six years ago. She could have been fifty or eighty, for all Pascal could tell. There was a canny wisdom in her gaze and a certain scratchy archness in her voice. And the smile she aimed at him made him want to drop to his knees and rededicate himself to a faith he had never felt deeply enough to pronounce in the first place. “Not even those who took advantage of our hospitality once before.”
“You are too good,” Pascal murmured in reply.
He would sooner rip off his own arms than admit how strange it had seemed to him to walk up to the front door of the abbey. Then wait to be admitted into Mother Superior’s presence as if he was any visitor. Not one who had lived here for months and not of his own accord.
Pascal had never intended to return.
Moreover, he had gone to great lengths to deny that he had ever been as helpless or weak as he had been when he’d been stuck here. He liked to touch his scars to remind him that he could overcome any obstacle, but he had stopped permitting himself to remember the details of this particular obstacle. This valley and the stone abbey were a story he told to illustrate both his strength of will and his ability to climb out of any pit.
He’d managed to convince himself that none of it was real.
But the stone building that housed the abbey had stood in this same spot for centuries. It had been a fortress, a castle and a monastery, and it was built to last ten more centuries in much the same forbidding condition. He followed Mother Superior as she glided along the smooth, spotless halls, made somewhat less dim by the lights set into sconces every few meters. He had to double-check that the lights were electric, and not torches. Because otherwise, it could have been any one of the past five centuries.
It was a relief to exit the old part of the abbey and cross into the modern clinic building. And somehow he was not the least bit surprised when the nun led him to the very same chamber where he’d stayed years before. He stopped in the doorway, not sure he was in complete control of himself as he looked around. But nothing had changed. The same whitewashed walls, free of everything save two items that were surely not considered decoration. The crucifix on the wall across from the narrow bed. And above the bed, a Bible verse in a frame.
No wonder he had spent his time staring out the window at the cold fields instead.
“As you can see, we have kept everything just as you left it,” Mother Superior said genially, but her gaze was sharp.
“How thoughtful,” Pascal managed to say, even as a revolt took place inside him. As if he was doomed to months of confinement if he stepped across the threshold—
But he was not a superstitious man.
And he would not let this absurd attack of malicious nostalgia affect him.
He stepped into the room, reclaiming it. Because the last time he’d been here, he’d been carried inside. In pieces.
It took him a long time to look at the nun. And to get the distinct impression she’d known exactly how hard it was for him to be here.
“Perhaps this time you can concentrate more on the cultivation of inner peace, and less on external stimulation,” she said when she had his full attention, her tone dry enough to make a desert weep.
Pascal would not have taken that tone from anyone else, but this was Mother Superior. And Pascal might not consider himself one of the faithful, but he was an Italian man, and therefore entirely too Catholic by definition to fight with a nun. No matter what she did.
Something he was certain Mother Superior knew well.
Once she left him to his uneasy memories, Pascal found himself with nothing to do but sit on the edge of the narrow bed where he’d wasted far too much time already. Most of it fighting pain and wondering if he would ever stand and walk out of this place of his own volition and on his own two feet.
And, he could admit, with a few very brief moments of joy.
All involving Cecilia.
He didn’t know what impulse it had been that got him in his car and brought him here. He’d been haunted by her across the years, it was true. But he’d wanted to put that ghost to rest. He never imagined for a moment that she’d been keeping this kind of secret from him.
And it was easier to bluster on about what he wanted and what he planned to do when she was standing there in front of him.
The simple truth was that he had a son. He, Pascal Furlani, had ason.
He couldn’t quite grasp the wonder of that. And the devastation, so quick on its heels. One chased the other, and he found himself thinking not of the little boy in the center of it, but of himself as a little boy. He had been in the center of a similar storm. And he’d found himself battered about, used as a pawn by his mother, then neglected when her machinations to force his father’s hand didn’t work.
He would never do that to his own child.
He vowed that to himself, here and now. Whatever happened, he would keep his feelings about what Cecilia had done in a separate compartment entirely. He would make sure that whatever the storms that raged between the two of them, the child would feel none of it. Cecilia claimed he was healthy and happy—well, now, he was healthy, happy and the sole heir to all Pascal had.
He lowered himself to prone position, and lay there, his hands folded on his chest and his eyes on the ceiling. A position he’d assumed in this very bed a thousand times before. He knew that ceiling better than he knew his own face. Every centimeter. Every faint crack or hint of discoloration. He knew how the light crept across the room on sunny days, and how the cold wind made the door rattle.
The abbey was nothing if not an excellent place for quiet contemplation of the impossible, like the existence ofhis son. Pascal stared at the ceiling and found himself wondering when he had last been somewhere that was this quiet. There were no sounds of traffic. There was no television blaring out the news. He knew there was a bell that rang out the sisters’ prayers, but it wasn’t ringing. And some days there were the sounds of the women who lived here, but today, the Mother Superior had told him pointedly, was a day of silence.
