Ted Dekker - The Bride Collector

He eventually moved to Miami, where he took his first job with the FBI. It was a strange story in so many ways, strange because Paradise knew it was absolutely normal.

Compared with her own childhood, something he hadn’t asked about, his young years had been a vacation. The cars, the parties, the friends, Sunday Mass, confession. He and some friends had once locked a priest in the back room, and he’d taken the stage in the priest’s robes. For half the service, the congregation assumed he was a visiting priest. He’d been an absolute rascal once. Oddly enough, the stunt endeared him to her. He wasn’t quite the clean-cut man he projected.

But Paradise couldn’t shake the stark difference between them, and it reminded her that she was the freak here. In the protected walls here, she was the sanest of the bunch, but one step past the gates and she was nothing but a basket case. How could she ever meet and love and marry someone, unless he lived here, at CWI?

“Are you okay?” he asked when she fell silent after a long string of questions.

An image of her and Brad walking down the aisle of the chapel on the other side of the campus hung in her mind. At the last minute he spun and faced the congregation. Just kidding! Ha, ha, ha!

Then to her, seeing her shock. What? Come on, Paradise, you didn’t really think I was serious, did you? I can’t live here, you know that.

Brad would never do that, of course. In fact, he would take any man who would do that and flush him down the toilet. Which was the real problem here: Brad was a beautiful, gorgeous, sensitive man and he was, forever, completely out of the reach of a piece of trash like her.

She should be running from this place for the sake of her sanity. Instead she was sitting here falling in love with him. Oh no, it was true, she thought with some alarm. She didn’t know what falling in love felt like because she’d never done it before. But the warm, thrilling, frightening emotions now bubbling up through her must be it.

She probably already had fallen for him!

“… me what you’re thinking?” he was asking.

She shook the thoughts free, realizing she must be staring, white-faced. “Sorry.” She swallowed. “Can you tell me about Ruby?”

He grew quiet and looked at the fountain. But she wasn’t ready for him to be silent on this topic. So she pressed him.

“You loved her…”

“Yes.” His voice was tight and he lowered his voice to hardly more than a whisper. “More than you can imagine.”

“I’m pretty good at that,” she said. “Was she beautiful?”

“Really, Paradise, I’m not sure we should-”

“Was she prettier than me?”

She knew of at least four or five responses that could ensue. The backpedaling, or the denial, or the out-and-out lie, or the clam-up.

He faced her, eyes searching her face, her body. “No,” he said. “Only in the way she dressed and the way she made herself up, but that’s the easy part. Inside, she was as messed up as you.” He looked at the trees. “And as me.”

What a beautiful answer, she thought. He meant it as a compliment. He was saying that she was on the same level as him rather than throw lies at her.

Everything about him was beautiful.

“She killed herself because she didn’t think she was beautiful,” he said.

A sudden and heavy silence settled over them. His eyes were locked on nothing, misted with emotion, and Paradise knew where he was going. But she didn’t want to stop him. A terrible empathy tugged at her heart.

“It wasn’t your fault, Brad.”

He sucked air in through his nose, closed his eyes. A tear leaked from one corner and she felt even worse for him. Tears flooded her own eyes. She knew nothing about love and tenderness, and even less about how to be a woman with a man, but he was here and he was crying and she had to help him.

“You’ve never loved another woman since?” she asked.

The words broke a dam in his soul. He set his elbows on his knees, lowered his face into his hands, and started to sob. What had she said?

What was she to do? She could only say what came to her mind. That was her gift, Allison said. She could look at a single leaf and see the whole tree. So she said what she saw now.

“You’re afraid that you can’t love another woman because in your mind no woman can measure up to Ruby. But that’s not why you haven’t been able to love another woman. It’s because you’re a kind man and you can’t bear the thought of hurting another woman by making her feel like she isn’t beautiful. Because that’s why Ruby took her life.”

Her words didn’t encourage him.

“But that was her choice, not yours. Life is worth living because of the risks, Allison always says, and I think she must be right. And I think it’s the same with love.”

Now he was sobbing quietly into his hands, elbows on his knees. He suddenly leaned closer to her, put one hand down and rested it on her knee, the other hand still covering his face.

The contact might as well have been a current of electricity through her bones. She sat perfectly still, head swimming through a thick sea of sorrow and elation and fear and wonder.

He was letting his pain go. Here. With her.

She wanted to throw her arms around his head and hold him close and tell him not to cry, not to feel sad, because she would love him. She would hold him and protect him and never let the monsters in the dark come up behind him and pull him back.

Paradise couldn’t do that. Not yet. She had to control herself. But she could and she must touch him. And so she did. She slowly lowered her hand onto his head and gently smoothed his short, wavy blond hair.

Then she hushed him, but her hushing was interrupted by her own sobs, not of sorrow, but of relief. Her control began to slip and rather than fight, she leaned over him, rested her head on his, and together they wept.

They sat like that for what must have been a long time, although Paradise lost track of time in this small envelope of hope and safety. Of love. Gradually they both quieted and Paradise thought she should sit up because she was holding him down. But she didn’t want to.

She was here because Allison wanted her to risk falling in love, and she was doing that. She was here because Brad thought she was beautiful, even though she needed help with her face and hair and clothes. She was here because she’d touched a dead body and seen the man with the dark hair who looked a little like Clark Kent without the glasses and who was leaning over Melissa telling her how beautiful…

Paradise gasped and jerked upright.

Brad sat up and stared at her. “Are you okay?”

She faced him. “I remember.”

He sniffed and wiped his eyes. “You remember what?”

“I remember what I saw. The man who killed Melissa!”

“You do?” It seemed to be the farthest thing from his mind.

“Yes!” Paradise jumped to her feet, ecstatic. “I do, I do. I can see him now, as clear as day.”

Brad stood up, stunned. “That’s… Are you sure? We have to get you down to the office immediately. We’ll need to reconstruct-”

“No, I can’t go. Of course I can’t go. But I can draw him. I told you, I’m a good artist. Or they can come here.”

“Of course. Yes, here. Do you know who it is?”

“No. Nobody that I can remember.”

She’d broken out! Allison would be thrilled. Paradise started to walk back toward the center. “I need to draw now, before I forget!”

CARS CAME AND went from the underground parking garage next to Rain Man’s condo, and Quinton watched them all from the protected darkness of his 300M, which he parked in a corner space that was reserved. He’d picked the spot two days earlier after noting that it remained empty into the early-morning hours. From his vantage through his window, he could see the yawning ramp that headed up to the street.