““C.J.’s words sounded again and again in her head. She knew that she had not given her an answer, because Lourdes honestly didn’t have one. It was her embattled conscience that had driven her out of Miami, away from a successful practice, from friends and family, to hide from her sins up here in the mountains, hoping time would ease its suffering. But it simply made the condition worse. Her conscience—was that friend made or born? Or was hers skewed with the help of a mother who’d read from the bible every night before dinner, even when there was no food on the table to eat? Some people supposedly didn’t even have a conscience—failing to develop one by the age of three or four, and were sunk for life. Some had one and ignored it constantly. Others had one, but it didn’t always work right. So what made the conscience, the friend, always right, anyway? Who draws that line, Lourdes?””
