In the Age of Love and Chocolate (Birthright #3)(54)

More often than not, Mr. Delacroix came with me. Still, we did not speak much of business, which is what we had always spoken of before. Instead, we talked of our families: his son, his wife, my childhood, his childhood, my mother, my father, my siblings, my nana. He had been orphaned when he was young. His father, who had been in coffee, had killed himself when the Rimbaud laws went into effect. He was adopted when he was twelve by a wealthy family, fell in love with a girl at fifteen—his ex-wife, Win’s mother. He was heartbroken over the divorce and he loved his wife still, though he accepted that he was at fault and held out little hope that there would be a happy ending in his future.

“Was it the club?” I asked him. “Is that why you divorced?”

“No, Anya. It was much more than that. It was years of neglect and bad choices on my part. You have a thousand chances to make something right. That’s a heck of a lot of chances, by the way. But they do run out eventually.”

* * *

Mr. Delacroix encouraged me to venture from Yuji’s estate, even for an afternoon, but I was reluctant. I preferred hobbling around where no one could see me. “Some day you’ll have to leave here,” he said.

I tried not to think about that.

The second to last Sunday in April, Mr. Delacroix insisted we go out. “I have a reason you can’t argue with.”

“I doubt that,” I said. “I can argue with anything.”

“Have you forgotten what today is?”

Nothing came to mind.

“It’s Easter,” he said. “The day even lapsed Catholics like you and me manage to darken the church’s door. I see you are more lapsed than I thought.”

I was beyond lapsed. What I truly believed was that I was beyond redemption. Since the last time I’d gone to Mass with Scarlet and Felix, I’d killed a person. There was no point in believing in Heaven if you were certain the only place you could end up was Hell. “Mr. Delacroix, you can’t have found a Catholic church in Osaka.”

“There are Catholics everywhere, Anya.”

“I’m surprised you even go on Easter,” I said.

“You mean because I am so evil, I suppose. But sinners especially deserve their annual portion of redemption, don’t you think?”

The courtyard had granite statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Both had Japanese features. Usually, Jesus reminded me of Theo, but in Osaka, he looked more like Yuji Ono.

The liturgy was the same as it was in New York—mostly Latin, though the English parts were in Japanese. It was not hard for me to follow. I knew what was being said, and I knew when to nod my assent, whether I meant it or not.

I found myself thinking of Sophia Bitter.

I could still see her face when I’d plunged that machete through her heart.

I could smell the scent of her blood mixed with mine.

If given the chance, I would kill her again.

So I probably wouldn’t be going to Heaven. No amount of church or confession could fix me anymore. The Easter service was lovely though. I was glad to have gone.

We both decided to skip confession. Who even knew if the priest spoke English?

“Do you feel renewed?” Mr. Delacroix asked me on the way out.

“I feel the same,” I said. I wanted to ask him if he’d ever killed anyone, but I doubted that he had. “When I was sixteen, I used to feel like I was so bad. I went to confession constantly. I always felt like I was failing someone. My grandmother, my brother. And I had bad thoughts about my parents. And of course, the usual impure thoughts that teenage girls are wont to have—nothing that awful. But in the years since, I’ve actually sinned, Mr. Delacroix. And I can’t help but laugh at that girl who thought she was so terrible. She’d done nothing. Except maybe having been born to the wrong family in the wrong city in the wrong year.”

He stopped walking. “Even now, what have you done really?”

“I’m not going to list everything.” I paused. “I killed a woman.”

“In self-defense.”

“But still, I wanted to be alive more than I wanted her to be alive. Wouldn’t a truly good person have let herself die by that koi pond?”

“No.”

“But even if that is true, it wasn’t like I was blameless. She didn’t choose me at random. She chose me because she perceived that I had stolen something from her. And I probably had.”

“The guilt is pointless, Anya. Remember: you are as good as you are tomorrow.”

“You can’t honestly believe that?”

“I have to,” he said.

* * *

One day toward the end of April, I asked him, “Mr. Delacroix, why are you still here? You must have business in the States. When we left, you were discussing a run for mayor.”

“My plans changed,” he said. “It hasn’t been ruled out.”

We had arrived at the pond, and he helped me to the bench.

“You know, perhaps, that I had a daughter once?”

“Win’s sister, who died.”

“She did. She was very pretty, like you. She was sharp-tongued, like me. And also like you. Jane and I had her when we were young, still in high school, but luckily Jane’s parents had money so it did not affect our lives as dramatically as it might have in the absence of money. My daughter got sick. It was exhausting for everyone. My ex-wife, my son. Alexa fought very hard for a bit over a year, and then she died. My family was not the same. I could no longer be at home. I did things I’m not proud of. I forced them to move to New York City so that I could take the job in the district attorney’s office. I thought it might be a fresh start, but it wasn’t. I could not bear to be with my wife or my son because it made me too unhappy.”