Their daughter, Megan, moved to Shelbyville two years ago. Opened up a place doing fillers and lasers and whatever else. There’d even been a little announcement in the church newsletter, “congratulations to Megan on her new business.” I’d read it and forgotten it.

Everybody had. Nobody connects a happy little newsletter blurb to the reason a sick man gets a denial letter.

Ninety-four thousand. To Megan’s clinic. From the fund that was supposedly empty.

Pastor Williams finally spoke, and what he said is the part I keep hearing. Not a denial. Not “this is a mistake.” He looked at all those faces and he said, real quiet, “You don’t understand the whole situation.”

“Then explain it,” I said. “Explain it to Earl.”

He didn’t. He just stood there with his mouth a little open, and Carol was crying now, and a couple of the elders stood up and started saying we should “take this somewhere private,” and people were pulling out their phones, and I just put my casserole dish down on the table and walked out. I left the dish. I never went back for it.

I’d love to tell you there was justice. That the church wrote us a check, that the pastor got removed, that Earl got his liver. I can’t. There’s an investigation now. The deacons hired some accountant. Two families left the church the next Sunday and four more after that. Megan’s clinic took down its social media. Carol hasn’t been seen at service since.

Earl is still on the list. Still drops his ten in the plate at the new church we go to, a little place across town, half the size. I asked him last week how he can still do that after all of it. He said, “The money was never the point of it, Helen.”

I don’t know if I believe that. I think about that ninety-four thousand every single day. I think about how I sat in those pews for 31 years and I almost ate my casserole and went home quiet. And the worst part, the part I can’t get past, is that I only know because I asked my friend to break a rule for me. If I’d been a better person, I never would have found out at all.

I’m still not sure what that makes me.