Movement Four -- What the God in the Cemetery Proved

Now. He says he does not feel grief. He does not feel pain, not really, not the kind that would require attention -- because Vesalia, he tells himself, does not need that from him. She needs steadiness. She needs a hand that does not shake. She needs someone who has already finished processing whatever there is to process, so that she never has to spend a single moment of her own healing worrying about his.

Who can confirm that this isn't a lie? I ask you plainly, because I have asked myself the same question more times than I can count, watching him say it. And if he truly did not feel those emotions -- if grief and fury really did pass through him without leaving anything behind worth calling a wound -- then I ask you to explain to me, honestly, what I myself witnessed, with my own eyes, in the state that god was left in, inside the Garden of a Thousand Souls, after everything else in that terrible, unglamorous night was finished.

I will not describe it to you again. You already know, if you've been listening carefully to everything this account has told you so far, exactly how thoroughly, how precisely, how completely that particular reckoning was carried out. I want you to understand only this: a man who feels nothing does not do what he did that night. A man who has truly finished processing his grief does not laugh, mid-violence, with a satisfaction that sat calmly alongside a fury that never once cooled enough to let the satisfaction replace it. I was there, in whatever way I am capable of being anywhere, and I watched his face, and I promise you, whatever he tells himself and whatever he tells Vesalia and whatever he tells the rest of his gathered, trusting family -- that was not the face of a man untouched by what he carries.

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What a hypocrite. Claiming calm while burning. Claiming steadiness while the coals refuse, even now, even years later, to fully go cold.

I try, here, to remember whether I have ever actually met Vesalia myself, in whatever body this telling currently occupies, or whether I only know her the way I know everything -- secondhand, borrowed, filtered through a watching that may not be watching from outside at all. I find that I cannot answer the question. I find that the not-answering frightens me considerably more than any answer would have.