"No! - sorry. No. Thank you."

Shrug. 

She puts the spellbook on the shelf and leaves it. She doesn't expect that she'll successfully leave it there forever, but she needs to, like, think about stuff.

When the weekend comes she goes to Mass. She feels restless and irritable about it, but going to Mass is what she does on Sunday mornings, so she does it. She kneels and tries to focus on the crucifix, and she sings, and she shakes people's hands, and she sits and listens. When they get to the creed she stands and says it with everyone else -

- and at some point collapses back onto the pew in sudden pain, holding her hands to her mouth to keep from crying out.

She sits there until the Mass is over, trembling and silently crying, partly from how much her head hurts, but mostly about the fact that she doesn't, actually, believe in one God the Father Almighty anymore, doesn't actually believe in a single day of judgement for the quick and the dead, doesn't actually believe that whoever's up there running any of this is someone she knows or trusts or understands. 

She heads back home. 

He's pacing. 

"Did something - what happened?"

"I don't think I'm Catholic anymore."

"I don't actually understand...religions."

"There's - Catholicism is a kind of Christianity, and Christianity is a set of beliefs about who created the world and what that person is like and wants from humans and what his plan is to fix all of the problems in the world. And one of the things we do is that every week we go to Mass and we sing, and are in community with other Catholics, and do some other ritual stuff, and as part of that we say a creed all together about how we believe in the core tenets of the religion, and I've said it every week since we met, and nothing bad has ever happened, but this time I said it and the universe declared that I have to believe this much to ride the Catholicism train, and - I don't.

"Someone's up there. I think. I have no idea who it is."

"Maybe there's a bunch of them and they all have different hobbies? Since there's a lot of stuff going on."

"Makes as much sense as anything else, at this point."

Hug?

Hug.

"It's just really - I believed a bunch of stuff sort of automatically, and now I don't even - know what I actually think about anything?"

"I think most people don't."

"How are you supposed to avoid lying if you don't know what you think about anything? How are you supposed to make decisions?"

"...I mostly just do what I want to or what someone with the right to tell me to do stuff told me to do. And you tend to say stuff not very confidently, when you're talking about things you don't know much about."

"Because I don't know about very many things! And now I know even fewer things than I did before. And usually have almost no idea what I want, and don't have that many people to tell me what to do, so that helps - not very much."

"Well, I guess you'll have to learn those things. What you want and what you should be doing."

"...I guess."

She heads over to the shelf and rifles through the spells again.

"Okay. I don't have an egg, so - empty room."

She heads into the bathroom and shuts the doors and says "shorogyt, zestpond bistup reiltas" several times, getting quieter and quieter each time.

Nothing obviously happens.

Okay. She heads back into the living room and walks across the room from Connor and whispers, very quietly, barely loud enough for herself to hear.

"Can you hear this?"

"Yeah," he says out loud. " - was that magic? That just sounded like talking."

"Yeah, I could barely hear it. - now I wanna know whether it's directed at just the one person, it's much less useful if it isn't directed."

She whispers "hi Zana" to Zana.

"Did you hear that?"

"No."

"Cool! I don't know how many applications that has, but it seems like it should have some."