Kingsley wrinkled his nose. Sam had a vicious pinch.

“You have to know something about Søren,” Kingsley began. “He had a bad childhood.”

“Didn’t we all?”

“I didn’t,” Kingsley said. “I had a beautiful childhood. My parents were in love with each other, and they adored my sister and me. There is no better city than Paris to grow up in. The City of Light? The City of Love? Nothing bad happened to me. Until everything bad happened to me. My parents died, and I was sent to live with my grandparents in Maine. It was bad. I hated my school. I stayed sane by sleeping with as many girls as possible.”

“That’s my recipe for sanity, as well.”

Kingsley grinned. “My grandparents sent me to an all-boys school. No girls to seduce. And then I fell in love with a sadist who...”

“Who did what?” Sam asked.

Kingsley had almost said “put me in the infirmary” but decided to keep that part a secret. He wasn’t ashamed, wasn’t protecting Søren. But that first night he and Søren had had sex, that night on the forest floor, had been the most important night of his life. He’d been having sex since age twelve, but in his mind, his heart, that was the night he had lost his virginity.

“A sadist who was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. Love at first sight. Or lust. Hard to tell the difference when you’re sixteen. Hard to tell the difference when you’re twenty-eight.”

“I have that problem, too.”

“Søren and I had sex one time the first semester I was there,” Kingsley said, summing up the most meaningful night of his life in a few words. “And then I went home for the summer. When I came back for the fall semester, he’d graduated and was teaching. We started sleeping together then. For the first month of school, it was once a week maybe. Then two, three, four times a week. We couldn’t get enough of each other. I’d wait until the students in my dorm were asleep, then I’d sneak out and run for it. He’d already be there in the hermitage waiting for me. We had to sneak around all the time. Exhausting but worth it. We had to sneak around even more after my sister, Marie-Laure, came to visit.”

“What did you do?”

“Got off campus one day. Søren had gotten a letter from his sister, Elizabeth, and he needed to take care of some family business. He asked Marie-Laure to take over his French classes that Friday so he could deal with it.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“When the teenaged sadist in the family is the relative you turn to for help, you know there’s a problem.”

Sam winced. “Sounds like it. What was the problem?”

“Elizabeth learned their father had gotten remarried, and his second wife had another daughter. She asked Søren to warn the new wife what kind of monster she’d married.”

“Dad was bad?”

“Søren had the father of all bad fathers,” Kingsley said. A joke, yes, but neither of them laughed at it. “Since my sister was substituting for him that day, I skipped class and went with him. I couldn’t believe he’d let me skip, but we’d had so little time together since she showed up. He said yes.”

“Where did you all go?”

“New Hampshire, to his father’s house.”

“How did you get there?”

Kingsley grinned. Grinned hugely. Grinned ear to shit-eating-grin ear.

“His father had money. Lots of it. I didn’t even believe he had so much money until that trip. Elizabeth sent a car for him to take him to his father’s house. But not just any car.”

“Oh, God, don’t tell me,” Sam said. “I see where this is going.”

“It was a Rolls Royce.”

27

KINGSLEY DIDN’T LIE, but he told enough half truths to Marie-Laure to constitute a lie. He’s meeting his father’s new wife. Needs to talk to her about a family situation. She’s never met him before, might not believe he is who he says he is. He asked me to go with him to vouch for his identity. You’ll be fine without us for one day, won’t you? Oh, yes, she said. Bien sûr. Go with him. Anything for him, she said, already obsessed with Søren only a week after meeting him.

Kingsley barely slept the night before. He’d fought the temptation all night to go to Søren’s tiny apartment in the priests’ quarters. But that would have been pushing his luck. He still couldn’t believe Søren had agreed to take him along on this trip. Trip? More like a mission, from the way Søren explained it. I have to go to my father’s house. He’s finally out of state on a trip. This is my chance to meet his new wife and talk to her without him anywhere near. I have to get his wife and my sister away from him. I need her to believe me.

“I promise I’ll vouch for your sanity and good character,” Kingsley said.

“Thank you,” Søren said.

“Even if I have to lie.”

The insult had earned him a quick hard slap to the back of the head.

At 4:37 a.m., Kingsley left the dorms with his bag over his shoulder and waited in the chapel. Everyone was still asleep, even the priests. He cracked open the front door and watched. Ten minutes later a streak of silver glinted into view, and even in the moonlit morning darkness, he could see Søren’s blond hair as he walked from his building to the car. Kingsley walked out then, too, and got into the car as if it were the most natural thing in the world and no one could or should question why he did it.