Chapter 26 — The Silence That Protects

A saying took hold at Santa Clara de la Luz after that year, and it divided opinion for a long time, because it was not a comfortable thing to say about a holy house.

It went like this: there are silences that look as though they protect an institution, but in truth they only protect the people who have learned to hide inside them.

For years, the convent’s instinct had been to keep its troubles quiet, to manage embarrassment, to close doors and lower voices and trust that a good reputation was the same thing as a safe house.

And that instinct had very nearly been the ruin of them, because the man in the walls had counted on exactly that silence, had fed on it, had lived inside it as surely as he lived inside the tunnels.