DAY THREE

Caitlyn, unlike you, I could not entirely endure the solitude inflicted upon us by the deep and rugged valleys of the Appalachians. In the years before we joined the collective, on Sundays, at times, I would lock the door and leave you in the cabin for a few hours and go to church. I first went because it was the safest way to lose myself anonymously in a small crowd; I could listen to others and make small talk when pressed, without placing myself into an intimate conversation or friendship. The music offered distraction. I enjoyed listening to unsophisticated preachers and dissecting their sermons for errors in logic, syntax, science, and omission. That was my weekly entertainment. Yet truth is a diamond; even mishandled, smeared with grease, or buried in mud, it cannot be marred and waits for one with a cloth to polish it clean. That was how God spoke to me again. Through those ignorant preachers. I finally understood, despite their manipulative distortions.

As a scientist, I had never found it difficult to acknowledge that there was a Creator behind this universe—the marvels of DNA, the exquisite dance of electron and proton, the boggling forces of gravity and light; all of it forced many of us in science away from agnosticism. Yet to comprehend that this Creator loved us more deeply than I loved you, Caitlyn, gave my life renewed meaning.

Deep in the Appalachians, I had found the most important diamond any man can find—God loved me and forgave me, even with you as a daily reminder of how terribly I had sinned…