Elle smiled. “I like dark.”

“Cop–teenage girl affair. Interesting,” Kyrie said, putting the pages back down.

“Just interesting?” Elle had been hoping for more of a reaction.

“Very interesting. And hot.”

“Kyrie.”

“What?”

“You’re a nun. You’re not allowed to find anything hot.”

“If I put my hand on a stove, I’m allowed to find it hot. This story is the fictional equivalent of putting your hand on a hot stove.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. Don’t tell me if it isn’t, okay?”

Kyrie’s eyes went wide and she whistled to herself. Kyrie could whistle? Cute.

“This is wow,” Kyrie said.

“Wow? I can live with wow.” Elle tried to hold back her smile.

“Really wow. I love it. I have never loved a story as much as I love this story. I want to read it again. And I want to read more of it. I want it to be one thousand and ninety-five pages long so I can read one page a day for three straight years. Wait. Leap year. Better make it one thousand and ninety-six pages long.”

“I think you’re exaggerating.”

“I’m not exaggerating,” Kyrie said. “I love this story. You have to keep working on it. Please?”

“Sure, why not?” Elle said. “Nothing else to do around here. Except laundry.”

“You could come to Mass.”

“I could. I won’t. But I could.”

“Your mom is a nun. You’re obviously Catholic. Why do I never see you at Mass?”

“I’ve gone to Mass enough for a lifetime.”

“Are we getting into an area you don’t want to talk about again?”

“Very much so,” Elle said. “I’d rather talk about why you’re still a virgin at twenty-one.”

“Is it that surprising?”

“No girls even?”

“Elle,” Kyrie said as she hopped off the counter, “I’ve never even been kissed.”

“You have got to be kidding me.” Elle stared blankly at her, the towel in her hand forgotten.

“I’m not counting the kisses you get in elementary school from boys who grab you from behind.”

“No, those definitely don’t count. Nothing before puberty counts.”

“Well, what can I say? I come from a very Catholic family. I have three brothers and two sisters and the most conservative parents ever. And the day I realized I liked girls and only girls was the same day I realized I wanted to be a nun.”

“How old were you?” Elle asked.

“Thirteen.”

“You knew you wanted to be a nun when you were thirteen?”

“Sister Mary Patrick came to my high school and gave a little talk on joining religious orders. I fell in love with her and the idea of being a nun all at once. I think...”

Kyrie leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms. If Sister Mary Patrick had looked anything like Kyrie did now, like an angel all in white, no wonder Kyrie had fallen for her. “I think they became the same thing to me. The idea of love and the idea of joining a convent. They were one and the same, two strands of the same cord. If I wanted one I had to have the other.”

“How’s it working out for you so far?”

“So far...” Kyrie smiled. “So far the past month has been the happiest month of my life.”

“Honeymoon phase,” Elle said. “It’ll pass.”

“You think so?”

“I’ve been here long enough to see three novices go from ‘This is Heaven on earth’ to ‘Get me the fuck out of here’ already.”

“But they didn’t leave?”

“One did. Two are still here. She’s better now. At least she stopped having panic attacks during Vespers. Sister Aquinas calls it progress.”

“Your mom seems to love it here.”

“She does. But Mom’s wanted to be a nun since she was—I don’t know. Forever, she says.”

“What took her so long to join?”

“Me,” Elle said with a shrug. She placed her folded towels into the basket and started on a new stack.

“She got pregnant with you?”

“When she was seventeen. Then she got divorced and of course you can’t join a religious order if you’re divorced and you have a kid. But then my father was killed and that meant she was technically a widow. She went back to college, got her degree and joined here a couple of years ago.”

“Good for her.”

“Yeah, I guess it is. I didn’t see that at the time. I’m starting to see it now.”

“You can see a change in her?”

“In Mom? Definitely. She used to be really angry,” Elle said. “Angry at herself, but she took it out on me a lot. Not physically. She wasn’t abusive or anything. Just...sad. Really sad and I made her even sadder.” The memories of a hundred mother-daughter fights flashed through her mind in an instant. “She wasn’t who she thought she should be. And now she finally is.”

“It’s a terrible thing to not be who God called you to be. I think that’s the cause for most of the suffering in all the world,” Kyrie said. “People trying to be who they aren’t supposed to be or not getting to be who they should be.”

“Maybe. But what do you do when you don’t know what you’re supposed to be?”