Marina Douglas reached St. Bridget Parish with an exhausted shuffle. Her once elegant shoes were torn and stained with dried mud. Hunger twisted her stomach. When she asked the parish worker about her mother, Sister Helen looked at her with a firm yet sorrowful expression. “Your mother is well, child. Better than ever. God has brought justice to her life.” Sister Helen wrote an address on a small slip of paper and pressed it into Marina’s hand. “Go there. And when you arrive, ask for her forgiveness on your knees. That woman is a saint.”
Marina used the few coins Sister Helen provided to take a bus across the city. The ride to an old neighborhood in northern Seattle felt endless. When she stepped off on a quiet street lined with maples and followed the numbers on the houses, she stopped short. Before her rose a beautiful colonial style home covered in ivy and surrounded by a garden full of roses, lavender, and damp soil. The place looked like it belonged in a magazine. “Impossible,” she thought. “They must have made a mistake. My mother cannot live here.”