Chapter 20 Caterina
CATERINA
St. Brigid’s remembers how to hold sound like secrets.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon—pale light, empty pews, the faint lemon-and-wax smell of floors that have outlasted arguments. I kneel in the same confessional box where once I didn’t confess at all.
Today I do.
I speak in a whisper that belongs to a younger self and a new one sharing the same throat. I say out loud what I’ve been carrying: the thought I had on a boat, the wish I made with teeth in it, the moment I loved my husband most and it scared me because of what he was doing with his hands.
The priest’s voice is gentle and conservative in his use of words.
He doesn’t gasp. He doesn’t reach for lightning.
He tells me God can sort through what I’ve brought, and that my job is to keep telling the truth and to stop mistaking fear for humility.
For penance he asks for something that looks like study and something that looks like kindness. I promise both.
When I push the door open, the church is so quiet you can hear the candles think. The confessional door thuds closed behind me as if it were breathing all along.
Cayce is in the same pew he was the first night I met him.
He sits like he owns his bones again, stretched along the aisle-end of the fourth row where the stained glass makes the wood look bruised and lovely.
Hands folded, not clasped. Jacket open. The ring gleams when the light finds it; my own feels heavy and right.
I slide in beside him, and he turns toward me.
“Little saint,” he says, keeping the words low because this is a place for low, not because he has to.
“I did it properly this time,” I say. “A real confession.”
“How was God?” he asks, mouth thinking about smiling.
“Good at listening.” I lean back, eyes up at the ribs of the ceiling. “You?”
“Haven’t said anything yet,” he answers. “Been waiting on the girl who makes the room make sense.”
That gets me right where it always does, a direct hit under the breastbone. “Funny,” I say. “I was told the same, once.”
We sit in the kind of quiet that doesn’t have to be fed.
Dust moves in the window-beam, performing for no one.
I let my head tip so it brushes his shoulder, and he doesn’t move it away; he tilts into it a fraction like we’ve been doing this for a lifetime instead of a handful of weeks that rearranged everything.
“It feels like a circle,” I say. “Back where we started.”
“Different circle,” he says. “Last time I was hiding behind a screen and pretending I didn’t know what I wanted.”
“And now?”
“I know,” he says. “I want you and the life you’ll give me. Forever.”
We take inventory, not in a list, but in the shared way of two people naming constellations. Nan is fierce and fine and has adopted me so thoroughly I now fear for the linen closet of any enemy I point at.
Don Marco sits straighter in meetings and listens like he intends to be the last person in the room to make the wrong call.
Rafferty came to the house in the morning and fixed a hinge that didn’t need fixing because he needed to do something with his hands. Cayce let him, and later I found the hinge opening smoother like a tiny redemption you can feel.
“And your uncle,” Cayce says, not like a man giving a report, but like a husband checking the house for drafts.
“Is the past tense,” I say. That truth lands somewhere that isn’t victory and isn’t mourning, something like a closed book that will always be on the shelf. “I thought I’d feel more. Rage. Relief. I feel…space.”
“Good,” he says. “We’ll fill it with something that belongs to you.”
I thread my fingers through his, my thumb finding the Ogham marking inside the ring. The mark is where my skin knows it will be. Cayce finally told me that it spells our name. I know better than to think the word does the work for us, It just reminds us to do it.
The organ pipes are dark and a little dusty; the choir loft is empty except for a forgotten program and a pencil with someone’s teeth in the wood. This is not a Mass day. No one is here to make sure we behave. God is, but He’s busy and He knows us, besides.
Cayce turns his head, studying me like he needs one more angle, one more frame for the album we’re building. “Would you,” he asks, and I already love the shape of the question because he hasn’t asked me for anything he wouldn’t die to protect, “take my confession?”
I go bright. “Now?”
“Now,” he says. “If you want it.”
A nervous grin quirks my lips. “What about the priest?”
“He left a few minutes ago.”
I could make a joke about sacraments and boundaries, about blending the sacred and the foolish, about how we’ve been walking that line since the first time a screen tried to keep our mouths apart. I don’t. I stand and hold out my hand.
“In the box, then, sir,” I say, and he rises like a man obeying a commandment he’s relieved to find written down.
We cross the aisle without hurry. The confessional is wood and shadow and the kind of privacy humans invented before we learned to password our lives.
I slip into the penitent’s side; he takes the other.
The screen between us is thin as a line.
I can see the outline of his jaw, the whisper of his mouth when he breathes.
My knees remember how to kneel; my body remembers the last time I did and what came after.
I speak first. “Bless me,” I say, and it means a dozen things at once.
His voice is low enough to be a touch. “Go on.”
I hear him move, not to adjust, but to settle himself like a man who is exactly where he means to be. I slide my hands into my lap and feel the rosary I tucked there, the small weight of it, the smooth place where a thumb has made a path. The wooden lattice between us glows the color of old honey.
“What do you want to confess,” I ask.
“That I keep count,” he says, steady. “Of everyone who has ever hurt you or could. That if I live to be old I will still be making lists. That sometimes, when I’m quiet, I’m not planning violence. I’m planning how to keep you away from it. And sometimes I’m planning both.”
“Those are truths,” I say. “Not sins.”
“They’re both,” he says, with a humility that sounds like iron. “I want to be clever enough to stop using my hands. But to be painfully transparent, I also plan to use them.”
I lean forward until my forehead finds the screen and rests there. “Sometimes I want you to,” I say into the grain. “And sometimes I want to be the only thing you touch.”
“You are,” he says. “Even when I’m holding someone else by the throat.”
