Chapter 9
A Desperate Plan
Angela realizes the only way to appease God and save Aggie is to return the Infant Jesus. She resolves to brave the storm and the darkness to take the statue back to Saint Joseph's.
The wind howled like a banshee outside their small cottage, rattling the windowpanes and sending shivers down Angela’s spine that had nothing to do with the cold. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of damp wool and worry. Aggie lay in her cot, her breath shallow, her small face flushed with fever. Mother, her brow furrowed with a weariness that seemed etched into her very bones, sat beside her, gently stroking her hair. Pat and Tom, usually boisterous as a pair of young sparrows, huddled by the hearth, their faces unusually subdued.
But Angela’s heart was a tempest all its own. Every ragged breath Aggie took felt like a tiny dagger twisting in her own chest. She knew, with a certainty that chilled her more than the storm, that this was her fault. The Infant Jesus, tucked away beneath a loose floorboard in her room, felt like a burning coal against her conscience, a heavy, silent accusation. She had taken Him to warm Him, to shield Him from the cold she imagined He felt in the drafty church of Saint Joseph’s. But now, the world outside was a raging inferno of wind and rain, and the warmth she had sought for Him had brought only sickness and despair to her own little family.
“Mother,” she whispered, her voice barely audible above the gale.
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