HE DAY AFTER Mitchell’s plane took off from Midway Airport, handwritten messages were delivered to a select group of people.

In Chicago, Matt and Meredith Farrell received theirs at 9:30PM. Matt read it and grinned.

“What is it?” Meredith asked.

“A wedding invitation from Mitchell,” he said, handing it to her.

Meredith read it and laughed. “He kidnapped Kate and Danny, got them emergency passports, and flew them to Italy. He’s convinced Kate to marry him, but he’s afraid to give her time to change her mind. The wedding’s in three days. How like Mitchell to ignore all the obstacles and do whatever it takes.”

Meredith reached for the phone and called Julie Benedict, who had just received a similar message. “Zack is canceling a shoot right now,” Julie said. “Can you and Matt get away?”

Meredith looked at her husband and held up the invitation with a questioning look. He nodded, and Meredith told Julie, “Of course.”

The third message was delivered to the home of Mrs. Olivia Hebert and brought to her by her elderly butler. Mrs. Hebert opened the envelope, read the message, and burst into a jubilant smile. “Mitchell is marrying Kate Donovan in Italy in three days, Granger! You and I will be flown there in his private plane.”

“I shall look forward to the trip, Madam,” Granger assured her.

“Guess who will be flying with us,” Olivia said dreamily as she pressed the message to her bosom and sighed.

“I haven’t any idea, Madam.”

“Zack Benedict!” she exclaimed.

The fourth message was delivered the following morning to the rectory of St. Michael’s Church in Chicago. Father Mackey, the young assistant pastor, answered the door, accepted the envelope, and carried it down the hall to Father Donovan’s office.

“This envelope just arrived for you, Father.”

“Just put it on my desk. I’m working on the budget for next month.”

“I promised the man who delivered it that I would hand it to you personally and at once.”

“Very well,” Father Donovan said, laying down his pencil and reaching for the envelope. “Have you made the changes I suggested to your sermon for Sunday?” he inquired of the young priest who’d been sent to St. Michael’s to work under his tutelage.

“Some of them,” Father Mackey replied as Father Donovan slipped his thumb beneath the flap and opened the envelope.

His reply made Father Donovan sigh. “You’re a dedicated priest, Robert, and you write an excellent sermon, but you have a tendency to take a hard line when you should bend a little bit. Conversely, you bend a little too easily when you ought to take a hard line. I particularly notice that tendency when I listen to you trying to counsel parishioners who come to you for advice. As time goes by, I suspect you’ll learn when to be inflexible and stand up for principles and church doctrine, and when you need to relax and respect the realities of a parishioner’s life.”

As he spoke, Father Donovan extracted and unfolded a single sheet of paper bearing the initials MW at the top right-hand corner. He read what it said and half rose out of his chair, his mouth open in indignation.

“Not bad news, I hope?”

“He has a lot of nerve!” Father Donovan said when he recovered his power of speech. Since the newspapers had already broken the story about the identity of the father of Kate’s child and his sudden arrival in Chicago to pay the ransom, Father Donovan had no compunction about telling Father Mackey about the contents of the letter in his hand. “Mitchell Wyatt apparently took my niece and her son, Danny, to Italy, and now he is summoning me there to perform their wedding in a little village near Florence the day after tomorrow! That man has b— gall,” he corrected himself.

Snatching up the telephone, he dialed the operator. “I need to place a call to Rome, Italy, immediately,” he said, and then read her the telephone number printed on the bottom of Mitchell Wyatt’s personal letterhead. “Is this going to be an expensive call?” he asked.

“Excellent,” he replied when the operator quoted him what seemed an exorbitant per-minute rate. “Make sure it’s a collect call. Really?... A collect call is even more expensive? Excellent!” he replied vengefully.

“WHAT’S THAT?” MITCHELL asked Kate as she began unwrapping a package that had just been delivered to her by overnight international mail.

