The bells of First Baptist did not simply ring — they commanded.
They rolled across Pine Grove every Sunday morning like a declaration of ownership. Over rooftops. Through kitchen windows. Across dew-wet lawns trimmed with devotional precision. The sound was not harsh, but it was firm. It told the town who it belonged to.
Grace Caldwell stood at her bedroom window and listened.
At twenty-two, she had heard those bells every week of her life. She could measure time by them. Childhood. Adolescence. The slow suffocation of early adulthood.
Below her window, Magnolia Street was already in motion. Neighbors emerged in pressed linen and polished shoes. Mothers adjusted ribbons in daughters' hair. Fathers locked front doors with an air of spiritual responsibility. Even the sky seemed properly arranged — pale blue, obedient, unthreatening.
Behind her, the door creaked open.
"Grace," her mother said softly, "your father's already at the church."
Of course he was.
Reverend Isaiah Caldwell did not merely preach faith. He curated it. He arrived before anyone else to stand alone in the sanctuary, to pray over pews as though the wood itself required sanctification.
Grace turned from the window.
"Yes, ma'am."
Her voice was gentle — the voice Pine Grove expected. Measured. Feminine. Contained.
On her bed lay the dress selected for her the night before. Powder blue. High neckline. Sleeves below the elbow. It fit her perfectly.
It did not belong to her.
As she dressed, she studied herself in the mirror. Long brown hair pinned modestly back. Soft features arranged into agreeable calm.
She looked like devotion.
She did not look like hunger.
By the time she descended the stairs, her mother had already gathered her purse and Bible.
"You're quiet," her mother observed.
"I'm thinking."
Her mother hesitated — as though thinking itself required supervision — then nodded.
They stepped outside together, the bells still ringing.
Grace felt them in her chest.
Not as music.
As gravity.
And she wondered, not for the first time, what would happen if she didn't answer them.
The thought unsettled her enough that she walked faster toward the car.
She did not know that before the day ended, someone would see through the calm surface she had spent a lifetime perfecting.
And she did not know that the first crack in her obedience would begin in the last row of the sanctuary.