Premise
In a nondescript café on a rainy afternoon, three women meet across a table of cold coffee and an unfiled recording. Here, long before an architect named Thomas ever hears the name, the foundation of the Order is laid.
From the Manuscript
She had been sitting there for forty minutes. She'd ordered coffee she hadn't drunk, watched the street through the window, and spent the time between those two things trying to locate the version of herself that would be able to do this. She hadn't found it. She had stopped looking.
The door opened and Rue walked in.
Selene had carried the memory of her for three months — the altar, the candlelight, the brief words they had exchanged as initiates in the corridor afterward, the expression on that face when the lead practitioner's eyes found it across the room from the horseshoe. She had thought she remembered her correctly. She had not. The woman in the doorway was small and auburn-haired and younger than Selene had expected, though she couldn't have said why she'd expected older. The coat was good. Everything else was less certain. She stood in the doorway with rain on her shoulders and her eyes moved to Selene and something happened in them that she didn't finish — a flicker of something unmanaged, there and gone, like a door opened and immediately pulled shut from the inside.
Selene didn't try to manage what happened in her own chest.
Rue met her eyes for one unguarded moment. Then she turned and went back outside.
Selene looked down at her cup.
She waited. Her thumb moved slowly around the rim. Outside the window the rain came down thin and indifferent and she watched it and held the feeling in her chest without examining it, the way she had learned to hold things that needed to be felt before they could be understood.
The door opened again.
Rue came back in wet. Not just the shoulders this time — her hair was damp at the temples, her cheeks were high with cold. She'd been out there longer than the distance to the doorway required. She walked to the table and sat down across from Selene, and before whatever she'd gone outside to do finished doing it, she looked very young and very tired and like someone who had made a decision she wasn't entirely sure about. The rain had darkened the auburn at her temples into something richer; a single strand clung to the side of her throat.
Then she set her bag on the floor and looked up and the moment was gone.
"I didn't know if you'd come," Selene said.
Rue's hands were flat on the table. Her gaze dropped to them, then lifted to Selene.
"I didn't know either," she said.
Half an hour later, at the corner table, the coffee between them had gone cold. Selene didn't move to get more. Neither did Rue.
"How long ago did you leave." Rue said. Not quite a question.
"The day after the story ran." Selene turned her cup slightly on the saucer. "I didn't have anywhere to go so I just — went. Stayed with a friend for a while. She didn't ask too many questions."
Rue nodded. Something shifted behind her eyes that might have been recognition.
"I filed the story on a Thursday," she said. "By Friday I couldn't remember what I'd thought I was going back to."
"Did you go back to anything?" Selene said.
A pause. Small. The length of something being decided.
"Work," Rue said. "For a while."
The rain tapped against the window. A couple came in from the street. They were laughing and shaking water from their jackets, bringing the cold in with them briefly before the door swung shut.
"I keep thinking about the woman," Selene said. "The one who watched from the back. Whether she knew."
Rue was still. "She knew."
"From the beginning?"
"From before the beginning, I think."
Selene absorbed this. Set it somewhere to look at later.
She looked down at her cup. When she spoke her voice was even, the way voices are even when something has been turned over many times in private and has worn smooth.
"It took away the fear," she said. "I know what it was. I'm not — I know what it was. But that's what it did. And when it was gone the fear came back and I didn't know what to do with it."
She hadn't said that to anyone. She waited for Rue's face to answer.
Rue didn't look away. Didn't offer anything to put over it. Her hands stayed flat on the table, then she met Selene's eyes again.
"It was the one place I felt whole," she said. "Just once." A pause so small it was almost not there. "I've been trying to find a place to put that ever since and there isn't one."
The cups sat cold between them. Outside the rain came down. Selene felt something in her chest open a little further — not relief exactly. Recognition. The relief of being understood by someone who has no reason to be kind about it.
— Belief and Love, Chapter 1