present; she’d accompanied Aidan on an extended mission to Africa.
“It was just delivered. Addressed to you.”
Flustered, Hannah turned her back to the other woman and pretended to look for a card, knowing there wouldn’t be one. When she touched one of the petals with her forefinger, it felt soft and vibrantly alive, like skin.
“You didn’t tell us you had an admirer,” Mrs. Bunten said in a coy, chiding tone.
“It’s from my father,” Hannah lied. “He always sends me an orchid on my birthday.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Bunten, disappointed. “Well, happy birthday, dear. I’m sure you’ll meet someone soon, as pretty as you are.”
Hannah couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the day. What did it mean, that Aidan had sent her this extravagant, sensual thing? For of course it had come from him; the absence of a card was the proof. Was he surrendering to his feelings at last? Should she? What would happen next?
She had three excruciating weeks to ponder the answers. It was the longest she’d gone without seeing him, and she was edgy and distracted. She comforted—and tormented—herself by watching vids of his preaching, often joined by her parents. At first she was nervous, afraid her face would give her away, but finally she realized that her expression mirrored theirs and those of every member of his audiences. The world loved Aidan Dale.
HE RETURNED ON a Friday, which was one of Hannah’s days off, and then there was the weekend to get through. She went to church with her parents on Sunday as always. Aidan’s sermon was unusually fervent that day, rousing the congregation to a near frenzy of exaltation. He concluded quietly, with a passage from 1 John: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” Though she was sitting too far back for him to see her, Hannah was sure he was speaking to her.
Monday, she wore her dark green dress, the one that always made her mother’s brow crinkle because of the way its plain lines accentuated her figure. She spent the day in a state of twitchy anticipation and even stayed an extra half hour, but he didn’t appear. She left feeling despondent and confused. He’d never uttered an inappropriate word to her. Never gone out of his way to be alone with her, never touched her. Had she imagined it all then?
The next morning she got a call from the church office: one of the volunteer chaperones for the True Love Waits jamboree in San Antonio this weekend had had to cancel due to a family emergency. Could Hannah take her place?
“Of course,” she replied. She knew Aidan was attending; Mrs. Bunten had mentioned it yesterday. Had he suggested Hannah?
She spent a fretful week waiting, oscillating between certainties: he had, he hadn’t, he had, he hadn’t. Aidan himself was away again, overseeing the opening of a new shelter in Beaumont. Hannah could do nothing but wait: for Friday to arrive at last, for the caravan to reach San Antonio, for her teenaged charges to be checked into the hotel, welcome packets to be handed out, mixups and dramas—“I was supposed to be in Emily’s room!”—to be sorted, the opening-night fellowship supper to be over. Aidan was supposed to be presiding, but there’d been thunderstorms in East Texas, and his flight had been delayed. The groans of disappointment this news elicited from the twenty-five hundred teens in the room drowned out Hannah’s own small sound of frustration.
After supper she paced in her room, waiting for the vid to ring or not, combing over what few facts she had. Fact: the church office had hundreds of volunteers to draw from, but they’d called her, Hannah, just as they’d called her for the interview. Fact: Aidan was coming alone. Alyssa was away for a week, visiting her parents in Houston. Fact: the other volunteers were sleeping two to a room, but Hannah had one to herself. Could it be mere coincidence, that she was the odd woman out?
She was half expecting, half despairing of a call, so when she heard the knock just after eleven, it startled her. It came not from the door to the hallway, but from the one to the adjoining room: three soft raps. Hannah’s heart leapt, but she didn’t hurry. She proceeded to the door at the stately, measured pace of a bride walking down the aisle.
She took a deep breath, undid the latch and opened the door. Neither of them moved or spoke at first. They just looked at each other, absorbing the fact that they were here, together, alone.
Aidan’s fine-boned face was etched with sorrow and longing. Hannah studied it, seeing for the first time that his features, while attractive, were unexceptional, and that what made it so arresting were the contradictions it held: boyishness and sensuality, self-assurance and humility, faith and apprehension, as if of some terrible blow yet to be struck which he alone could foresee.
“I’m not the man you think I am,” he said. “I’m a sinner. Weak, faithless.”
“You’re the man I want,” Hannah said. She felt oddly calm now that the moment was here, happening outside of her head. She had no misgivings, just a sense of absolute rightness that she knew could have come only from God.
“I’m the worst sort of hypocrite.”
“No, not in this,” Hannah said. “This is honest. This is right. Don’t you feel it?”
“Yes, I feel it,” he said, “like I’ve never felt anything in my life. But your honor, Hannah. Your soul.”
She took his hand and brought it to her chest, laying it over her heart, then put her hand over his heart, which was beating in wild contrapuntal percussion to the hard steady cadence of her own. She waited, and finally he pulled her to him and kissed her.
He kept his eyes closed that first time, even when she cried out from the pain of it. At the sound, he grimaced as though he were the one being hurt. She hadn’t told him she was a virgin, not out of any desire to hide the fact, but simply because it seemed self-evident. It was for him that she had waited.
“It’s all right,” she whispered.
He shook his head. “No, it’s not.” His hips moved faster. His body shuddered. And then he cried out himself, but not in pain.
Now, Hannah closed her own eyes and let herself imagine how it would be to see him again. To lie with her head cradled in the hollow of his shoulder while he stroked her hair and spoke of random things—a dream he’d had the night before, a sermon he was struggling with, an idea he hadn’t shared with anyone else. But the fantasy stuttered and halted, just as their conversations all too often had when one of them inadvertently said the wrong word, puncturing the fragile membrane that sheltered them from the outside world. “Home” conjured Alyssa in the bed between them. “Church” raised the specter of discovery and scandal. “Tomorrow” or “next week” led to thoughts of a future together that they could never have.
For there was no question of Aidan’s leaving his wife. He’d told Hannah so bluntly that first night, as he was getting dressed. “I can never offer you more than this,” he said, waving his hand to encompass the rumpled bed, the generic room. “I love you, but I can never leave Alyssa. I can’t bring that kind of shame on her. Do you understand? You and I will never be able to love each other openly.”
“I understand.”
“You deserve that, with someone,” he said. “A husband, a family.”
Lying in the damp bed with his scent on her skin and her body aching from their lovemaking, she couldn’t imagine being with another man. Even the thought of it was repugnant.
“I don’t want anyone else,” she told him.
SUNLIGHT BOUNCING OFF concrete, glinting on razor wire and steel, bathing her face in warmth. Cool wind buffeting her skin and stirring her hair, vivid blue of sky piercing her eyes. Sounds of cars whizzing past, a snatch of song from a radio, the tweeting of birds, the chirping of locusts, the crunch of two pairs of feet on gravel.