Chapter 88 The Empty Church

• The night air had a different edge when I returned to the church. As if the entire city knew I shouldn’t be walking alone, that Dante was about to break in two, that Simon had only hours left, that my mother was breathing somewhere on the map with the cruel certainty that sooner or later she would reach me. Everything was too much, too simultaneous, too human.
• And yet, there I was: returning to the place where Ivy and I had left a war suspended.
• The church stood at the end of a narrow street, lit only by weak street lamps casting elongated shadows across the walls. The same dark wooden door, the same silent façade, the same feeling of stepping into territory that didn’t belong to me. I pushed it with both hands; it creaked, a sound that spread through the empty nave like a prophetic whisper.