The stove in the annex had been making that dry, rattling tick all afternoon, but I was too tired to get up and check the damper. My boots were caked in dry red mud from the church yard, and my head felt like it was packed with heavy gray wool. Father Thomas had found me sitting on the bottom step of the parish hall, staring at my hands like they belonged to someone else.
He didn’t ask me what was wrong. He just reached down, took my elbow with a grip that was dry and warm, and told me to come inside.
I didn’t think much of it then because the parish house had always been a safe place ever since my mother passed away. The hallway smelled faintly of beeswax and old paper, the same smell it had when I was eight years old and hiding behind the oak coat rack during choir practice. My steps felt heavy, dragging against the floorboards as if my shoes were full of lead shot. I remember thinking I needed to apologize for tracking mud onto his braided rug, but my tongue felt thick and wouldn’t cooperate.
He didn’t take me into the reception office where the parishioners usually sat. Instead, he led me down the narrow corridor toward his private quarters at the back of the building, where the floor slanted just a little bit toward the garden wall.
The air in that hallway felt different, thinner somehow, though my brain was moving too slowly to figure out why. He opened his heavy oak door and stood aside, his face unusually pale under the low hallway light.
“Step inside,” he said. His voice was too quiet, steady in that way that usually meant he was trying not to let you see he was worried.
I walked into the small room and stopped near the washstand. A single iron-framed bed sat against the far wall under a narrow window that looked out over the dry boxwood hedges. He didn’t wait for me to sit down. He walked over, picked up a heavy black Bible from the bedside table, and gently placed it right in the center of the quilt. Then he turned back to me, his dark eyes fixed on mine with an intensity that made the hair on my arms stand up.
“Lie down,” he said. His voice dropped an octave, tight and controlled. “And don’t be afraid.”
I just stared at him. The command was so out of character for him, so sharp and entirely without his usual gentle preamble, that my thoughts simply scattered. My knees were already shaking, the room starting to tilt sideways like a photograph sliding off a mantel. The bed looked miles away, but the floor looked even farther. Confused but trusting him out of sheer habit, I slowly lay down on the mattress, my palms automatically closing around the cold leather cover of the Bible and clutching it tightly against my chest.
A few moments later, he moved closer. The floorboards didn’t even creak under his shoes. His hands reached toward my throat, his fingers stretching out to touch my collar.
Terror hit me like a splash of freezing well water. The exhaustion vanished, replaced by a hot, blinding panic that made my chest heave.
I didn’t think about who he was or how many times he had sat with my family through the worst days of our lives. All I knew was that a man was leaning over me in a locked room.
“Father,” I cried out, my voice cracking into a raw scream. “What are you doing?!”
The sound of my own voice startled the silence of the room. I tried to roll away from him, kicking my legs against the quilt, but my limbs felt uncoordinated and weak, like I was moving through deep water. The Bible slipped an inch from my grip, the heavy pages bunching against my sweater.
Father Thomas didn’t flinch. He didn’t pull back or look defensive. He just smiled, a thin, tired twitch of the mouth, and looked straight down into my terrified eyes.
“Breathe through your nose,” he quietly replied. “You’ve been breathing bad air for three hours.”
Before I could ask what he meant, his fingers caught the top button of my heavy wool coat and snapped it open with a sharp click. He didn’t wait for my permission. He pulled the wool away from my throat, unwound the thick red scarf that was still wrapped twice around my neck, and tossed them both onto the floor.
“Look at the window,” he said, and his hands moved past me to shove the heavy wooden sash upward until it jammed against the frame with a wooden groan.
The cold night air hit my face instantly, smelling of damp earth and frost. It felt like someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over my head. My lungs seized for a second, rejecting the shock of it, and then I drew in a ragged, whistling breath that tasted clean and sharp. The gray fog behind my eyes didn’t vanish all at once, but it broke apart like smoke in a gale.
I lay there for a long moment, staring up at the water-stained plaster of the ceiling while the cold wind washed over my forehead. My heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird, but the heavy, dizzy pressure behind my temples was already starting to fade into a dull, throbbing ache.
“The stove,” I whispered, my voice sounding small and foolish even to my own ears. “In the annex.”
“The flue rusted through sometime last week,” Father Thomas said, his voice returning to its normal, steady pitch as he pulled a wooden chair over to the side of the bed and sat down. He looked exhausted, the skin around his eyes gray in the moonlight. “The draft was pulling the exhaust right back down into your kitchen instead of out the chimney. You’ve been sitting in it since sunset.”
I reached up with one shaking hand and touched my own throat, feeling the cool air against skin that had felt burning hot only a minute before. The memory of my scream hung in the quiet room between us, heavy and embarrassing. I had looked at the man who had buried my grandmother, the man who knew every secret my family had ever kept, and I had thought the worst.
“I thought…” I started, but my voice trailed off because I couldn’t finish the sentence without saying out loud what I had suspected.
“I know what you thought,” he said gently, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees. He reached out and tapped the corner of the black Bible where it still lay half-under my hip. “I needed you to hold onto something heavy so you wouldn’t pass out before I got the window open. And I needed your coat off so your chest could expand. I didn’t pick the gentlest way to do it, but you weren’t hearing half of what I said anyway.”
I looked down at the leather cover under my fingers. The gold lettering on the spine was worn smooth from forty years of his hands holding it during morning prayer. It hadn’t been a prop or a threat. It had been an anchor thrown to someone already drifting under the ice.
“How long were you standing there?” I asked.
“Long enough to notice the cherry-red flush in your cheeks when I saw you on the steps,” he answered simply. “People don’t get that color from a long day of work, not in this weather. They get it when their blood forgets how to carry oxygen.”
He didn’t make me get up right away. He just sat there in the dark room, letting the cold wind blow through until my breathing steadied and the room stopped spinning around the edges. Every time a shiver ran through my shoulders, he didn’t offer a blanket yet, just waited to make sure the fresh air was doing its work first.
When I finally sat up, the dizziness was gone, replaced by the shaky, hollow feeling you get after surviving something you never even saw coming. My coat and scarf lay in a heap by the door where he had dropped them, smelling faintly of coal smoke and old dust.
Father Thomas stood up and walked over to the washstand, pouring a small glass of water from the heavy earthenware pitcher. He handed it to me without a word, his fingers steady as I took it from him.
“We’ll call the utility company in the morning,” he said, looking out the open window toward the dark silhouette of the annex roof where the faulty pipe was slowly venting into the empty night. “For tonight, you’re staying in the spare room down the hall. And no, you aren’t going back over there to pack a bag.”
I took a small sip of the cold water, feeling it clear the last of the bitter taste from the back of my throat. The panic was gone now, replaced by a quiet, heavy realization of how close I had come to simply falling asleep in the kitchen chair and never waking up to turn off the light.
“Thank you, Father,” I said, my voice barely audible over the sound of the wind rattling the glass.
He gave a small, tired nod, turned back toward the window to make sure the latch was secure, and left the room without another word, closing the door softly behind him. I sat alone on the edge of the bed for a long time, listening to the cool night breeze sweep through the room, with the leather-bound Bible resting safely on the bedside table beside a warm cup of water.
