The Miracle Thief Read Online Free PDF Page A

everything I once was had been subsumed by my life here. By my vows and my veil. And such a poor nun was I that I could not even offer her the benefit of sage wisdom or spiritual advice.
    â€œAre you…weeping?”
    What if I was? I was poorer, I was meaner and ruder than ever I once had been.
    â€œAfter all this time, still, you are so beautiful.”
    A thousand times I had imagined what I might do or say if I saw Charles again, and none of them had included my crying like a child. Could I not be spared this one last indignity?
    He stretched forth his hand. “Juliana—”
    I put up my own to stop it. “Do not. Do not touch me.” I spoke the words as best as I could through the sobs that choked my throat. My mouth was moving with great, ugly jerks. “Or I will not be able to last this life through.”
    Ignoring my protests, he gathered me into his arms.
    Weeping and trembling, I held myself apart from him as long as I could, and then there was nothing left to do but let him hold me. Hidden from the world by the rising mists of the morning’s dew, I like to think we righted whatever had been put wrong between us. He felt just the same as I tucked my head into the spot beneath his chin, and yet, he was so different. “I have heard they call you simple.”
    â€œStraightforward. Yes, I know.”
    â€œYou were not always like that.”
    â€œNo.” He spoke the word as he pressed his cheek to my temple. “I learned it from you. You were never one to say yes when you meant no. After you left, I realized I had lost what I held most dear, because I had been too circumspect. Much better for everyone to know what I am about. Much better to declare my intentions while I still have time, before that chance is taken from me.”
    The sun, bright and fierce, burned through the last of the mist.
    He stilled for just a moment, and then he dropped his hands and stepped away. “I wish you would speak with her.”
    â€œWhat would I say?” What could I offer her that her formidable grandmother and her father could not?
    â€œShe is too impulsive.”
    Too impulsive? That was a fault I could not fix. But I could pray she would become more like her father. That if she did not yet have it, she would come by a will less malleable than mine. I could beg heaven, as I always did, that she would find some kind of peace, some sort of contentment. But how could she not? She was a princess. Her life would be nothing like mine. And that is why I had come to the abbey, why I had left her there with him. I had wanted her to be loved, and I had wanted her to be safe.
    ***
    â€œI wonder what it would be like to live at the abbey. To stay up here in the mountains, away from all the world.” She had looked at me with those shining blue eyes that were so much like her father’s.
    I dropped my gaze, because she was too willing, too eager, wanting, I suspect, to place far too much weight on my opinion. Behind us, I knew her father stood watching.
    Pulling my hands up within the folds of my sleeves, clasping myself about the elbows, I thought about what I must say. The reason I had gone was so she could stay with her father. That she might wish to live out her life here at the abbey was a repudiation of all I had done, all I had sacrificed for her, and all I had tried to become. I must not give her any reason to stay. I must not hint at any reason for her to choose my path instead of her own. “A life of contemplation is not for everyone.”
    â€œWhy ever not?”
    I delighted in the fire that shone from her eyes, even though its blaze was directed at me. “It does not suit everyone.” It had not, in fact, suited me, because there were some things that should not be contemplated. And in the solitude, in the dark of night, when I had said all the prayers I could say on her behalf, when I had accomplished all the things I could do, it was always those things