The side of Richard’s face twisted into a grin when he saw my discomfort. “Or . . . we just find something to cut the chain.”
“I’ve seen bolt cutters in one of the garden sheds,” said Cormack, raising his eyebrows like a comedian telling a joke.
“Bolt cutters, hey?” Richard thumbed his goatee. “What are we waiting for?”
“I don’t think you should do this.” Louelle stepped in front of Richard. “I won’t be drinking. I’m not going back to my family with alcohol on my breath. Never again.”
“Well, the demon alcohol is not my vice, Lou. And I demand a celebration. I’m not going to see any of you after this.” He softened his tone. “We won’t empty their cellar. Just a few bottles.”
He, Cormack and Yolanda hi-fived each other and stepped off in the direction of the sheds.
Louelle and I exchanged tense glances. It wasn’t just what they were planning to do that had me worried but the fact they wanted to do it at all. Had any of us even learned anything in our week here? Were any of us really changed? What if I went back home and started doing the same thing all over again?
Louelle tipped her head to the side, looking up at the sky again. “Something feels . . . off.”
“Off?” Hop asked.
“You don’t feel it?” A frown drew her eyebrows together. “When I was a kid, Mama used to drag me and my brothers to church every Sunday. We all hated it. But it felt like people were trying, you know? Trying to be good, even if they weren’t. It felt warm and safe. But this place, it doesn’t have that feeling.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, wishing Louelle hadn’t spoken. I wanted to be encased in a winners’ bubble and on a high. But the victory already felt hollow in some way I couldn’t put a name to. I glanced upward sharply at the bulkhead that stretched across the garden. Was anyone watching us from there right now?
“It’s fine,” I said sharply. “It’s just that the challenges have shaken us. Maybe we should stick with the others.” I started walking, wanting to shake my sudden unease. “Let’s go. Hop, are you with us?”
“Guess I am.” He managed half a grin, but the apprehensive expression in his eyes contradicted it.
We met the other three as they returned with the bolt cutters and headed into the monastery together.
“Changed your mind, eh?” said Cormack.
“No, just keeping an eye on you lot,” I quipped.
“Hey,” Richard said in a stage whisper. “The mentors will have gone to bed, way down the other end of the monastery. They won’t hear us. We’ll just head down the stairs, grab a couple of bottles of red, race back up again.”
Like a bunch of petty thieves, everyone’s shoulders seemed to hunch a little as we made our way along the hallway.
The monastery interior was as silent as a tomb, as alien to me as on the night I arrived.
Pressure bore in on me from all sides, the hexagons bearing against each other. Was Brother Sage right? Was everything scripted, predicted by numbers? I could almost sense all the working parts of the monastery. The metronomes ticking away in synch. The garden stream running in an endless circle. The centre of the monastery and the tiny burning flame. The smallest, most inconsequential thing loomed large in your mind here, everything examined in isolation, under a microscope, from six different angles.
Love could be destroyed by numbers.
Minutes: the time it took for the blood clot to trigger the minor stroke that would momentarily take a driver’s vision away and cause him to crash the car.
Seconds: the amount of time it took for Ben to go from alive and laughing to dead.
One second: the time in which it could take Gray to say to me, I don’t love you anymore.
57. Gray
WE ARRIVED ON SIKINOS IN THE middle of a rainstorm. The island where we hoped to find Jennifer. White, block-shaped houses were set into bare hills. The air was steaming hot.
The Vasilious hadn’t told us Jennifer’s address, but they’d seemed resigned to the fact that things had been set in motion and that we needed to talk with her. But they hadn’t wanted to be complicit in just handing her over to us.
We’d found out her full name easily enough—Jennifer Bloom. A simple internet search for her paintings was enough to tell us her name and that she lived on the Greek island of Sikinos. Constance and I had studied Google maps of the island, locating the exact bay that Jennifer painted so much. It’d taken eight long hours by boat to get here.