He laughed nervously. A forgery, surely. But as the sun set, he took the tablet to the empty church and began reading aloud from the Gethsemane scene.

“Scene 12: The Garden. Jesus kneels. Sweat like blood. An angel holds a cup, but the cup is not silver—it is the sound of a mother weeping, forty years from now.”

“You found my script,” the apparition said. It was Longinus. “I wrote it so the world would remember the real Passion. Not the polished hymns. The soldier who trembled. The thief who laughed. The moment the sky tore like a curtain because God could no longer look at what men were doing.”

From that day on, Mateo never again celebrated Palm Sunday without trembling. And every time someone in the village whispered, “Can you pass me the Passion script?” he would reply: “Careful. Some scripts read you back.”