Turn 3 of 7

Go to Lauds, and speak to Ilde after

You touch Ammet's arm once — brief, deliberate — and turn toward the chapel. She falls into step beside you, and you feel her exhale as though your silence has lifted something from her. The gravel crunches under your feet in the old rhythm, and the garden gate swings shut behind you both with its familiar iron complaint. The cut stems and the missing fruit will still be there when you return. The Office will not wait.

The chapel is small and cold and lit by candles that the youngest sisters tend each evening. Six of the eight stalls are already filled when you enter. Sister Breta leads the antiphon in her steady, unremarkable voice, and the Latin rises and falls around you like breath. You take your place, open your mouth, and sing the words you have sung three thousand times. The familiar shapes of the psalms move through you — *Domine, labia mea aperies* — and your hands hold the antiphonal without trembling, and for the space of the Office you are simply one voice among many.

Ilde is in the stall to your left. She sings with her eyes closed, as she always does, her hands resting open on the page. Her pruning knife is not on her belt, where she usually keeps it — the leather loop is empty, and the absence registers like a missing tooth. Her face is composed, her breathing even, and her voice is the same clear alto it has always been. She does not look like a woman keeping a secret. She looks like a woman who has not slept, but that is not unusual for Ilde, who has tended the garden through every season for thirty years and often rises before the birds.

Abbess Corrin is in the first stall, and she does not stand for the psalms. She sits with her hands folded in her lap and her lips moving, and you notice what you have been trying not to notice for months — the way her habit hangs on her shoulders now, the way the candlelight finds hollows in her face that were not there at Easter. She has refused her portion nine times. Nine years of fruit offered and declined, nine years of seasons given back to the tree, and the tree has forty years left and Corrin has noticeably fewer. She turns her head during the reading and her eyes meet yours for a moment, and there is something in them — not accusation, not fear, but a quiet, steady attention, as though she has been waiting for this morning to arrive and is watching to see what you will do.

The Office ends. The sisters file out into the grey corridor, and Ilde moves toward the garden door with the unhurried purpose of someone who has work to do. You catch her at the threshold, where the candlelight from the chapel gives way to the pale morning coming through the garden window. She stops when she sees your face, and her expression does not change — she simply waits, her hands at her sides, her empty knife loop catching the light.