III.

He couldn't tell her how good she looked. Nor could he tell her what he wanted to say.

He approached her to try to start the conversation he wanted about his son and her childhood. He needed advice, Tim had good days and others when he became a fierce rebel and rude and he rebuked him and punished him and everything was even worse. Maybe she knew how to treat a child, maybe she also behaved like that when she was a child. For two seconds he imagined her as a girl and was surprised because surely she did not differ from the present. She seemed to remain so.

He approached with an unintelligible nervousness for him and she turned to look at him, ready to help in anything.

But he couldn't say a word. He hid with a cough and said nonsense about missing medications and then fled like a coward. He ran away because he felt he was burning.

She had those eyes. They were as always and at the same time they were different and he could not deduce what made them different until he got into his car, still chased by them.

He had no idea of fashion, that was evident to everyone, in fact his robe was proof of that with its missing buttons. So it was normal that he did not immediately notice that the difference is that she wore other glasses, bright and light glasses that would be the envy of a movie star. The glasses highlighted their already wide eyes, made them brighter. They made her more beautiful, incredibly beautiful.

What was happening and why he thought of her this way, he didn't know. What he did know was that he wanted to keep looking at her forever.

He spent the days watching her. He felt like a visitor in a museum watching a work of art.

Of course, that didn't mean anything else. He just looked at her, because they were no longer her glasses or her eyes, but something else.

She was different. He didn't know how he didn't notice it before, but now he saw it before him. She was prettier and younger than the other sisters, simpler and smaller than nurses, more refined and educated than ordinary Poplar women, more stubborn and competent than him.

Her hands were pale and thin but with signs of hard work, such as well-cut nails and some calluses. Her voice was firm and sweet at the same time, and her intelligence and reflexes were quick and cunning.

She was different and that was worth looking at. Not because something happened to him but out of curiosity.

However, all those thoughts did not prepare him to hear her talk about her faith. She very solicitously brought Nurse Miller's records and then asked him if he needed anything. He could interpret it as a courtesy to someone working at this time of night, after a tragic day where a baby died inexplicably. But he didn't hear only courtesy. He surprised himself, at what time did he think he knew her well enough to distinguish her intentions and her voice changes?

He asked for some of her faith. The words came out before he could stop them, he knew immediately that he had committed something close to heresy. But she not only did not rebuke him, but turned absolutely everything, leaving him confused. She spoke of her faith in so few simple words, in a soft voice but could see the determination in that sentence. She was a nun who allowed herself to doubt, and that was suddenly fascinating.

He felt a terrible desire to learn more about her. It was no longer knowing about her childhood but what she thought about life. He needed to know about her and he didn't understand why, he needed to learn from her, sit down and philosophize about existence and death, and the world, and everything.

Sister Bernadette remained still after her declaration, with her hands clasped and the ghost of a smile in her mouth. She took a few steps and he stopped her, for the second time perplexed by his own actions, not believing that just seconds passed while he saw a maelstrom of thoughts go through his head.

He told himself that it was only a tea, surely that didn't infringe religious rules, but her quick refusal and the excuse, because it sounded like that, of having dinner with her sisters, it said that he had crossed a limit.

She was a mystery and his fingers itched to solve it.