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knew her, and even I knew that she was the kind of woman who couldn’t live without meaning, powerful and real meaning, in her life. And she wouldn’t have found it on the other side of that Dartmouth stage.
    “I was heartbroken over Sterling, yes,” she continued, still examining her hands, “but I was also heartbroken over my life…and it hadn’t even happened yet. I took the fake diploma they give you before they send you the real one, walked off that stage and then right off campus, not staying for the requisite hat-throwing or the pictures or the too-expensive dinner that my parents would insist on. And then I went to my apartment, left a definitive voicemail on my father’s phone, stuffed my things into my car and left. There would be no more internships for me. No more $10,000-a-plate fundraisers. No more dates with men who weren’t Sterling. I left that life behind—along with all of Daddy’s credit cards. I refused to touch my trust fund. I would stand on my own two feet or not at all.”
    “That was brave,” I murmured. Who was this Sterling she kept mentioning? An ex-boyfriend? A former lover? He had to have been an idiot to let Poppy go, at any rate.
    “Brave or foolish,” she laughed. “I threw away a lifetime of education—expensive education. I assume my parents were devastated.”
    “You assume?”
    She sighed. “I never spoke to them directly after I left. I still haven’t. It’s been three years, and I know they’d be furious…”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “You wouldn’t understand,” she said, her words chastising but her tone friendly. “You’re a priest , for crying out loud. I bet your parents were ecstatic when you told them.”
    I looked down at my feet. “Actually, my mom cried when I told her, and my father didn’t speak to me for six months. They didn’t even come to my ordination.” It was not a memory I liked reliving.
    When I looked up at her, her red lips were pressed in a line. “That’s awful. It sounds like something my parents would do.”
    “My sister…” I stopped and cleared my throat. I’d talked about Lizzy countless times in homilies, in small groups, in counseling sessions. But somehow, explaining her death to Poppy was more intimate, more personal. “She was molested by our parish priest for years. We never knew, never suspected…”
    Poppy put a hand over mine. The irony of her comforting me was keenly palpable, but at the same time, it felt nice. It felt good. There had been no one to comfort me when it had happened; we’d all been in our separate worlds of pain. There had been no one to just listen , like it mattered how I felt about it. Like it mattered that I still felt about it.
    “She killed herself when she was nineteen,” I went on, as if Poppy’s touch had triggered a response to share that couldn’t be stopped. “She left a note, with the names of other children he’d hurt. We were able to stop him, and he was put on trial and sentenced to ten years in prison.”
    I took a breath, pausing a moment, because it was impossible not to feel those twin dragons of rage and grief warring in my chest, heating my blood. I felt a fury so deep whenever I thought of that man that I honestly believed myself capable of murder, and no matter how many times I prayed for this hatred to be lifted from me, no matter how many times I forced myself to repeat I forgive you I forgive you as I pictured his face, it never truly went away, this anger. This pain.
    Finally mastering myself again, I went on. “The other families in the parish—I don’t know if they didn’t want to believe it or were humiliated that they’d trusted him, but whatever it was, they were furious with us for calling for his arrest, furious with Lizzy for being the victim, for having the gall to leave a note outlining in sick detail what had happened and who else it was happening to. The deacons tried to block her having a Catholic funeral and burial, and even the new