And then Deacon Morris stood up. Quiet man, never says two words. He’s seventy-eight and he buried his wife last spring. He looked right at the pastor and his voice cracked and he said, “Families don’t steal from widows.” Just that.

And he sat back down. I have never heard a room that still in my life. Somebody started crying behind me. The moderator stood up and said we needed to vote on whether to turn the records over to the district attorney. Forty-three hands. Unanimous. Even the people who loved that man raised their hands, because the page didn’t lie.

The total Pastor Coleman approved and signed for, for work that was never done on that building, for three years, was eighty-four thousand dollars. Eighty-four thousand. Out of a little country church that passes a wooden plate. I said the number out loud that night and I watched two women in the front row put their hands over their mouths, because they knew, same as me, how many of their own ten-dollar bills were sitting inside it.

Travis got charged. So did his father. The church split right down the middle, about half of them blaming me, like I built the roof that leaks. I lost people I’d known thirty years. One of them was my own cousin, who hasn’t called since. They go to a new church out by the highway now and I hear Pastor Coleman still gives the prayer at the potlucks.

I did the right thing. I know I did. Everybody who tells me so is correct. But I drove past the old building last Sunday and the bucket’s still out under that third pew, because nobody ever fixed the roof, and I sat in my car in that gravel lot and I couldn’t make myself go in.

I keep thinking about his hand on my arm in that hospital. I keep thinking I could’ve just asked him one more time, quiet, before I made it forty-three people’s problem. I don’t know. I really don’t. I just know I can’t sit in that pew anymore, and I’m the one who emptied it.