Epilogue
Alec- Six Months Later
The studio was smaller than it looked on YouTube—two armchairs, a velvet loveseat, a coffee table crowded with mismatched mugs and a neon sign on the wall behind us that buzzed, in hot-pink cursive, BLESS YOUR HEART.
The podcast was called Sinners & Saints, it had four million downloads a month, and it was hosted by two women from Tulsa who had taken one look at the wreckage of American piety and decided to laugh at it professionally.
Roxanne “Rox” Turner was the loud one, all leopard print, gold hoops, and a laugh you could hear through a wall.
Bett Cunningham was the dry one, reading glasses pushed up into a silver bob, the kind of calm that made you confess things.
They had been doing this for six years, and as Rox announced in the cold open, never been so excited about a guest in their lives.
“Because let me tell you what we love in this house.” Rox held up one manicured finger.
“We love a televangelist sex scandal. We do. We are not proud, we are not above it, we wait for them like other people wait for Christmas. And THIS one—” she gestured at the two of us on the loveseat, “—this one had everything. The megachurch. The confession in front of thousands of people. The mommie dearest of it all. And—” she pointed at me, “—a love story.
We don't usually get the love story. Usually the man just goes to a Christian rehab in Arizona and we never hear from him again.”
“They come back six months later with a podcast of their own,” Bett said.
“They ALWAYS come back with a podcast,” Rox agreed. “But not our boys. Our boys came back with each other. Harrison, Alec—welcome.”
“Thank you for having us,” Harrison said, and beside me he was loose and easy in a way the man I'd met in a beige hotel room six months ago could not have faked at gunpoint.
No suit today. A soft gray henley, sleeves shoved up, no tie, no cross.
He'd stopped wearing the cross around month two. I hadn't asked. He'd just stopped.
“Okay, I have to start here, because the internet wants to know and I am the internet's humble servant.” Rox leaned forward. “How did you two meet. And do not give me the People magazine version, I want the real one.”
I felt Harrison go very slightly still beside me—old reflex, the watchman checking the door—and then, deliberately, relax. He nodded at me. Your call.
“We met,” I said, “on Grindr. At the convention.”
There was a beat of pure silence, and then Rox put her whole head back and howled.
“ON GRINDR. At the—” she had to set her coffee down. “At the CONVENTION. At the family-values, God-and-country, drag-is-grooming CONVENTION, the two of you met on a hookup app—”
“In fairness,” I said, “it's the busiest those servers ever are. You want to know when a values delegation lands in your city, don't check the airport. Check Grindr. The whole grid lights up like a Christmas tree.”
“Of COURSE it does.” Rox wiped her eyes. “Of course it does. Bett, why are we surprised. We are never surprised.”
“I'm not surprised,” Bett said placidly. “I've read the donor records.”
“The thing is,” I said, “my profile was the only one with a face. Everybody else was a, you know—”
“A headless torso,” Rox supplied. “The Lord's own anonymous abs.”
“Exactly. So I lit up the whole convention like a flare, and this one—” I tipped my head at Harrison “—messaged me.”
“I didn’t know who he was,” Harrison said.
“That's the part people don't believe. I didn't know he was press.
Alec didn't know I was… me. We were two people in the dark who didn't know each other's names, and it was the first honest conversation I'd had in about twenty years.” He said it lightly, but the room caught the weight under it.
Then Bett, gently, over the top of her glasses: “That's the part that gets me, actually. Harrison, you walked away from—what's the number, the ministry was valued at—”
“I genuinely don't know anymore,” Harrison said. “And I mean that as a brag.”
“Billions,” Bett said. “The jet. The political machine. People with your kind of platform do not give that shit up. They repent on Tuesday and they're back fundraising by Friday. You torched it. On purpose. On fucking camera.” She tilted her head. “How hard was that?”
Harrison was quiet for a moment, and I watched him reach for the true answer instead of the smooth one, the way he'd been teaching himself to for six months.
“It was the best decision I've ever made,” he grinned.
“That's the honest answer and I know how it sounds.
People expect me to talk about how much I lost. And I did lose things—real things.
