The inn's small lobby held the particular gray, under slept quality of a room that had watched its occupants fail to rest in it. Ferrara sat alone near the cold hearth, a Bible open across his knee, his eyes fixed on the page without any visible sign that the words were actually reaching him. He looked, Abigail thought, like a man holding onto something familiar mostly for the shape of the thing in his hands rather than for anything it currently offered him.
She came in without a greeting. There didn't seem to be one that fit anymore, not after last night, not after a voice that wasn't a voice had settled behind her eyes and told her, in words she would carry the rest of her life whether she wanted to or not, exactly what she'd done. She set a cup of coffee in front of him instead — the only comfort either of them seemed capable of offering the other this morning, and, she suspected, exactly enough.
Ferrara looked up.
"Did you sleep?"
"No."
"Neither did I." A beat, his thumb worrying the edge of the Bible's cover. "I kept thinking about what you said. That we taught it how to grow." He looked at her directly now, something raw underneath the careful priest's composure he usually wore. "Is that true? Or is that what it wants you to believe?"
Abigail sat across from him. She'd asked herself some version of that same question at least a dozen times since the square below her window had finally gone quiet, turning it over in the dark the way she used to turn over a genuinely difficult case file, except this time there was no version of the answer that let her set it down feeling clean.
"I don't know." She met his eyes. "And not knowing might be the most dangerous thing right now."
He nodded slowly, as though her uncertainty confirmed something he'd already privately concluded and had been hoping, against his better judgment, that she'd talk him out of.
"There's something I should tell you," he said, carefully, the words arriving one at a time, each one weighed before it left him. "About Bishop Graves."
"What about him?"
"He'd been spending time in the restricted archive. Before you arrived." He chose his next words with visible effort, a man picking his way across ground he wasn't sure would hold him. "I don't know how much time, or what he found in there, but—" A pause. "He looked like he found something."
Abigail's mind went immediately, coldly, to the manuscript she hadn't yet seen and somehow already dreaded. "How long has he known about this place?"
Ferrara's voice dropped, quiet enough that she had to lean slightly to catch it. "I believe it to be longer than he told us."
The weight of that settled between them, taking up more space in the small lobby than either of them seemed prepared to make room for. Abigail thought of Graves' composed, unreadable face across that vast Vatican office, the careful way he'd handed her that folder of photographs, the specific stillness of a man who has learned, over decades in a position like his, exactly how much truth a room actually needs to hear.
"We can't handle this alone," Ferrara said, quiet, shaken in a way she hadn't yet heard from him, not even in Eleanor Whitby's living room, not even watching Daniel's restraint snap on its own.
Abigail looked up at him. She had already reached the same conclusion, somewhere in the sleepless hours before dawn, turning the shape of everything they now understood over and over until only one answer remained standing.
"Rome," she said.