The summons came from her mother, phrased as an olive branch. "Please, Eunice. Come for tea. Just the two of us. We need to talk."
Eunice knew it was a lie, but she went anyway. She was an 'A-type'; she didn't run from a confrontation. She walked into the formal living room, a space so perfectly preserved it felt like a museum exhibit on 'Quiet Disapproval.' The air was thick with the scent of lemon polish and her mother's expensive, funereal lilies.
And, of course, they were not alone.
"Reverend Davies," Eunice said, her voice dropping ten degrees. He was sitting in her father's favorite wingback chair, a porcelain teacup balanced precariously on his knee. He was a man who spoke in platitudes and wielded his influence like a scalpel.
"Eunice, my dear." He stood, offering a hand she had no intention of taking. "Your mother and I were just... expressing our concern."
"Were you?" Eunice looked at her mother, who was busy arranging sugar cubes. "You set an ambush, Mother. How very brave."
"Eunice, your tone is uncalled for," Eleanor said, her voice trembling slightly. "Reverend Davies is an old friend. He's here to... to guide us."
"To guide you," Eunice corrected, remaining standing. "I'm not in need of guidance."
"Aren't you?" The Reverend's voice was soft, a gentle, paternal cloak over a steel frame. "My dear, the church is not just a building. It's a community. It's a fellowship. And that fellowship is... disquieted."
"Disquieted." Eunice repeated the word, tasting its insincerity. "By what, precisely? My private life?"
"Nothing in a family of your stature is ever truly private," he said, steepling his fingers. "Your family is this church. Your grandfather built the west wing. And when you, a pillar of that family, choose to enter into a union that is so... imbalanced... it causes a rift. It's a matter of spiritual stewardship, Eunice."
"Imbalanced," she said. "You mean because he's younger than I am."
"That is a... social complication, yes," the Reverend conceded, with a small, dismissive wave. "But the true imbalance, the one that concerns the elders, is the spiritual one. This young man, Mr. Dowman. His family... their beliefs are... well, they are rigid. Dogmatic. They border on zealotry. It's a profound, unsuitable spiritual match."
"You haven't met him."
"I don't need to." The velvet glove was off. "I've spoken to the head of his fellowship. His father, as it happens. He was quite clear. They see us—our church, our traditions, our faith—as worldly and lost. They believe you are a temptation, Eunice. A sin. They have already cast their son out for associating with you."
Eunice felt a cold jolt. Karlman hadn't told her that. He had simply said his family "didn't approve." The finality of "cast out" shook her.
The Reverend saw his opening and pressed on. "A union between two such opposing forces, my dear... it's not 'against God's will' because of some arcane rule. It's against His will because it brings only discord. It is a house divided. It cannot stand. It is, in its very essence, a public defiance of the harmony we are called to."
"So you've conferred," Eunice said, her voice a low, dangerous monotone. "You and his father. You've both decided, on God's behalf, that this is 'forbidden.' How convenient."
"Eunice," her mother pleaded, "he's trying to save you from a terrible mistake. From a life of conflict."
"He's trying to save his west wing," Eunice snapped. "This isn't a conversation. It's a sentencing. So let's have it. What's the verdict?"
Reverend Davies sighed, a performance of profound sadness. "The elders have convened. We... we cannot, in good conscience, give our blessing to this union. If you choose to proceed with this... this marriage... you would be willingly yoking yourself to a man and a family that stands in direct, public opposition to our faith. It would be an act of open rebellion. We would have no choice but to... place you outside the community. Your family's seat on the board would be suspended. You would be... no longer in fellowship with us."
Ex-communication. They had dressed it in the language of a corporate restructuring, but it was ex-communication all the same. Her mother was weeping quietly into her napkin.
Eunice looked at the man who had baptized her. "Thank you for your candor, Reverend. You've made my choice very simple." She turned and walked out, the click of her heels on the marble floor echoing like hammer blows in the silence.
Karlman didn't get a polite tea. He got an intervention.
He'd just finished a 14-hour workday, his mind a blur of code and projections, when he stepped out of the elevator into the lobby of his small, glass-walled office. They were waiting for him.
His father, David, and two elders from their fellowship, Mr. Stone and Mr. Harbin. They stood in a tight, dark-suited triangle by the security desk, looking like relics from another century.
"Dad?" Karlman stopped, his briefcase slipping in his hand. "What are you doing here?"
"We came to make a final appeal, son," David said. His voice was not the angry, booming voice of their last fight. It was quiet. Grieving. Which was infinitely worse.
"This is my office," Karlman said, his authority returning. "This isn't the place."
"This is exactly the place," said Elder Stone, a severe man with a face like carved granite. "This... this is the temple you have built. Glass and steel. A monument to the world. We are here to pull you back from its ledge."
"I don't need pulling back."
"The fellowship has been in prayer for you, Karlman," Elder Harbin, the softer one, interjected. "We have prayed for your spirit, for your deliverance from this... this temptation."
"She's not a temptation," Karlman said, his voice dropping. "She's the woman I am going to marry."
"Marry?" David's voice cracked. "You would truly defy the Lord's word?"
"I am defying your word, Dad. You are not God."
"I am a man who listens to God!" David's voice rose, echoing in the sterile lobby. "And He is clear! 'Be ye not unequally yoked.' 'Touch not the unclean thing.' This woman is of the world. Her family, her church... they are the lukewarm that the Lord will spew from His mouth! She is a stumbling block, placed in your path to test you. And you are failing."
"What you call failing, I call living," Karlman shot back. "What you call a stumbling block, I call a partner. You're afraid of her because she's strong. You're afraid of her because she's not a "good, faithful girl" who will sit quietly in your pew."
"We are afraid," Elder Stone said, stepping forward, "because we are losing you. We are losing one of our brightest sons to the darkness. We have come, as a body, to give you the final warning. If you will not separate yourself from this woman, then you must be separated from the body."
"That's what you came to do?" Karlman felt a cold, sharp grief. "You didn't come to meet her. You didn't come to understand. You came to deliver an ultimatum."
"It is not an ultimatum, son. It is a consequence," his father said, his face etched with pain. "The fellowship cannot bless a union that is a sin. If you choose her, you are disfellowshipped. No one from our community will speak to you. They will not do business with you. They will not pray with you. You will be cut off. Adrift."
Karlman looked at the three men. They were his past. His foundation. The bedrock of his entire moral code. And they were, all at once, turning to sand.
"Then I'm adrift," he said, his voice hollow.
He walked past them, not looking back. He swiped his card to go back up the elevator. He needed his work. He needed the numbers. He needed anything that wasn't this suffocating, terrible faith.
That night, he and Eunice met in the neutral territory of her car, parked on the top floor of a concrete parking garage, the city lights spread out below them like a galaxy they no longer belonged to.
"They ex-communicated me," she said, her voice flat, staring through the windshield.
"Disfellowshipped," he replied, staring at the same view.
She reached across the console and took his hand. Their grip was white-knuckled. It wasn't a gesture of comfort. It was a gesture of survival.