Stone Fox: Good Friday

The house with the apple tree stood at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, its garden always too neatly trimmed, like a smile held too long. On Good Friday, the air was heavy with incense and tension, the kind that settles deep in the lungs and doesn’t leave. Isobel Moretti sat on the front steps in her Easter dress, legs tucked beneath her, hands folded in her lap like she was saying a silent rosary. She didn’t cry. Not when her mother screamed. Not when her father’s voice went low and mean. Not when the door finally slammed like the closing of a coffin.

She was only eight, but she understood the gravity of silence.

Inside, her parents were splitting a life like communion bread — equal parts torn, not shared. Her mother had always been the softer one, too beautiful in that sorrowful, self-sacrificing way. The kind of woman who wore perfume to bed and cried when it rained. She knelt in front of the TV each night with a glass of red wine, watching old movies and whispering lines from memory, like they were scripture. But lately, she wept more than she watched. She held Isobel in bed, thinking she was asleep, and wept into her hair like she was baptising her in grief.

Her father — Vincent Moretti — was made of angles and absence. Sharp suits. Sharper words. He wasn’t unkind, just unreachable. Always just out of frame, like a saint too distant to pray to. Isobel loved him fiercely, the way children love their fathers — blindly and with desperation. But there was a disconnect, like trying to tune a radio and only ever getting static. He kissed her forehead on Sundays and called her “my girl” but never looked her in the eyes long enough to notice when they brimmed with unshed tears.

She watched the slow decay of their marriage with the quiet agony of a child who understands more than she should. The meals that went cold on the table. The separate bedrooms. The polite cruelty. She soaked in every wordless argument, every closed door, until the sorrow lived inside her bones.

Her little sister, Sofia, was only five. She still had baby teeth and believed in fairy tales. She had a gap between her front teeth and wild black curls that framed her face like a halo gone crooked. That day, she clutched a stuffed rabbit and looked at Isobel with wide, uncomprehending eyes. "Are we going somewhere fun?" she asked. Isobel didn’t answer. She just took Sofia’s hand and squeezed it — not gently, but firmly, like an anchor.

No one asked them what they wanted. They were told they’d have two homes now, two rooms, two routines. As if more could make up for what had been broken.

That night, they left the house under a sky bruised with clouds. Isobel looked back only once. The apple tree stood in silhouette, gnarled and stoic like a crucifix in church — a beautiful, painful reminder that we’re all rooted in suffering. She imagined it withering, collapsing in a heap of fire, burning to ash.

In the backseat of the car, Sofia fell asleep against her shoulder. Isobel stared straight ahead, not blinking. She felt the rage swell and push against her ribcage, pressuring it to split but despite the cracks deepening, threatening to shatter her completely, she refused to let anything spill out. She promised herself — and God — that she would never be at the mercy of someone else’s choices again. She would become her own sanctuary.

They say blood is thicker than water. That night, Isobel learned that both stain and no amount of fire will cleanse her.