“I don’t know, but it’s from Gray Elliott,” Kate said.

“Be careful, it’s probably bugged.”

“It’s a wedding gift,” she said, reading the card.

“We should call the bomb squad.”

Ignoring him, Kate lifted the lid off the inner box and folded back the tissue. It was a beautiful antique photograph album. Carefully, Kate lifted the album’s cover, then looked up at Mitchell with shining eyes. Inside the album were enlargements of some of the photographs taken by MacNeil and Childress.

The first one was of Kate and Mitchell on the balcony of the hotel in St. Maarten. They were standing very close, smiling at each other, and a kiss was just a moment away.

“Mr. Wyatt?” Mitchell’s secretary said as she walked into the living room of his apartment. Out of deference to Kate, who was sitting beside him on the sofa, she explained in English, “The collect call you’ve been expecting is on your private line. He sounds... upset.”

Mitchell took his arm from around Kate’s shoulders. “That will be your uncle,” he said mildly as he stood up and walked over to a large, comfortable upholstered chair that was positioned in front of the windows overlooking Piazza Navona. He sat down in the chair, glanced out the windows at one of his favorite views, and answered the phone. “Good morning, Father Donovan. I assume you’ve gotten my letter?”

Father Donovan focused his gaze on the young priest he was trying to coach while he launched his opening salvo in an angry, no-nonsense voice. “Mitchell, do you honestly think for one moment that I would bind Kate for the rest of her life with the sacred vows of holy matrimony to a man who won’t allow her to have children?”

“No.”

“Then what is the purpose of sending me this—this outrageous invitation to perform the ceremony in Florence?”

“I have promised Kate that she can have as many children as she wants whenever she wants to have them.”

Father Donovan nodded encouragingly to Father Mackey, but in his enthusiasm over his success, he pressed for added assurances instead of just accepting Mitchell’s clearly worded statement. “And you won’t oppose her in any way?”

“On the contrary, I will take the greatest pleasure in helping her conceive them.”

“If that was intended to be a lewd, provocative remark, I am disappointed but not shocked.” At that statement, Father Mackey leaned forward worriedly in his chair, but Father Donovan smiled and dismissed the young priest’s concern with a silent wave of his hand, and then moved on to the next skirmish he faced with the man on the telephone.

“Are you Catholic?... Yes, being baptized as one qualifies as being Catholic.... Have you been married before in a Catholic ceremony?... Well, if you haven’t been in a church or near a cleric in fifteen years, then I guess it’s safe to assume you haven’t been married in a Catholic ceremony. However, I cannot make assumptions about anything as important as this, so I have to ask you to answer that question with a yes or no.”

Father Donovan repeated Mitchell’s curt negative answer for Father Mackey’s benefit, then braced himself for a major battle. But first he offered a little reassurance—in order to soften Mitchell up. “In that case, Mitchell, I see no insurmountable obstacles to my participating in your wedding to Kate. I gather from your note that you’ve already made arrangements for the ceremony with the local village priest. Is he willing to let me participate?”

Father Donovan nodded at Father Mackey, indicating Mitchell’s answer to the last question was yes. “Well, that’s very good,” Father Donovan said delightedly. Then he smoothly added, “If you haven’t been near a priest in fifteen years, it’s been at least that long since you went to confession. Naturally, you’ll need to take care of that matter before the ceremony—”

He stopped because Mitchell cut him off with a clipped, annoyed question. Then he responded in a tone meant to convey understanding and patience—but slightly strained patience. “No, Mitchell, I assure you I am not joking. When you and Kate stand before me in God’s house on your wedding day, prepared to take your sacred vows, I want you both to have souls as clean and shiny as you had when you were babies. That means you will have both been to confession beforehand. That is not a request; it is a requirement.”

After a pause to let that sink in, Father Donovan said much more kindly, “Children frequently dread going to confession because they associate it with guilt and embarrassment, but the sacrament of confession is actually intended to offer forgiveness and understanding, to help us feel truly absolved.”