The sentence should shock me. It doesn’t. We have bled the scandal out of honesty.
“Anything else?”
“That when you walked into the room that night and I saw you—barefoot, wild-eyed, taser in your hand—I believed for the first time since I was a boy that what I wanted was possible.”
“What did you want,” I whisper.
“A house where you sleep first,” he says. “And monsters are on the outside, not inside.”
“Absolution granted,” I tell him, quiet and fierce, because no priest will say it like I mean it. “Go and sin intelligently.”
His laugh is low and desperate and mine. “You’re so bad,” he says.
“I’m so yours,” I correct.
There’s a beat where the room grows small enough to wear.
He shifts, and I see his hand through the lattice, fingers curling like he wishes wood was less devout.
I stand and the door on my side creaks, that little crow-caw of old hinges on their best behavior.
I slip out, cross the narrow shared wall, and open his.
He’s waiting on the bench inside, shadowed, jaw unshaven as if sleep has not yet convinced him we made it home. I step in and close the door behind me. The booth becomes a world.
“You sure,” he asks, because the last twenty-four hours rewrote a lot and only fools assume the old sentences still hold.
“Yes,” I say, and I’m not sure until I say it how much I needed to say yes in a room like this where once I said nothing.
We don’t rush.
We don’t dare.
The walls are too thin for carelessness and too thick for shame. I sit on his lap like we invented the chair for this. His hands bracket my hips and then wrap around my back with a control that would make a ticking timepiece jealous.
I taste his mouth—clean, mint and the kind of hunger that isn’t for food. He breathes into me the way men do when they’ve been holding their breath for years. I kiss him the way women do when they decide the scar is as holy as the skin.
“Tell me,” he says against my lower lip, and it’s not an order, it’s a way to keep the room small enough to bear.
“I want to feel you between my thighs when I leave this place,” I say. “I want to walk out smiling and know the pews are going to gossip and not care.”
He obliges me the way a tide obliges the moon.
Hands sure, cadence right, the screen at my back warm from our breath.
He speaks to me like something a priest could call scandal and I’d call navigation: there, good, breathe, now.
If God turns His face, it’s to give us privacy, not judgment.
I’m not blaspheming when I say it feels like being rebuilt.
When I come apart, it’s silent the way storms can be silent if you’re under the right roof. He follows because I ask him to, because he wanted it as much as I did, because some doors close on a whisper and still latch tight. We stay tangled until our ribs recall their names.
My forehead rests in the curve of his collarbone; one of his hands rubs my spine like he’s smoothing out pages. For a sliver of time, the booth holds every promise we’ve made—spoken and not.
“Confession heard,” I murmur.
“Confession kept,” he answers.
We fix ourselves with the mutual care of thieves who plan to steal hours later.
He straightens my hair like he did on the wedding day after we ruined the schedule; I press his tie into obedience with two fingers.
He kisses the outside of my ring—unnecessary, perfect—and I let a laugh escape because it feels good to be a woman who laughs in a box holy men built for tears.
We step out one at a time, sabbath-quiet, and reenter the empty church like nothing happened except everything. In the fourth pew, we sit again. The air is thin and sweet as new paper.
At the front of the sanctuary, the priest rearranges things on his altar with a small frown on his face. Or maybe it’s a smirk. I can’t quite tell.
“Things are changing,” I say, because it seems polite to tell the room.
“They are,” he agrees. “We’re doing the changing, or I don’t want it.”
“Nan will approve,” I say. “Don Marco will pretend not to, then bring cake to help us celebrate.”
He huffs. “Rafferty has plans for an empire.”
“Pru will demand a crown.”
“I’ve been told she already owns three,” he says fondly.
We sit like that, the kind of married where even the silence picks up our rings and tries them on for size. My heartbeat has stopped trying to outrun my body. The old fear is still here, but it’s house-trained.
“Do you know,” I ask, and he looks ready to know anything, “what I told the priest?”
“Tell me.”
“I told him I’m trying not to confuse obedience with holiness. That I’ve spent years being afraid of wanting anything.” I look at our hands. “And that the only thing I want now is a life where my wanting doesn’t get other people killed.”
He turns my palm up and traces the lines like a map he intends to drive tonight. “We’ll build it,” he says. “We’ll still have to break things sometimes. But we’ll be precise.”
“We already are,” I say, thinking of a certain office and a knife behind an ear and a taser’s delighted crack, and the way the ocean pretended not to notice.
He tilts his head toward the altar. “Light a candle?”
“For the dead,” I say.
“For the living,” he corrects.
We walk up together. I drop money in the wooden slot like it’s a thank-you note; he picks a tall, thin taper and lets me hold the match. The flame takes, hungry and polite. We stand long enough to make it a prayer, short enough not to be dramatic.
On the way back down the aisle, I stop at our pew and turn to him. The empty church feels like ours by squatters’ rights.
“You have anything else to confess,” I ask, because if he says yes, I’ll take it, here, now, a hundred times.
He pretends to consider. “One thing.”
“What.”
“I like you in churches,” he says. “Dangerous is your color.”
I laugh and it echoes up into the beams like bells.
I take his hand and we go, not because we’re finished, but because we aren’t.
Outside, the afternoon is learning how to be evening.
On the steps, he kisses my knuckles because the street is watching.
At the curb, he opens the car door because tradition can be tamed to serve the right queen.
“Home,” he says.
“Home,” I answer, and as we pull away, St. Brigid’s keeps our secrets the way she always has—by holding more stories than she bothers to tell.
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