Sinner (Shelter Harbor #1)(93)

And then the whole thing comes back around — one big wheel of “too big to really think about.” But I guess that’s the point — belief, faith, a higher power? The point of the whole thing is that you don’t have to think at all.

You just have to feel it.

It’s faith and belief, and just knowing those things that brought my mother around to finally seeing through my father’s zealotry that day at the house. It’s not thinking, but just knowing, and finally feeling that the life she’d been cornered into was not her own that made her act.

Or maybe it’s just that her love for me finally outweighed the fear my father had put into her all those years.

Leonard did not go quietly into that good night. While Rowan was still at the airport looking for me, and before I went over to O’Donnell’s, he came to the Hammond house, a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other. He screamed scripture, called down the smiting hand of God, and demanded that his “traitorous wife” and “Babylonian whore of a daughter” come out, until Rowan’s father finally stepped outside and quietly filled him in on Massachusetts’s fairly strict policies on non-licensed gun possession.

He left soon after that, and neither my mother or I have heard from him since.

It’s been two years.

My mother was a wreck, for a long time, actually. There were times she went into panic mode, where she was convinced she’d made a horrible mistake and that she had to find a flight back to Georgia to beg my father’s forgiveness.

Slowly though, she’s stopped thinking that way.

She stayed in Shelter Harbor, and she splits her time now between an administrative position at Jacob’s Congregationalist church, and as a baker at Mrs. Wilshire’s shop downtown.

I’ve honestly never seen her happier.

She smiles now — truly smiles, and I think that alone is worth whatever crap she had to go through to finally get away from my father.

Leonard did go back to Christ Redeemer Township, and back to his precious Grace Church of Salvation and Divine Retribution. So did Chastity.

There’s a rumor I’ve heard through a very convoluted grapevine that they’re romantically attached now.

The Lord works in very mysterious ways.

In case it wasn’t ridiculously obvious, I also stayed in Shelter Harbor. I mean, it’d be strange if I hadn’t, seeing as my husband lives here, right?

Rowan and I were married nine months after the night it all shattered and then came back together, in a small ceremony on the beach with family and friends. Kyle took a ministries course online and performed the ceremony, with his father grinning over his shoulder.

No churches. That was actually my request.

But I don’t want that to suggest I somehow lost my faith or turned from religion, because that’s not the case. I think it’s just that I’d spent so long seeing the worst aspects of faith — the blind kind of faith.

The kind of faith that’s a penance rather than a celebration, and I guess that’s just not the sort of faith I choose to believe in anymore.

Jade took over the apartment above the bar, and Rowan and I moved into a small house near the beach, just outside town. I enrolled in a part-time graduate program in social work at the University of Massachusetts, and Rowan continues to steer the ever-divey, ever more and more popular O’Donnell’s on its steady course.

Gus continues to come to Thursday night trivia.

“Pass the garlic, won’t you, honey?”

I smile as I turn in the kitchen of the Hammond house, reaching for the minced garlic and passing it to Irene, who’s manning her stove like a captain at a ship.

We’re all here for Sunday dinner — Rowan, Kyle, Silas and Stella’s son Carter are setting the big wooden table outside in the backyard. Sierra, Ivy, and Vivian are gabbing about something or another out on the porch. I’m in the kitchen with my mother, Irene, Jacob, and Stella.

“Oh, did you want a glass, Eva?”

I look up and quickly smile and shake my head at Stella’s offer for wine. “Oh, no thanks. I’ll wait for dinner.”

I go back to slicing tomatoes before I stop and do my best to hide the grin as I glance up out the kitchen window at my husband outside — laughing as he hoists his nephew Carter up in the air.

I am waiting for dinner, but it’s not for wine.

…It’s so we can tell the whole family about the brand new little Hammond that’ll be arriving in a few months’ time.

We’re naming her Faith.

Irene announces dinner being ready, and the whole lot of us smile, laugh, and help as we all move out to the dinner table in the backyard. Wine is poured, food is passed, jokes are told, and announcements are made that bring the whole table to its feet in cheers, hugs, and congratulations.