It was the sighing, the news article read, the awful sighing that caught the woman’s attention in the half-light of morning and led her down to the beach. She said the young whales were the worst, their splashing frantic, their moans tortured.

Wren Crawford closed her laptop and pushed her sandwich aside on her desk.

She knew better than to spend her lunch break reading stories about whales beaching themselves by the hundreds half a world away. She could barely manage her own daily intake of sorrow working with traumatized women and children at Bethel House. She didn’t need to read about another potentially futile rescue mission. Her current therapist, Dr. Emerson, would agree: limit exposure to faraway tragedy and anguish as much as possible. Her job provided more than enough for anyone to absorb.

She fixed her attention on the many children’s drawings and paintings taped to file cabinets and tried to shake the whale image, but it was no use. All she saw were the volunteers with their buckets, laboring to keep the survivors cool and damp by dousing them with water, desperately cooperating with a high tide to turn the creatures upright and coax them out into safety. Then they would form a human chain and try to keep the rescued ones from stranding themselves again. Already the carcasses were strewn for hundreds of yards along the New Zealand coast. It would be several days before they could assess whether any of their efforts had succeeded.

She picked up her phone to text Casey, her best friend since middle school. He might tease her for being sensitive, but he wouldn’t condemn her.

Need a mental reset, she wrote.

What for?

Beached whales in New Zealand.

How about kittens somebody dumped in the alley?

Wren punched his number. “How many?”

“Three.”

“Where?”

“Inside the dumpster. Heard them crying when I took out the trash.”

She would never understand cruelty. Not to animals, not to children, not to any who were vulnerable. “Where are they now?”

“Playing with my shoelaces. And ow! Biting me. Hey, hey, Theo. Here—play with this.”

“You already named them?”

“Just one.”

“Does Brooke know?”

He laughed. “Not yet. Not sure how she feels about cats.”

Wren hoped his long-distance fiancée would approve. “Well, you’re a good man, Casey.”

“Or a sucker for cuteness.”

“Either way . . .” A coworker appeared in her doorway with the familiar Sorry to bother you but there’s an emergency look on her face. Wren held up a single finger to indicate she’d be there soon. “I’ve got to go. But maybe you can investigate whether there’s a no-kill shelter or a cat rescue agency? And they’ll probably need to go to a vet. What’s your schedule like? I’ve got to work late.”

“It’s okay. I got it. We’re not shooting anything today.” Casey, a freelance videographer, had been working for months on a project highlighting human trafficking in West Michigan. “But come by after work, okay, Wrinkle? I need to talk to you about something.”

“Okay.” She took one final bite of her sandwich. “But if there isn’t a safe place for them . . .”

“I know, don’t worry. Then I’ll keep them here until we can figure something out. And hope they don’t destroy my couch in the meantime.”

“Thanks, Casey. You’re a star.”

“Each of us lighting our own little corner of the world, right?”

Yes, she thought as she hurried down the hallway. In the midst of all that was crooked, dark, and despairing, Shine.

There was a sketch by her favorite artist, Vincent van Gogh—a pencil, chalk, and ink drawing of a gnarled tree with exposed roots, half torn up by a storm, yet clinging to the earth. Vincent had seen within the tree roots an image of the struggle for life, for hope. He understood it.

That was the picture that came to mind as she listened to her coworker recount the story of the latest referral: a mother beaten up by a boyfriend who had been pimping out her four-year-old to his friends. She’d come home from work early and discovered it.

Wren wasn’t sure if she was going to faint or vomit. She only knew she had to find a way to cling to something solid. Like Vincent’s tree roots. She gripped the edge of the table where she and Allie were sitting.

“You need a minute?” Allie asked.

Wren nodded.

Allie set aside the police report. “I keep thinking if we were in Chicago or Detroit, I might not be surprised by all of this, but Kingsbury . . .”

Exactly. In college Wren had been stunned by statistics on abuse and human trafficking in West Michigan. That’s when she had decided to put her compassion to good use and be part of the rescue mission in Kingsbury and beyond. But the darkness was relentless.

She bit her lip. She was not going to cry. Because if she started to cry, she might not be able to stop. Is that happening a lot? Dr. Emerson had asked her a few weeks ago. Crying that won’t stop?

Not a lot. But some.

At work?

No. She managed to hold it together at work. But it was exhausting, always being on high alert, always bracing for the next crisis, always living on the verge of losing control and crumbling.

She stared at her hands and pictured Vincent’s precarious tree.

Would you be open to getting some more help? Dr. Emerson had asked. Maybe taking a break from work?

She couldn’t. They were already understaffed, and still, the kids kept arriving at Bethel with their moms. She glanced out the window at the February gloom. “The baby whales are the worst.”

“What?”

She didn’t realize she’d said it aloud. “Nothing.”

Allie paused, then said, “Are you okay? I mean, not just about this, but in general. You’ve seemed a little off lately.”

Wren tried to receive the observation as concern rather than criticism. “Just feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything.”

Allie nodded. “Well, don’t let the enemy drag you down. This is frontline stuff, right? You’ve got to take up your shield of faith and fight back against the darkness. That’s what we’ve all got to do.”

Wren sighed. “Some days I don’t have much fight left in me.”

“I know. Me too. That’s why we’ve got to keep renewing our minds. We’ve got to take every thought captive because otherwise”—Allie motioned toward the hallway—“all this will pull us under.”

And on the days when she didn’t have the energy to take thoughts captive and renew her mind? On the days when the undertow of grief and fear was too strong to resist? Then what?

Allie seemed to be reading her thoughts. “It doesn’t matter how we feel. We’ve got to stay grounded in the Word. It’s the only way to survive. The only way through is to pray. Constantly.”

That was exactly what Wren found hardest to do whenever the darkness pressed in. She didn’t have the energy to read the Word or pray. But she wasn’t going to say that to Allie. She didn’t need guilt and judgment layered onto her sorrow. She pushed back her chair. “I should get in there, meet Evelyn and her mom.”

Allie eyed her with compassion. Or was it pity? “Tell you what—how about if we swap places today and I do the intake for this one?”

Wren was going to argue. She was going to assert her competence, demonstrate her resilience, and prove to Allie she was emotionally and spiritually fit to push back the darkness and fight the good fight. But she didn’t have the strength for bravado. And besides, with all the legal and medical complications involved in this type of case, she couldn’t risk missing something. Or falling apart in front of everyone. So she said, “Thanks, Allie.”

“You’d do it for me.” Allie picked up the folder. “You’ve still got time on your lunch hour. Why don’t you head to the art room? Take a deep breath, center yourself.”

Good idea. Wren retrieved her phone from her desk drawer, then went to the art room and closed the door behind her. She would paint and listen to music. That would help center her. She chose a few tubes of acrylic paint from the storage closet, set up an easel and a small canvas she had already primed, and selected one of her favorite songs, “Vincent,” for inspiration.

Starry, starry night, Don McLean sang as she squeezed cerulean blue onto her palette. Like Vincent, she could paint in blue and gray.

Look out on a summer’s day with eyes that know the darkness in my soul.

Vincent knew. He understood. He was a companion in darkness.

She mixed the blue with a bit of violet until it was almost black. Then she spread the gloom onto the canvas with thick impasto strokes, sculpting the dark into shadowy mountains and caverns. Strokes of contrasting yellow would brighten the sky, but she didn’t want it brightened. The purple darkness soothed her.

She stepped back and scrutinized the scene. She would blur the violet with gray and smudge the clouds into a brooding haze. Nothing luminous about it. Not like Vincent’s dark, which shimmered with light.

“Let it be what it is,” Dr. Emerson might say. “At least...