Most of the cabin slept. The lights had been dimmed to the particular dull amber airlines use to suggest nighttime to bodies that no longer had any reliable sense of what time zone their exhaustion belonged to, and somewhere behind them a child cried briefly, was soothed, went quiet again. Abigail sat with her notebook open on the tray table, unread for the last twenty minutes. Beside her, Father Ferrara sat with a breviary closed in his lap, his thumb resting against the cover without opening it, the posture of a man keeping something within reach rather than actually using it.
"You're not Catholic," he said. Not quite a question.
"Baptist." She glanced at him. "Does that matter?"
He considered the question with more care than she'd expected, the way he seemed to consider most things — turning it over fully before he'd let himself answer it.
"Only that what we're walking into is deeply specific to Catholic theology," he said. "The rites. The authority behind them."
"And if something doesn't recognize that authority?"
He was quiet for a moment. Looked forward, out past her, at nothing the dark cabin actually offered to look at.
"That's not something our framework accounts for."
"That's why I'm on this plane, I guess."
A beat. Something in his face shifted — not quite a smile, but the shape a smile might have taken if the last few weeks hadn't worn most of the humor out of him first.
"I worked a case in Naples," he said. "A young man. Twenty-two."
Naples, six years earlier.
The apartment sat above a shuttered bakery on a narrow street that smelled, even at two in the morning, of yeast and diesel exhaust and the particular salt-damp closeness of a city built too near water to ever fully dry out. Ferrara had been younger then — not young, exactly, but younger in the specific way a man is younger before the first case that actually changes the shape of what he believes he's capable of.
The young man's name had been Enzo. Ferrara did not let himself think the name often anymore, and yet it arrived now, unbidden, with the particular clarity of something that had never actually left, only waited.
Enzo's mother had found the rosary broken beneath his bed two days before she called the parish. She hadn't known what it meant, only that something about the scattered beads on the floor beside her son's shoes had frightened her more than anything he'd actually said or done. By the time Ferrara arrived, Enzo had not slept in four days. He sat in the corner of his small bedroom with his knees drawn to his chest, flinching at sounds no one else in the room could hear, whispering, in a voice that dropped register halfway through each sentence, words in a dialect his own grandmother would not have recognized.
The rite had taken eleven hours.
Ferrara remembered the specific quality of the silence that fell near the end of it — not an absence of sound but a kind of vacuum, as if the room itself had been holding its breath for eleven hours and only now, finally, let it out. Enzo's body had gone slack. His breathing had evened. When his eyes opened again, they were, for the first time in four days, entirely his own — soft, exhausted, human, blinking up at the ceiling like a man waking from a very long fever.
"He was calm afterward," Ferrara told the dark cabin now, his voice even, practiced, the voice of a story that had been told internally so many times it had worn smooth edges into itself. "Present. Himself."
Enzo had cried, in the days that followed. Had eaten a full meal for the first time in over a week, seated at his mother's table, making a small joke about the salt in her soup that made her laugh even through her tears. He had gone to Mass with her that Sunday, walked the whole way there under his own power, knelt and stood and knelt again in all the right places. Ferrara had watched him from three pews back and had allowed himself, for the length of that single Mass, to believe entirely in his own work.
Six days after the rite, Enzo's mother found him in the bathroom, the door locked from the inside, water running long after there was any reason for it to still be running.
He had left no note. There had been nothing, in the days between the rite and that morning, that anyone could point to afterward and call a warning — no relapse, no returning symptom, nothing the careful clinical language Ferrara had since learned to use, in Abigail's company, would have flagged as risk. Just a young man who had, by every visible measure, gotten better, and then, six days later, had not been able to go on living inside whatever getting better had actually cost him.
Ferrara had stood in that same church a week after the funeral, alone, long after the last Mass of the day had emptied out, and had asked the plain wooden ceiling above the altar a question he had never once, in the years since, managed to arrive at an answer for.
"I've told myself the rite worked," Ferrara said now, eyes fixed forward, not on Abigail. "That what happened after was human. Not — something I failed to stop." A beat, and something in the careful evenness of his voice finally cracked, just slightly, just enough to show what the evenness had been holding back the whole time. "I hold onto that because the alternative is harder to live with."
He turned. Met her eyes for the first time since he'd started the story.
Abigail didn't offer him anything easy. She had learned, over years of sitting across from people in far worse circumstances than a dim airplane cabin, that the worst thing you could do to a man carrying a story like that was rush to make it smaller than it was.
"I think I need to believe the work is worth doing," she said instead, quietly. "I just don't know yet if I'm equipped for this version of it."
"None of us are." Something almost like warmth moved through his exhaustion, brief and real. "That's never stopped the Church before."
Abigail exhaled — something between a laugh and a release, the first unguarded sound she'd made in days.
They sat together after that without speaking, two people awake while the rest of the cabin slept on around them, the plane cutting steadily through miles of black water toward a village neither of them yet understood, each privately turning over a version of the same unanswerable question: whether the thing waiting for them at the end of this flight would care, in the end, about the difference between a rite that worked and a rite that only looked, for six quiet days, like it had.