The bell for Lauds rang at four forty, which meant Alicia had been awake since four fifteen, lying still in the dark so Sister Josepha wouldn't hear the floorboard by her bed creak and assume she was sneaking off to pray extra, which she absolutely was not doing, because extra praying got you noticed, and getting noticed at St. Agatha's was rarely good news.
She counted the cracks in the ceiling until the bell rang for real. Fourteen. She'd counted them every morning for two years. Still fourteen.
Chapel was cold in the way only stone buildings in early spring could manage, a cold that had opinions about you.
Alicia knelt where she always knelt, third pew from the back, close enough to look devout, far enough that Father Roman's eyes usually slid past her toward the sisters he actually cared about impressing.
She mouthed the words. She'd stopped meaning most of them around month eight.
That wasn't something she'd ever say out loud. Not even to Sister Josepha, who was kind in a worn-in, forgetful way, like a coat that had been someone else's first.
After Lauds came the chores. Today: the library, second week running, because Sister Prudence had decided Alicia's handwriting was neat enough for the donation ledger and neat handwriting, at St. Agatha's, was its own kind of prison sentence.
She liked the library, in fairness. Nobody checked on her there. She could shelve a stack of dead men's sermons and slip in ten unsupervised minutes with whatever she wanted, so long as she kept one ear on the door.
Today it was psalms, actually. The ordinary kind. Nothing subversive. Just the sound of the words, which she liked better than their meaning most days.
She was three pages in when Father Basil found her.
"Diligent as ever," he said, from the doorway, in the tone he used for compliments that weren't.
"Just cataloguing, Father."
"Mm." He didn't come in. He rarely did, with her. "Father Roman wants to see the new arrivals list before vespers. The donation crates from the Hollis estate."
"I'll have it ready."
He lingered a moment longer than the sentence required, the way he sometimes did, like he was checking a fact against her face and finding it inconclusive. Then he left.
Alicia exhaled, and didn't examine why she'd been holding her breath.
She went back to the psalms. Three more pages before the light shifted enough that she'd have to move to the window seat, and by then it would almost be time for the noon meal, and after that the mending, and after that, if she was very lucky, another quiet hour before Vespers where nobody needed anything from her at all.
It was, she would have said if anyone had asked, an unremarkable life.