Chapter Ten
The Man Everyone Needed to Believe In
They called him Mercy.
Not his real name, of course.
He had gone by other names before.
He had been other men before.
But when a man comes back from prison with language like recovery, like growth, like I’ve done the work, people who need hope will build altars out of him.
He didn’t ask them to.
He never had to.
People want to believe beautiful stories.
Mercy told beautiful stories.
He told them in bars, in rehab meetings, in soft-lit art spaces with exposed brick walls and community grants taped invisibly to the ceiling.
He talked about the dark places he’d been.
He talked about the demon bargain he almost made.
He talked about the ritual magic he used to chase love like power.
He talked about sex like it was a kind of prayer
and women like they were cathedral doors
that opened to let him get better.
He talked with the candor of a confessional
and the charm of a wolf who had learned to smile.
He was never ashamed in the right places.
That’s what made him convincing.
Shame would imply responsibility.
Mercy preferred redemption narratives that never required repair.
Communities built on kindness are the easiest to con.
That’s not cynicism.
That’s architecture.
People who believe in healing
want healing to be real so badly
that sometimes
they forget healing isn’t magic.
It’s debt.
It’s blood and work and humility.
It’s showing up to people who were hurt and saying:
“I did this.
I will listen.
I will not require you to love me afterward.”
Mercy skipped the hard verbs.
He moved in.
He was given keys.
He was given microphones.
He was given rooms full of people
who bent their heads softly toward him
when he spoke.
He even worked with women who’d been broken by men like him.
And the town applauded
like watching him speak healing words
was the same thing
as him never having been a knife.
Mort came because the numbers didn’t add up.
It wasn’t Mercy that lit the cosmic alarm.
It was the people around him.
Too many fogged souls.
Too many half-closed hearts.
Too many women whose stories tilted —
not invalidated
not erased
just gently, firmly redirected into forgiveness they didn’t choose.
The universe tolerates cruelty longer than it tolerates fraud.
Fraud breaks the rules of motion.
It tells suffering:
“Stop moving.
You don’t get to decide how this story ends.”
That’s when Mort gets called.
He found Mercy reading poetry in a hall someone else had paid for.
People cried.
People held hands.
Mercy described making a pact with darkness
like it was a romantic anecdote.
People laughed because it sounded like theater,
and because laughing forgives pre-emptively.
Mort watched.
Not Mercy.
The room.
He saw women smiling politely with their hands in their laps.
He saw a girl pretending not to shrink when he walked past her row.
He saw love
doing the ugliest thing love can do:
protecting the wrong thing.
He didn’t stop the event.
He waited.
When Mercy left the building
to stand under the mural painted in his honor,
Mort joined him.
Mercy saw him and smiled like a man used to admiration.
“Brother,” he said warmly. “Are you here to hear the good news or share it?”
Mort didn’t answer.
He watched the mural:
Mercy painted like a saint.
Hands open.
Eyes upward.
Benevolent.
Paint forgives easier than people do.
Mort finally asked,
quiet as winter:
“Who have you actually apologized to?”
Mercy grinned.
“I’ve apologized to the universe,” he said. “That counts for everyone.”
“No,” Mort said gently. “It doesn’t."
Mercy’s smile tightened just a fraction.
“I’m doing good now,” he said. “I’m helping people. I’m proof healing is real.”
Mort nodded.
“You are proof that performing healing pays very well.”
Mercy’s eyes cooled.
“People need me,” he said simply.
Mort didn’t argue.
Predators always think they are necessary.
He found the woman later.
Not The Woman;
not the only one.
There’s never only one.
She didn’t tell him everything.
She didn’t have to.
She said she got messages she never asked for.
She said she was told to be flattered.
She said when she withdrew,
she was called ungrateful.
She said she was told he had suffered enough,
that she should “practice compassion.”
She said forgiveness didn’t feel like a gift.
It felt like pressure applied gently to her throat.
Mort listened.
He did not write anything down.
He didn’t ask her to forgive him.
He didn’t ask her for evidence.
He just let her tell the truth,
and watched the air around her
move again.
Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for someone
is agree, silently,
that what hurt them
did.
The thing living around Mercy
wasn’t inside him.
That would have made this easier.
It hovered above him like a halo made of debt.
A shimmering thing made entirely of borrowed belief.
Power from applause.
Power from hope.
Power from people who wanted to heal so badly
they outsourced their courage to a man who spoke confidently about demons.
Mort had seen worse entities.
He had rarely seen a more popular one.
He stood beneath the halo
and spoke like a clerk tired of being polite.
“He doesn’t get to keep what doesn’t belong to him,” Mort said quietly.
The halo pulsed,
confused.
Mort continued.
“The forgiveness he didn’t earn?
The absolution he never asked properly for?
The wholeness he convinced people they owed him?”
He looked at the sky.
“I need it back.”
Cosmic things rarely speak.
This one screamed.
Bright civility peeled back like paper soaked through with rain.
Everything Mercy had stolen without admitting to stealing
came loose.
Not to punish him.
Just to return balance.
Women felt anger again.
Men who adored him started to wonder why.
A mural that had looked holy
now just looked like a man.
Mercy staggered
like a drunk whose charisma had been poured out onto the floor.
He laughed weakly when the room no longer adored him by default.
“Why are you doing this?” he croaked.
Mort looked almost kind.
“Because forgiveness is not your right,” he said softly.
“It is not a currency.
You do not get to take it without being invited.”
Mercy snarled.
“You’re destroying the work I’ve done!”
Mort shook his head.
“I’m letting reality exist again.”
The town did not burst into righteous violence.
That would have been easy.
Instead,
something far more terrifying happened.
People had to think again.
Women decided what they actually felt.
Some left the room.
Some confronted him.
Some did neither.
Some forgave him —
and this time
it counted
because no one told them to.
Some never would.
He had to live with that.
Which meant he had to live with something real
for the first time in years.
Later,
Mort sat on a curb.
Someone walked by
and, out of reflex,
offered him coffee.
He held it.
He didn’t drink.
Janelle appeared beside him like gravity.
She already knew.
She watched the town adjusting to having feelings again.
“Did you break him?” she asked.
Mort shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I broke the shelter he hid in.”
She nodded slowly.
They sat in the new weather,
listening to a man realizing he wasn’t adored anymore
and women remembering that their boundaries were not cruelty.
Janelle finally exhaled.
“Forcing someone to forgive,” she said quietly,
“is a kind of assault.”
Mort nodded.
“Yes,” he said.
They didn’t feel triumphant.
They felt like they had torn gauze off a wound
that wasn’t done bleeding yet.
Sometimes that is justice.
Sometimes that is mercy.
Sometimes those are the same word
and sometimes they never will be.
The town breathed.
And somewhere,
far off,
a tired universe
allowed a little more truth
back into circulation.
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