He paused again, waiting for a reaction, but the line was dead silent, so he forged ahead. “If there’s a language barrier, or some other reason you don’t want to make your confession to the local village priest, then I’ll hear your confession myself if you’d like.”

That offer got an instantaneous response from Mitchell, one that made Father Donovan’s shoulders shake with laughter. Clamping his palm over the phone’s mouthpiece, he whispered to Father Mackey, “He just told me I could take that fantasy with me all the way to hell.”

Recovering his composure with an effort, Father Donovan said almost gently, “Mitchell, I’m not going to hell and neither are you. You may confess to any priest you like, so long as you’ve taken care of the matter before the ceremony. Now please put Kate on the phone. Your future wife and I need to have a little talk.”

In Rome, Mitchell jerked the phone away from his ear and handed it to Kate, who had perched on the arm of his chair. “It’s your turn,” he said irritably, and got up to fix them both a cocktail. As he listened to Kate’s end of the conversation, however, a little of his ire began to transform into amusement, because she apparently wasn’t getting off any easier than he had. In fact, whatever her uncle was saying to her caused her to frequently murmur “Yes, I know” and “Yes, you’re right” and “Yes, I will.”

It was at least five minutes later when she finally said, “Good-bye. We’ll see you soon,” and hung up the phone.

Mitchell handed her the drink he’d fixed her, then sat down in the chair again and pulled her onto his lap. “Your uncle is a self-righteous, pompous, sanctimonious, petty tyrant,” he announced irritably.

Smiling softly into his eyes, Kate pressed her fingers to his chiseled lips to silence him. “He was giving me a lecture on the need to give you the benefit of the doubt in the future and reminding me about my part in what went wrong with us before. He was telling me that you’re a man of tremendous character and personal integrity, a man who is capable of loving Danny and me deeply and forever with gentleness and strength.”

“As I was saying a moment ago,” Mitchell replied with a grin, “your uncle is a man of surprising perception as well as an excellent judge of character.”

Father Mackey was not so confident of that. In fact, he had serious misgivings about the wisdom of Father Donovan’s willingness to support Kate’s marriage to Mitchell. He stood up, started to leave, then turned back. Father Donovan leaned back in his chair, smiling with satisfaction at the outcome of his phone call, when he noticed the young priest’s worried expression. “You look troubled, Robert. What’s wrong?”

“I just don’t see how you can feel any confidence about marrying two people who have known each other only a few days and who have the kind of unpleasant history they have.”

Folding his arms across his chest, Father Donovan contemplated his reply for a moment, and then said, “I’m going to answer that with the same question I posed once to Mitchell: How is it possible that two people, who knew each other only a few days, could end up being so agonizingly disappointed in each other that neither of them was able to forget about it after almost three years?”

“There could be psychological undercurrents, unresolved parental issues. Who knows what the answer is?”

“I know what the answer is,” Father Donovan said with certainty. “The answer is that when they were together during those few days, those two people loved each other so much that neither one of them could come to terms with the suffering they inadvertently inflicted on each other later.”

“You could be right, I suppose. But even so, a man and a woman—”

“Please don’t quote to me from another book on the sanctity of marriage that you read in the seminary. In fact, I want you to read a book that may actually help you grasp the spiritual reality that can exist between couples who truly love each other. You won’t find it on the usual reading lists.”

“I’ll be happy to read whatever you suggest. What’s the title?”

“It’s called The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.”

Father Mackey looked dubious but willing. He walked over to Father Donovan’s desk and wrote down the book’s title and author on a piece of paper. Then he stopped and stared, openmouthed, at the older priest. “Wasn’t Gibran excommunicated?”

Father Donovan shrugged. “Yes, and so was Galileo, for daring to claim that God’s earth actually circled the sun and not the reverse. Look who’s laughing now.”