Page 56 of On Your Knees

My jaw clenches. I’ve never told Patrick that. I’ve never told him much of anything.

I’ve been physically vulnerable with him, and I know he’s seen my emotions. He’s seen me at my lowest. But whatever he thinks took me there, it’s a guess, and it couldn’t possibly be the truth.

No one knows the truth, not the full truth anyway. No one but me and Ruby.

It’s probably not fair that I hate her more than Paul, but I do. I absolutely fucking do. But then Paul is… not someone that I know how to think about.

So I blink him away. I blink it all away.

And when Patrick pulls up in front of the High Castle Church, which looks like any other grand event space in the city, complete with a gold and white awning, I get out without meeting his eyes. I button my suitcoat. I lock in my expression. And I walk through the open glass doors into a place I haven’t been in sixteen years.

God, it’s surreal. Like a dream. Like Hell in technicolor, masquerading as Heaven.

There’s a coffee shop in the atrium. There’s a gift shop too. The employees are all young, attractive women, mostly blondes, with bright white smiles.

There’s flowing golden script on the walls with corrupted Bible verses. There’s a white marble bust of stern-faced Byron Castle, Paul’s father and founder of High Castle Church. He was dead before my adoption, but Paul used to make me watch old recordings of his sermons.

All of it is familiar but upgraded. Same structure with new colors and new faces. But one thing definitely wasn’t here before, and I’m drawn straight to the golden statue as though it has its own gravitational pull.

That’s where I am when Ruby finds me.

“A good likeness, isn’t it?” she inquires in her sweet, Sunday voice.

I don’t look at her. I just keep staring up at golden Paul, standing quiet and dignified, with one hand clasping a golden lectern and the other open toward the viewer, toward me, in a way that has my scalp prickling. His face, TV-handsome, somehow expresses both caring and condemnation.

I shiver and close my eyes and find myself in a cold, dark room. Here, he isn’t smiling and he isn’t golden. Usually, he’s behind me, unseen, but this time he’s beside me, curled up on his side, pale and limp and dead.

I open my eyes and find him golden again. And he was, once, in my eyes.

He loved me, I think, before I made him sin.

Ruby slips her hand through my arm at the elbow. I manage not to flinch. I manage, in fact, to smile.

A good thing too, because when we turn, there are cameras.

There are always cameras.

That’s why Ruby has her dark hair in its church updo with the piece coiled and pinned at her temple. It’s her signature, that and the pearls around her neck. She knows the value of appearances. She knows how much they can hide.

We walk into the theater. It really can’t be called a nave. It has stadium seating, and the multilevel stage is big enough for a game show. It has to be, to accommodate the choir and other musicians, the interview couches, and secondary speaking platforms behind the pulpit.

The High Castle Church started smaller, of course. Byron Castle was a fire-and-brimstone televangelist in the 80s, popular for his booming voice and chilling sermons. He died famously of a heart attack during one of his sermons, right there on live TV in the mid-90s.

Paul, taking over, had a different style, quieter, colder, and even more terrifying. He was compassionate and threatening. He knew your secrets. He knew your sin.

Despite his compelling presence, Paul might easily have run High Castle into the ground, diminished the fortune that his father had amassed. Paul wasn’t a businessman like Byron. Fortunately, though, Paul married one.

Ruby did all this. The stadium. The dynamic angles. The transition to the digital and streaming age. Even the infiltration of High Castle into community spaces, like at the charity dinner. She’s widened its net.

Ruby isn’t wrong that the doubling of the High Castle fortune was her doing. She’s not wrong that she should have gotten all of it. But Paul, with his blind spot for business, died without a will, and by state law, the fortune got split between us.

Of course, no one expected Paul to die at 48.

Ruby and I walk down the steps to the family section, front and center. Paul’s sister is here, and she gives me a tight smile. Her daughters are here too. Her son, though, will be preaching, along with Pastor John Clifford. No women speak in this church, at least not from the pulpit.

Ruby tries to get me to sit beside Paul’s sister, but I resist, forcing her to either make a scene or sit there herself. Of course, she takes the seat and leaves me on the aisle.

There’s a hum of voices around us, and the cameras move along the tracks in the ceilings, swiveling and zooming, capturing the energy of the audience. In the control room, the footage is being expertly spliced and captioned before streaming onto the internet.