Chapter 40 Jillian
JILLIAN
“Take me to church / I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies”
— “Take Me to Church” by Hozier
As I expected, the cathedral is almost entirely empty.
It’s just me and an old woman seated close to the front on the right-hand side.
I pick a pew near the back, on the left, and sit down.
The wood is cold through my jeans. The ceiling is impossibly high above me, vaulted and painted in muted golds and blues that I can barely make out in the low light. Candles flicker along the side aisles.
I haven’t been in a church since I was pregnant.
That one was not nearly so grand as this.
It was a small chapel attached on a highway upstate, about forty minutes outside of Poughkeepsie, where I spent nine months pretending I was invisible.
The chapel had folding chairs for pews and a crooked wooden cross on the wall and a window that looked out onto a parking lot.
I used to go there in the evenings, not praying, just resting my belly on my hands and breathing.
I never knew what to say in there. I still don’t.
I fold my hands in my lap now. There’s no pregnant belly to rest them on.
I don’t know who I’m asking for forgiveness.
That’s the problem. I’ve been sitting with this for five years and I still don’t know who I owe the apology to.
God, maybe, if he’s up there and if he cares.
My daughter, definitely, except she doesn’t know I exist. Or myself, which feels selfish but also feels true, because I’ve been punishing myself for half a decade and I’m tired.
I’m so fucking tired.
Up at the chapel in Poughkeepsie, I used to whisper the same thing every night with my palms flat against my stomach: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m going to do the right thing, and you’re going to hate me for it, and I’m sorry.
My phone vibrates in my coat pocket. I ignore it. I’m not here for the outside world. That can wait.
Or so I thought, until it vibrates again. And again.
The old woman near the front turns around and gives me a look that could curdle milk. “Silence that thing,” she hisses. “This is a house of God, not a telephone booth.”
“Sorry,” I mutter, and fumble the phone out of my pocket. I intended to turn it off, but then I see that the screen is lit up with a text from an unsaved number. It’s a photo.
I open it—and nearly scream.
The photo is of me. Taken from behind and above, maybe fifteen feet back and to the right. My red hair against the dark wood of the pew. My green sweater. My hands folded in my lap, just like they are right now.
The photo was taken seconds ago.
I don’t turn around. I sit exactly where I am, staring at the image of myself on the small, bright screen, as my pulse careens out of control.
He’s here.
Kir is here.
I type back with shaking thumbs, Not here. Not now.
Three dots appear immediately.
You came here to confess something. So did I.
A priest walks past in the center aisle, heading toward the sacristy. He catches me looking at him and nods, a small, warm, unhurried gesture of welcome.
I try to nod back. I manage something that’s probably closer to a flinch. Because the word SINNER might as well be tattooed across my forehead in block letters. This priest has no idea what he just smiled at. If he did, I would most certainly not be welcome here.
I look around the cathedral to see if anyone has noticed my anxiety spiral. The answer seems to be no. The old woman is still in her pew up front and the priest has disappeared through a door beside the altar. Nobody else is here.
I start to type back, Where are you, and then I stop.
Like they’re being drawn by something invisible, my eyes drift to the confessional booths along the far wall.
There are three of them, ornate and wooden, with heavy curtains and narrow doors.
Two are clearly empty, the curtains pulled back, the interiors dark and still.
The third one has its right-side door shut. As I watch, it moves. Not much. A quarter inch, maybe less. I’d miss if I weren’t already looking for it. But I know what it means.
He’s waiting.
I sit with my hands in my lap for another few seconds, because I need my legs to stop shaking before I can stand. When they finally do, I stand up. My knees dip into a genuflect before I can stop them. Muscle memory doesn’t care that I haven’t believed in anything sacred for half a decade.
I walk down the aisle. Each step echoes up into that painted ceiling and comes back down sounding twice as big. I reach the third confessional and pull open the left-side door, the penitent’s side. The booth is small, dark, and smells like old wood and furniture polish and, beneath that…
Cinnamon.
I sit down on the narrow wooden bench and pull the door shut behind me. The latch catches with a soft click.
The lattice screen between us is old and intricate, the gaps small enough that I can’t make out any real detail on the other side. Just shapes. A shoulder. The outline of a jaw. But I can hear him breathing.
I whisper, “This is so fucked.”
He sighs. “Then leave.”
I should. But I don’t.
“I hurt someone tonight,” he confesses. “A man I didn’t know. He didn’t matter.” His breathing is taut and labored. “But I didn’t hesitate and I didn’t feel anything while I did it. I just put a bullet in his fucking skull.”
My fingernails dig into the denim on my thighs.
“The barrier keeping me from doing the same to you,” he continues, barely above a whisper, “is about as thin as this lattice between us.”
I stare at the carved wooden screen. As I watch, Kir’s fingertips appear through one of the gaps. Four of them, pale against the dark wood, smeared with an ash gray substance that can only be gunpowder.
I lift my hand off my thigh and press my fingertips to his. Skin to skin. Warm and alive and trembling. My clean hands to his stained ones.
We stay like that for a long moment. His fingertips and mine, pressed together through the lattice, four points of contact no bigger than communion wafers. I can feel his pulse through the pads of his fingers, or maybe that’s mine—it’s impossible to separate the two when they’re beating this fast.
And then something comes to life.
It starts in the pit of my stomach, a fire that has no business being here.
Not in a confessional. But the lattice is doing something to me, something I recognize with a sick, swooping clarity—because it’s doing what the mask used to do.
It’s a barrier. A veil. It reduces him to a voice and a shadow, and the separation is permission.
The blessing to feel what I feel without having to look it in the face.
My breathing changes. I press my fingers harder against his through the screen and the heat in my stomach drops lower, spreading between my hips, pooling and igniting there with an insistence that makes me squeeze my thighs together on the bench.
This is a church. I am sitting in a confessional in a cathedral on Mulberry Street at five-something in the morning, and I am getting wet for a man who just told me he murdered someone tonight. There is no version of this that doesn’t land me in a very specific circle of Hell.
Then Kir’s fingers withdraw.
I hear him stand. The wooden bench on his side creaks with the sudden absence of weight, and then his door opens, the hinges groaning softly, and clicks shut.
Footsteps. One, two—
My door opens.
Kir fills the frame. He’s still in the dark sweater from earlier, his hair disheveled, his jaw clenched so tight I can see the muscle working beneath the skin. His gray eyes finding mine in the candlelit gloom and they shine with an unholy light.
“I don’t want a wall between us anymore,” he growls. “Or a mask, or an excuse. I want you, Jillian Pierce. And I’ll drag you down to hell with me if that’s what it takes to have you.”
He steps in, ducking his head beneath the low frame, and pulls the door shut behind him, and this confessional becomes a coffin built for two.
The space collapses to nothing. His knees press against mine. His hands find the wall on either side of my head, bracketing me in, and the smell of him—cinnamon, cordite, cold night air—fills every cubic inch of the booth until there’s no oxygen left that doesn’t taste like him.
“This is a church,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“There’s an old woman out there. And a priest.”
“I know, Jillian. Not one of them can stop me. Neither can God or the Devil. The only one who can is you. Will you stop me, little fox?”
I look up at him. His face is inches from mine, close enough that I can count the flecks of silver in his gray irises and the vein pulsing at his temple. He’s waiting for my answer, which is absurd, because how can he not see it?
I know what I want. I’ve known for a long time now.
I reach up and wrap my fingers around his wrist, then pull his hand off the wall and press his palm flat against my chest, right over my heart, so he can feel it beating for him.
“No,” I whisper. “I won’t.”