Chapter 2: The Sidewalk Escape
The cold wind off the Atlantic hit us hard the moment the double doors locked shut, slicing straight through my thin wool jacket and making Lily shiver instantly inside her ivory dress. The courtyard of the St. Jude Parish chapel was designed for glamour, not comfort—vast sheets of smooth gray slate stretching out toward a wrought-iron security gate where a row of sleek black town cars idled with their exhaust puffing white into the afternoon air.
"Leo, my feet hurt," Lily whispered, her small fingers clutching the sleeve of my gray suit jacket so hard her knuckles turned white. Her white leather dress shoes, bought three sizes too big at a thrift store last autumn with cardboard wedged into the toes, were already scuffed and gray from the dusty marble floors inside.
"Keep moving, Lily. Just keep walking," I muttered, swallowing the bitter lump in my throat. I refused to let her see me cry, even though my own knees were trembling beneath my trousers.
We hurried down the wide stone steps, keeping our heads low as we skirted past the towering boxwood hedges that bordered the driveway. Behind us, muffled through the thick oak doors, the faint swell of organ music resumed, an obscene attempt to pretend nothing had happened, that the vulgar little ghosts from Julian Vance’s past hadn't just walked up the center aisle to demand their daily bread. But I knew better. The flashbulbs had gone off. Someone in that choir loft had captured every inch of our disgrace, and Evelyn Sterling’s father—a man who owned half the downtown commercial real estate and all the local newspapers—would spend the rest of the evening making sure those negatives never saw the light of day.
We reached the outer iron gate just as a security guard in a dark suit emerged from the side lodge, his boots crunching sharply on the gravel. He eyed us with an expression of cold, professional disgust, holding up a hand to warn us away from the entrance.
"Move along, kids. You got your show. Now get off church property before I call the county sheriff," the guard barked, his breath pluming in the chill air.
"We're waiting for our ride," I lied, my voice cracking with a defiance I didn't feel.
"Yeah? And I'm the Archbishop of Canterbury. Walk down the shoulder toward the highway, or I'll give you something real to cry about."
I grabbed Lily's hand and pulled her hard toward the gap in the hedge where a narrow service path led down the embankment toward the county road. We didn't look back. We scrambled down the steep slope of damp mulch and wild ivy, slipping once and scraping my palms raw against the sharp shale beneath, until we hit the safety of the public sidewalk three blocks away from the church gates.
The wind died down slightly as we ducked into the recessed brick entryway of a shuttered florist's shop. The air smelled of old cardboard, dead chrysanthemums, and damp concrete. Lily sank down onto the cold metal grating of the shop's delivery chute, pulling her thin skirts around her knees.
"Are we going home, Leo?" she asked, her big brown eyes looking up at me with a heartbreaking, fragile trust.
"Yeah, Lil. We're going home," I said, reaching into the deep interior pocket of my suit jacket to pull out the folded packet of papers that had caused this whole catastrophe.
I smoothed the crisp white legal stationery against my knee. At the top, printed in stark, unfeeling black letters, was the letterhead of Vance & Associates Commercial Real Estate. Below it, handwritten in Julian’s familiar, hurried scrawl, was a note addressed to my mother: This covers the remainder of the agreed terms. Do not come to the office again. Attached to it was a past-due notice from the municipal water authority for four hundred and twelve dollars, dated three days ago, along with a pink slip of paper from the landlord threatening eviction by Friday.
Julian had spent the last three years playing the dashing, self-made philanthropist on the local evening news, donating wings to children's hospitals and cutting ribbons for downtown revitalization projects, while his own flesh and blood sat in a drafty, unheated two-bedroom walk-up six miles away, watching the pantry empty out can by can. My mother had spent her last week in the hospital trying to reach him through his secretaries, through his public relations firm, through every dead-end channel she could find, until her heart simply gave out under the strain of it all.
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"He's not going to help us, is he?" Lily asked softly, peering over my shoulder at the papers.
I folded the documents carefully and slid them back into my pocket, tightening my jaw until the muscles ached. "No," I said, my voice steadying into something cold and hard. "He's not. But he's going to listen to us whether he wants to or not."
