would die before anyone realized how worthless I knew myself to be.
“But then Lev Warren Saw me.”
She closes her eyes.
“And I realized how starved my soul was and how desperate it was to believe in something greater than myself—and to be believed in. I can’t talk you through what you’re about to experience. No words could do it justice. Lev Warren witnessed me through God’s eyes and I was no longer afraid, I was no longer hurting and I no longer felt alone. I walked the path of Warren’s Theory and I am redeemed. My life has purpose. I live with hope. I am complete. The Unity Project now offers that same opportunity to you. Faith without works is dead. Our faith is vibrant and alive.”
She opens her eyes and her gaze shifts just slightly past us.
“Let him show you,” she says.
A hushed, heavy awe settles over the room and then someone starts to wail—a keening sound above all else. What happens next is chaos; people fold themselves around him, hoping to be witnessed. I don’t even glimpse Lev before he disappears into their collective faith. I can only track his progress by the rippling of bodies as he makes his way slowly toward the front. As soon as he’s close enough for me to parse, a hand grips my arm, pulling me violently from my seat. I instinctively reach for Dana but her back is to me; I call her name but she doesn’t hear. Lev’s devotees pay no mind to the girl struggling to break free of this punishing grip and I have this thought that if I died right here, right now, no one would notice.
It’s Foster. He guides me roughly down the outside row until we’re through the tent’s opening and back outside, where the cold air shocks my skin and burns the inside of my lungs, waking me up to just how sick with its own revelry it was in there.
“Get your fucking hands off me—”
He says nothing and he doesn’t take his hands off me until we’re far enough away from the tent. By then I’m ready to tear his throat out with my teeth.
“Fuck you. Don’t ever touch me—”
Stop. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I’ve been a feral and tearstained girl in The Unity Project’s presence before. I will not be her today.
“Lo.”
I open my eyes, quickly passing my hand over my face.
Casey.
Foster moves aside, and there she is. I’m such an emergency, she didn’t even have time to grab a coat. She doesn’t look cold. She looks like a painting. The wind pushes her hair away from her face and if the sun was just so and the sky was clear, the light would halo her head and make everything about this moment even more of an insult.
“I want to see Bea.” It’s pointless to say anything else.
“Does she want to see you?”
“Bring her out here and let’s ask.”
Casey doesn’t say anything.
“Bring her out here.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Then point me in her direction.”
When Bea stopped talking to me and wouldn’t take my calls, Casey was left to deal with my aftermath. I never made it easy on her and I’m not sorry that I didn’t. I was beset with a kind of fevered persistence it’s hard for me to imagine being led by now. It was a pure, raw fire. The calls, the emails, a final, painful confrontation that should have only been between me and my sister but left me begging for my family to a proxy instead …
“Foster.” Casey turns to him. “Lo is leaving. Can you get her phone?”
He nods and heads to the house. Casey’s eyes slowly travel up and down my body, and I hate the way it feels. She can be unsettlingly parental at times; nails the classic Mom ’n’ Dad mix of patient disappointment I barely got a taste of before my own mother and father died.
I raise my hands, as if in surrender.
“Look, I’m not here to make trouble.”
“Oh, really?” she asks. “Is that why you’re telling your boss to poke around, exploit our grief, our pain, our loss?”
My heart stops.
“You keeping tabs on me, Casey?”
Or is Bea.
“I have to say, despite all I know of you, Lo, I never imagined you’d be capable of something so ugly and so cruel—sensationalizing Jeremy’s death to get Paul Tindale sniffing around here, hoping to sell a few more subscriptions to his failing magazine—”