Rabid by T K Kenyon Page B

tiresome displays. You can’t prove I did that! The child is lying! I am not possessed by a demon!
    “Her reply was different than what you told me. If your student brought you a micrograph of a cell, and the cytoskeleton and the nucleus were labeled with fluroprobes,” such that the cell looked like a glowing island in a black sea webbed with lime green topographical lines and capped with a scarlet pillbox hat, “and he told you that the picture was of a virus, you wouldn’t believe him. A virus looks like a virus, and a cell looks like a cell. Upon examination, truth looks like truth, and a lie looks like something else.”
    Sloan blinked, again stalling. Dante waited. Sloan’s fingers curled around the arms of the chair. “She was angry,” Sloan said. “She said I’d lied to her.”
    “What did you tell her?”
    “I never said that I would leave my wife.” The last part rang desperately of truth. “And besides,” Sloan said and glanced up into the corner of the library, “the affair was actually a good experience for me. It tested my marriage, and now I know that I love Beverly and my family. It’s brought me and Beverly much closer.”
    More lies, as much to himself as to Dante. Dante pinched his nose. A headache blossomed behind his eyes. “What about the other woman?”
    “I broke it off,” Sloan said.
    “You used this woman.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead and he tried not to allow the diatribe to emerge again .
    Those words lurked in him, always ready to leap and devour. Dante had tried to counseling pedophiles for a week before he decided to work with the victims. The men could barely talk about their crimes because they didn’t understand that their victims were children, who had souls, who had dreams, who should have grown up whole. Pedophiles were all spiritually stunted and could not imagine what it was like to repeatedly raped. Dante had broken a chair against a wall in his effort to not smash it over the pedophile’s head.
    Sometimes, Dante was tempted to turn the men over to the American justice system so they could learn that lesson like John Geoghan had, but that was not what the Vatican had decided.
    He said, “You think only of how this woman affected you , but she is a soul, a soul that you damaged. You are not closer to God. It could not draw you closer to God or help your marriage to use this woman and damage her. This has destroyed your marriage.”
    Sloan slouched in his chair, his eyes slitted and lower lip curled in. “It’s over with. What did you want me to do?”
    The anger tore free. Dante’s hands were tangled in each other, an enormous, wrathful fist. “Confess,” he said, “confess with an open heart and know that you have offended God. You’ve broken your marriage vows, a sacrament. You’ve broken your wife’s heart. She trusted God and she trusted you. You’ve hurt this other woman, this Peggy, by lying to her. It was rape , having sex with her when she believed that you loved her, when she believed she was worshipping you with her body, but you were just screwing her.”
    The next morning, Sunday morning, Dante confessed his wrath and his despair to Brother Samual before early Mass, and his heart felt like abraded, flayed muscle, as he pressed his palms on his knees, and whispered, My brother Jesuits were recounting their affairs, enumerating the ways they had broken their vows and how this had benefited them as priests and brought them closer to God, and I shouted, ‘What about the women? What did you do to them?’ Wrath is my personal foible. Wrath stems from pride, an unjustified pride because I have not committed these particular sins since taking Holy Orders. But I am a sinner, too, in my pride and wrath.
    Sloan, sitting in his chair across the library from Dante, drew one ragged breath.
    Dante looked up from his hands, which cramped from clenching.
    Sloan pressed his hands to his face so hard that his arms quivered.
    Dante