The village church sat at the top of a gentle rise, its spire visible from nearly every lane in Pluckley, the way a lighthouse is visible from anywhere along a coast whether or not anyone happens to need it in that particular moment. Abigail stood in its courtyard while Ferrara and Aldric spoke quietly a few steps away — logistics, she assumed, the practical architecture of whatever came next, though she'd stopped listening closely enough to be certain.
Her attention had gone elsewhere.
A young mother knelt at a small stone shrine along the courtyard's edge — a weathered statue of Mary, her painted robe faded almost entirely to gray, one hand raised in a gesture that had likely once been a blessing and had, over however many decades of English weather, softened into something closer to a wave. The mother knelt beside a girl of perhaps five, guiding the child's small hands together, palm to palm, patient in the specific unhurried way of someone who had done this exact thing many times before and expected to do it many more.
The girl closed her eyes. Her lips moved — a whisper Abigail couldn't hear and didn't need to, because she recognized the shape of it instantly, the cadence every child raised inside any faith eventually learns before they've fully understood a single word of what they're saying.
Abigail watched. Not with judgment. Not even, she realized, with the clinical remove she usually brought to watching people — the careful cataloguing of micro-expression and posture that had become, over years of practice, closer to a reflex than a choice. She simply watched, the way you watch something you recognize but can no longer quite reach.
The girl finished. Touched the statue's worn stone hand. Smiled — a small, complete, entirely unburdened smile, the kind that only existed, Abigail thought, in people who had never once had reason to ask whether the thing they were praying to was actually listening.
Abigail tried to look away.
She couldn't.
Her fingers twitched at her side — a small, involuntary motion, her hand wanting, for half a second, to fold itself the same way the girl's had. She didn't let it. She kept her hands still, deliberately, the way you keep still around something you're afraid might notice you if you move.
She thought, unbidden, of a church in Birmingham with gold light coming through plain glass, of a wooden cross she had stared at every Sunday of her adult life without once arriving at the kind of certainty that little girl had just demonstrated in under a minute. She thought of her own small hands, folded exactly like that, at exactly that age, in a pew beside a mother who believed with the whole of herself and had never once seemed to find it difficult.
She could not remember the last time her own faith had felt like anything other than work.
There had been a time — she was almost sure of this, though the memory had gone soft and hard to fully trust, the way early memories always did — when it hadn't required effort at all. When prayer had simply been a thing she did, the way breathing was a thing she did, without the constant low hum of analysis underneath it. She did not know, precisely, when that had stopped being true. There had been no single loss she could point to, no crisis of faith dramatic enough to explain itself. Only a slow accumulation, case study after case study, pattern after pattern that almost resolved into something explainable and then, at the last possible moment, didn't — until belief itself had quietly become just another dataset she couldn't stop turning over in her hands, looking for the flaw in it.
She envied that little girl with a fierceness that startled her.
Not envy, exactly. Grief. There was, she thought, a very specific kind of grief reserved for watching someone else hold effortlessly onto something you'd once held the exact same way, before you'd let your own hands get too busy holding everything else.
"Everything alright?"
Ferrara had turned. Was watching her now instead of Aldric, his expression carrying the particular attentiveness of a man whose entire vocation was noticing exactly this kind of small, private unraveling in other people.
Abigail nodded. Too quickly, she realized, half a second after she'd already done it.
"Yeah." She kept her voice light, practiced, the voice she used for closing a subject rather than opening one. "Just — taking it in."
Ferrara studied her a beat longer than she'd expected him to, the silence stretching just slightly past the point where an ordinary conversation would have moved on. She had the distinct impression, in that beat, of being read the way she usually did the reading — assessed, weighed, some private conclusion quietly reached and just as quietly set aside for later.
He didn't push.
She looked back at the mother and daughter. The mother had risen now, brushing dust from her knees, taking the girl's hand to lead her back toward the lane, the whole exchange already folding itself into the ordinary texture of an ordinary morning — nothing remarkable to either of them, nothing they'd remember by dinner. The ease of it. The peace of it. A faith so uncomplicated it didn't require a single circled word in a notebook, didn't need to be timed against a stopwatch or run through a framework before it could be trusted.
Something in Abigail's chest tightened.
Not doubt. She had plenty of that already, had been carrying it long enough that it no longer announced itself the way genuine doubt was supposed to. Not fear, either, though there was certainly enough of that available to her too, if she went looking for it, in this village, on this particular morning.
Grief. That was the only honest word for it. The specific, quiet grief of standing close enough to something you used to have that you could still remember exactly what it felt like to hold it — and far enough from it now that you weren't at all sure your hands still remembered the shape.
She stood there a while longer after the mother and daughter had gone, the courtyard settling back into its ordinary morning quiet, Ferrara and Aldric's low conversation continuing a few feet away without her, and let herself feel the whole of it for exactly as long as she could afford to before she'd need to fold it away again and become, once more, the version of herself this village actually required.
Then she did.
She turned from the shrine, arranged her expression back into something closer to the composed clinician who'd flown across an ocean to make sense of the unexplainable, and walked back toward the two men waiting for her — carrying the grief with her anyway, the way you carry anything you've decided, for now, not to set down.