Harvesting the Heart by Jodi Picoult

as brave as Cuchulainn himself with a palm full of feed, and every llama and goat and sheep in the place came runnin’ over to you. Knocked you flat on your back, they did.”
    I frowned, remembering it as though it were yesterday. They had come from all sides like nightmares, with their hollow, dead eyes and their curved yellow teeth. There had been no way out; the world had closed in around me. Now, under my wedding suit, I broke out in a light sweat; I thought how much I felt like that, again, today.
    My father was grinning; I could hear it. “What did you do?” I asked.
    â€œWhat I always did,” he said, and I listened to his smile fade. “I picked you up. I came and got you.”
    I listened to all the things I wanted and needed to say to him racing through my mind. In the silence I could feel him wondering why he hadn’t come to get me in Massachusetts; why he hadn’t picked up the pieces and smoothed it over and made it better. I could sense him running through everything we had said to each other and everything we hadn’t, trying to find the thread that made this time different.
    I knew, even if he didn’t. My father’s God preached forgiveness, but did he?
    Suddenly all I wanted to do was take away the pain. It was my sin; it was one thing for me to feel the guilt, but my father shouldn’t have to. I wanted to let him know that he wasn’t responsible, not for what I had done and not for me. And since he wouldn’t believe I could take care of myself— never would, not now—I told him there was someone else to take care of me. “Dad,” I said, “I’m getting married.”
    I heard a strange sound, as if I had knocked the wind out of him. “Dad,” I repeated.
    â€œYes.” He drew in his breath. “Do you love him?” he asked.
    â€œYes,” I admitted. “Actually, I do.”
    â€œThat makes it harder,” he said.
    I wondered about that for a moment, and then when I felt I was going to cry, I covered the mouthpiece with my hand and closed my eyes and counted to ten. “I didn’t want to leave you,” I said, the same words I spoke every time I called. “It wasn’t the way I thought things would happen.”
    Miles away, my father sighed. “It never is,” he said.
    I thought about the easy days, when he would bathe me as a child and wrap me in my long-john pajamas and comb the tangles from my hair. I thought about sitting on his lap and watching the bluest flames in the fireplace and wondering if there was any finer thing in the world.
    â€œPaige?” he said into the silence. “Paige?”
    I did not answer all the questions he was trying to ask. “I’m getting married, and I wanted you to know,” I said, but I was certain he could hear the fear in my voice as loudly as I could hear it in his.

    It built up in my stomach and my chest, the feeling, as if I were spiraling into myself. I could feel Nicholas holding back, tensed like a puma, until I was ready. I wrapped my arms and my legs around Nicholas, and, together, we came. I loved the way he arched his neck and exhaled and then opened his eyes as though he wasn’t quite sure where he was and how he had got there. I loved knowing I had done that to him.
    Nicholas cupped my face in his hands and told me he loved me. He kissed me, but instead of passion I felt protection. He pulled us onto our sides, and I curled myself in the hollow of his chest and tasted his skin and his sweat. I tried to burrow closer. I did not close my eyes to sleep, because I was waiting, as I had the last time I’d been with a man, for God to strike me down.

    Nicholas brought me violets, two huge bunches, still misted and swollen with the spray of a florist. “Violets,” I said, smiling. “For faithfulness.”
    â€œNow, how do you know that?” Nicholas said.
    â€œThat’s what Ophelia says, anyway, in