Eloi Tilubie

Eloi is the warm heart of Saint-Spire, and he runs it from the kitchens. Bread always rising, a pot always on, a kind word always ready — for the sisters, for the priest, and most of all for the orphans, who have learned that the surest cure for any bad day is to drift toward the smell of something baking.

He remembers almost nothing of his life before he came to the abbey, and he has made peace with that the way kind people often do: by pouring himself entirely into the present — into the people in front of him, into the small daily work of feeding and tending and being needed. The children adore him. He would, he says, do anything for them.

Eat. Whatever it is, it's always a little easier once you've eaten.

There is a shadow beneath all that warmth — a blankness where a past should be. Eloi has never gone looking for it. Some doors, he senses, are kinder left closed.