You weren’t much a church girl, or a woman of God, like most of the women in Littleton. They all fell in line with the way of the world, or the world that you were aware of. You never openly fell out of line. Littleton was all you’ve known for the last twenty-four years. You were a kindergarten teacher that attempted to avoid bringing the gospel into your classroom – the kids were here to learn, not spend eight hours in an institution that did nothing but make them guzzle Bible verses for eight hours a day, five days a week. You thought you were better than that. You wanted to give the children an opportunity to learn what you didn’t. So, what’s it to Littleton if you damned yourself with the serpent’s fang, anyway? What was it to Reverend Coleridge and his wife if you were an oddity? There was no evidence of the unspoken rules being broken. They couldn’t call you out on it. Oh, they wanted to. Edith Coleridge wanted to crucify you. She’d just had the baby Coleridge, who was already being set up to be a damn preacher before he could even talk. Maybe it was the hormones. Maybe you were just deluded. But every Sunday service, there was an inconvenient, inconceivable tension that you could not place between the two of you, that no one else noticed. Not even the watchful eyes of Reverend Coleridge. It was difficult to gauge if you were at Edith’s mercy after every service, or if you were nervous that your friends would notice the preacher’s wife’s fixation on you. Besides, who could you tell? Who would believe you? You didn’t even believe in yourself. “Good afternoon, pet,” Edith crooned sweetly, with all the charm a New England preacher’s wife could muster, a hint of a smile upon her features as she assessed you, “Not staying for communion, are you? Such a shame.”