There she was, a dove in her white feathers gliding across the dewy nighttime grass on her way back to the abbey.

“Kyrie!” Elle called out her name once more. In her voice Elle could hear desperation, anguish, sorrow, the sound of her own heart breaking. Kyrie paused in her steps but didn’t look back at her. Elle reached through the fence and waited, holding her breath, hoping against hope. “Come back,” she said, willing Kyrie to change her mind, to come back.

Kyrie started walking again and Elle’s legs gave out on her. She crumpled to her knees and rested her head against the iron bars. For the first time since coming here...for the first time in months...for the first time since she left home, Elle cried.

She wept deep, hard, copious tears that left her back shaking and her body trembling. All this time, Kyrie never planned on leaving with her. It had all been a ruse to get Elle to go back into the world where she belonged. That’s why Kyrie had begged for the kiss—her last kiss.

Elle grabbed her duffel bag and wrapped her arms around it. She was that desperate for something to hold. She cried for three reasons.

She cried because she was scared.

She cried because she was alone.

And she cried because...

“Søren,” she whispered into the cold dark night.

She missed him; she missed him so fucking much. She’d missed him from the second she walked away from him until this moment when she still missed him. She missed him and she loved him and she’d give anything right now for him to pull up on his Ducati and take her in his arms and drive her back to the city and put her in his bed and beat her and fuck her and forgive her for leaving him.

But she was alone. Søren wasn’t here. And even if he forgave her for leaving him, she couldn’t forgive him yet for what he’d said and what he’d done. If she went back to him it would be just as it was before. She would be his property and his possession. He would leave the priesthood and make her marry him. And that would be that. Her freedom would be gone, vanished. He would never let her top Kingsley again, or anyone for that matter. He’d made that abundantly clear.

Alone and with only five hundred dollars to her name, she had to make a decision. She couldn’t sit on her ass and cry all night. Although it was certainly tempting.

Once upon a time she’d been happy. Truly happy. Somehow she’d lost that somewhere along the way. Whenever she’d lost anything—her car keys, her driver’s license—Søren would take her by the shoulders and tell her to retrace her steps. Walk backward from now to the moment she last had it.

When was she last happy—truly happy—out in the world?

Elle walked backward in her mind, back past the fight she’d had with Søren, past the day at the doctor’s office, past the morning she’d woken up nauseous and had thrown up so hard both she and Kingsley had known immediately what had happened...

With her sleeve, Elle wiped her face and looked up at the moon and the stars. For so long she’d lived among city lights she’d forgotten that the moon wasn’t all there was in the night sky. And although a riot of stars danced across the heavens, it was the moon that drew her gaze. Kingsley had a conservatory on the roof of his Manhattan town house filled with tropical plants and rare flowers in a glass box the size of a large bedroom. She loved the scent of hothouse flowers in bloom and spent lots of time up there reading and watching the city go by her. She’d often wait for Søren there, staring out the glass walls onto Riverside Drive. She’d watch for Søren and smile when she heard his Ducati’s engine and saw him roll up in front of the house.

The last time she and Kingsley had had sex, it had been on the fainting couch in his conservatory. Earlier that night he’d beaten her brutally in his bedroom and fucked her raw. But a few hours later, they’d taken wine up to the conservatory and she’d ordered him to strip naked. With so many plants around them no one could see into the conservatory unless they looked in from the roof, which meant that maybe God was watching. She liked that idea. That night she’d doused King with scalding candle wax until he was so hard and turned on he begged her to fuck him. She straddled his hips, took him inside her. While he was in her and she on top of him, she’d looked up at the moon high overhead and had a moment of purest happiness. Søren would be home soon, she remembered thinking. And until then she had Kingsley to keep her company. Søren never left her alone when he was gone. He was always with her in one way or another.

Elle wanted that again, that happiness she’d lost along the way. And the last place she’d had it was in Manhattan with Kingsley in his town house.

Maybe it was still there.

Slowly she got to her feet and shouldered her bag. She brushed the dirt off the ass of her pants and headed toward the road. It took two hours to reach the city of Guilford. She didn’t bother getting a hotel room. She found the one bus station in the city and sat in the lobby waiting for the first worker to arrive. While she waited for someone to show up, Elle pulled out her book and stared at it. The pages were crinkled and bent, thick with ink. The Virgin. She wasn’t sure about the title anymore. Daphne was only a virgin for about the first fifty pages. And being a virgin was a negative state. Nothing to brag about. Those years Elle had been a virgin, the lack of sex she was having was the least interesting thing about her. Who was Daphne really? Daphne was a runner. That’s who she was. She ran track and cross-country, she ran when John chased her, and at the end she ran again, she ran away. The Runner didn’t sound very romantic. Maybe something else...maybe...