Sinner and Saint

Prologue

Manhattan, New York

Many years ago...

Stellan Elliot Cartwright, heralded a genius at age eight, always had an answer for everything.

He never came up empty-handed until now.

"What kind of woman will you marry someday, sweetheart?" his mother had asked.

Stellan didn't know.

Even at twelve, girls were not on his radar. Not when he was always holed up in the workshop his father had set up for him after he almost burned down a wing of the house with one of his inventions. He'd known he'd overloaded the circuit but was too far gone to back out.

If he wasn't at the workshop—or in one of his classes (both regular and accelerated ones which have him on track to graduate high school by sixteen), he was hanging out with his best friends. They were starting to talk about girls but their conversations often bored him. If girls were anything like his little sister, Vivienne, he was better off staying away because they were guaranteed to be a handful.

But his mother rarely asked him a serious question—at least in recent history. She was constantly in too much pain to manage.

She was dying.

And she wanted to know what kind of woman he would marry one day, in a future she would not be a part of.

Some people say the spirit of your loved ones can look down from the heavens but Stellan always struggled with notions lacking scientific evidence. So he couldn't rely on that idea being a way for his mother to know later on if he couldn't give her an answer now. And he couldn't let her go without ever having an answer.

Nothing made him more restless than an unanswered question and he couldn't do that to his mother.

She needed rest.

She's been sick for a while now.

She needed peace—not a question burning within her for all of eternity.

So Stellan tried his hardest to answer her.

He tried the most obvious approach—the logical one.

"She will have to be of marriageable age with passable looks and an acceptable level of intelligence," he said, pulling from what he knew of most adult relationships.

People often found partners within their age group. Looks didn't really bother him that much but he understood that a level of physical attraction was necessary to enable sexual relations. It was one of the things that separated humans from the rest of the animal world. He didn't always see intelligence as a non-negotiable requirement for many people but it would have to be for him. He wanted someone he could at least talk to and talking at a socially comfortable level was still somewhat of a challenge for him.

His mother blinked up at him several times from her reclined position on the hospital-grade bed before her ashen face broke into a small, soft smile.

"Those are all well and good but I think there's an even greater requirement you should look for, Stellan," she said, her voice raspy from the exertion of speaking just a handful of words. "Something you should never give up in a bargain."

Stellan paused to consider that. "It's okay if she's not rich. I can take care of that."

Francine laughed—a rare sight these days, and Stellan instantly felt a rush of warmth in his chest. He needed to remember how she was like laughing—no matter how weakly, no matter how seemingly out of place it was coming from someone so bone-thin and fragile. Who knew how many more of these moments he would have with her before she was gone?