Chapter 1 #2
"Please." The word is quiet, stripped of her usual brightness.
My little sister, who I left with my worst secret when she was eighteen and I was twenty.
Who cleaned up a mess I made and then watched me disappear into a collar and a seminary and years of silence.
Who has every reason to hate me and calls me twice a week instead.
"I know it's not your world anymore. But I need my brother. Just this once."
I close my eyes. Behind them: marble floors, candlelight, the skyline of Miami through floor-to-ceiling windows. The world I was born into and ran from. Not because I hated it. That would be simpler. That would be survivable.
Because I loved it.
"I'll be there," I say.
After she hangs up, I sit alone in the church. The afternoon light filters through stained glass, painting the pews in colours that belong to another life. I don't pray. I just sit with it — the gala, Marisol's voice, the woman at the diner.
This is fine. This is one day. Sera is leaving. The gala is a single evening. I can hold the walls for one day and one evening and then return to the collar that does its job.
I have survived this long. I can survive this.
—
Wednesday evening confessions are usually quiet.
Mrs. Alvarez comes with her gossip that she frames as her own guilt—I've learned to hear the loneliness beneath her words.
Mr. Gutierrez struggles with his drinking but shows up faithfully each week; his effort alone deserves grace.
I sit behind the screen in the dim light, listening for the person beneath the sin, offering what comfort I can.
The routine steadies them. The consistency is what matters.
I'm about to close up when the door on the other side opens.
Not one of my regulars — they settle in with familiar ease. This person hesitates. The creak of the kneeler taken cautiously. The careful arrangement of weight. Then stillness.
I wait for the formula. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
It doesn't come.
Instead, she breathes. Just breathes, and the sound fills the narrow box like weather rolling in — controlled, measured, a woman deciding how much to give.
"I'm not Catholic," she says.
Everything stops.
I know that voice — immediately, cellularly, with a recognition that bypasses every rational thought and goes straight to the base of my spine. Low, rough around the edges, carrying that careful rhythm of someone who weighs every word before releasing it.
The woman from the diner. Sera. She's sitting on the other side of a screen in my confessional and she doesn't know it's me and I should say something — should identify myself, should acknowledge that we've met — but the words don't come because my body is too busy short-circuiting.
"I mean, I was Catholic. Once." A pause. "But I don't remember what to say."
"That's all right." My voice comes out steady. Professional. The priest voice, cultivated over time. "Words aren't required."
A soft laugh, bitter. "Then why am I here?"
I stay silent. Let the question hang. People answer their own questions when you give them space.
"Because I needed to talk to someone who can't repeat what I say." Her words come faster now, tumbling. "The seal. That's real, right? You can't tell anyone?"
"Nothing you say here leaves this space."
She exhales. The sound of someone releasing something they've been holding too long. A breath that seems to empty her completely, leaving her smaller somehow, closer to the screen.
"I don't know why I'm here. I've been driving for weeks and I walked past this church three times today before I came in."
I open my mouth to respond. Nothing comes out. I try again.
"This is a place for anyone who needs to be heard." My voice sounds steady. The rest of me is not.
"My husband died six months ago." The words come out flat, rehearsed — the way you say something you've practised saying until the edges are smooth.
I wait.
Then she laughs, bitter, cracked. "And the thing I can't tell anyone — the thing that's eating me alive — is that I'm relieved. He's dead and I can breathe and what kind of person does that make me?"
My hands find the armrest. Grip.
"Grief takes many forms," I begin, reaching for pastoral mode, but she cuts me off.
"No. I'm not grieving. I'm free." She pauses, searching.
"The world got smaller around me, piece by piece.
Choices disappeared. Friends disappeared.
Everything disappeared except him and this life he built around us like a beautiful cage.
And now he's gone and I should be devastated but I'm not.
I'm relieved. I'm so fucking relieved I could scream. "
The profanity in the confessional should scandalize me. It doesn't. It sounds like the most honest thing anyone has said in this box in three years.
And her voice — God help me, her voice. In the diner, it was warm and wry and edged with humor.
In here, in the dark, stripped of performance, it's something else entirely.
Raw. Low. Intimate in a way that fills the narrow space until the walls might as well not exist. I'm aware of her breathing on the other side of the screen.
The warmth of another person, inches away, separated by a lattice that suddenly feels like nothing at all.
I am not thinking about the curve of her throat as she leaned on the counter at Alma's.
I am not thinking about the way her fingers wrapped around the coffee cup.
I am not thinking about the small, involuntary sound she made tasting pie, and I am certainly not reimagining that sound in a context that would send me directly to hell.
"But that's not the worst part," she continues, her voice dropping lower.
"The worst part is what I miss. Not him — never him.
But the world. It was dangerous and electric and alive in a way nothing else has ever been.
I was surrounded by dangerous people doing dangerous things and I liked it.
The parties at Il Luss—" She catches herself.
"The parties were intoxicating. I chose not to ask questions.
I chose the intensity over the safety. What kind of person thrives in a world like that? "
My skin prickles. The confessional is too warm.
Too close. She is right there, behind the screen, and I can hear every shift of her weight, every breath, and my body is responding with a directness that eight years of celibacy has done nothing to civilize.
I am hard. In a confessional. In a church.
While a woman pours out her anguish three feet away from me.
There is no version of this that God forgives.
I press my hands against the armrest until the wood bites my palms, willing my body to stand down. It doesn't listen. It hasn't listened since she walked into the diner and every wall I've built went glass-thin.
"I'm broken," she says quietly. "I only feel real when things are on the edge of disaster."
The silence stretches between us. She has just described the inside of my soul without knowing I was in the room. I am a man who feels too much, wants too much, burns too hot, and the only solution I found was to build a life with nothing in it that could catch fire.
"Feeling intensely isn't pathology," I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I intend. "Some people are wired for deeper currents. That doesn't make you broken. It makes you honest about what being alive costs."
"How do you know?" Something sharp in her voice now. "How does a priest know what it feels like to be alive only when everything's about to burn down?"
What comes out of my mouth is reckless and true:
"Because grace and destruction sometimes wear the same face."
Silence. When she speaks again, her voice is softer. "You're not like other priests."
No. I'm not. Other priests don't sit in the confessional with an erection they can't will away, thinking about the way a stranger's mouth moves when she smiles, knowing her darkness because it's their own, wanting things that would shatter every vow they've taken.
Forgive me, God, I pray, and I know exactly what I'm asking forgiveness for.
Not the desire. I've weathered desire before — in seminary, in the early years, on the bad mornings when the cold water isn't enough. Desire I can survive.
This is worse. This is recognition. This is a woman who carries the same fire I carry, who described my own cage from the inside, who looked at my collar and saw through it in the first three seconds.
She said she was just passing through town.
She'd better be.