I'm not going to pretend the money and the influence weren't real. But I spent thirty-five years being the most important man in every room I walked into and I was so lonely I used to count the months between the times anyone touched me.” He glanced at me.
“And then I gave all of it away in about ninety seconds, and what I got back was him. So. Hardest thing I ever did, and it was the best thing I ever did. Oh, and I also met my future husband,” he added.
Rox's mug stopped halfway to her mouth.
“I'm sorry.” She set it down with a clack. “Future. Husband. Y'all are getting MARRIED?”
“Next week,” Harrison said, and the grin that broke over his face was the realest thing in the studio. “Hawaii. Small. Just us and a few people who actually like us, which it turns out is a shorter list than I used to have and about a thousand times better company.”
“NEXT WEEK—” Rox was up out of her chair now, hoops swinging. “Bett, they're getting married next week and they came on our little show first, I could cry, I'm not going to but I could— okay. Okay. Details. Who's wearing what? Are there doves? Tell me everything.”
“No doves,” I said.
“Barefoot on a beach,” Harrison said. “At sunset. He thinks it's corny.”
“It's incredibly corny,” I said. “I'm completely on board. I cried just booking the flights, but don't tell anyone, it'll ruin my whole brand.”
“Your brand.” Rox pounced, settling back into her chair.
“Let's talk about your brand, Alec, because this is the other thing.
You had the story of the DECADE. You were in the room.
You had the photographs. And the word on the street is you got offered a national news desk—a real one, —and you turned it down.
Why on God's green earth would you do that?”
“Same reason, honestly.” I shrugged. “I met the love of my life.”
“Oh, they MATCH,” Rox said to Bett. “They gave the same answer. I'm going to be sick, it's beautiful.”
“It's a little more boring than that,” I said.
“The network wanted the story, and the story they wanted was the takedown—the hypocrite, the scandal, the head on a pike.
And by the time I could've written it, the man wasn't a hypocrite anymore.
He'd told the truth himself, in public, which is the one thing the machine can't survive and can't spin.
There was no takedown left to write. So I wrote the other story.
How the cage gets built. Who profits. What it costs the kid in the church pew who thinks he's the only one.
And I didn't want to do that with a network lawyer reading over my shoulder, so—”
“So he built his own thing,” Harrison said, with a pride he didn't bother to hide.
“Substack and a YouTube channel,” I said. “I point a camera at right-wing grifts and I turn the lights on. No editor, no owner, nobody I owe a favor. Turns out a couple hundred thousand people will pay for somebody to just… tell them the truth, plainly, with the receipts. Who knew.”
“I knew,” Bett said. “It's the whole reason we have jobs.”
“And Harrison.” Rox turned, and her voice did the thing the good ones do, dropped the bit for a second and got real. “You're not preaching anymore. You gave away the empire. So what does a man like you even do with his Sundays now? Genuinely. I want to know.”
“I open shelters,” Harrison said.
“You—”
“For homeless queer kids. The ones who get put out on the streets by their families. There are more of them than you would believe, and a frightening number of them come out of exactly the kind of church I used to headline.” He said it without heat, just fact.
“We've got one open in Houston and one in Richmond—where this one's from, I relocated.” Harrison pointed at me.
“I follow him around now like a stray—and there's a foundation behind it so we can put them in more cities.
Beds. Counseling. Somebody at the front desk at three a.m. who's glad to see you walk in instead of sorry.” He paused.
“I spent my whole life raising money to tell people who God couldn't possibly love.
I figured I'd spend the rest of it on the other side of that ledger.”
The studio was quiet. Even Rox, for a second.
“Can I ask you something,” Bett said, “and you can tell me to go to hell.”
“I've been told worse by worse.”
“Do you still believe in God?”
And there it was, the only question that had ever really mattered, asked over a coffee table with a neon sign buzzing behind it, and I felt Harrison consider it the way he considered everything now—honestly, without the armor, reaching for the truth.
“I don't know,” he said. “That's the real answer, and I used to think it was the most frightening sentence a man could say.
I truly don't know. I spent thirty-five years absolutely certain.
But the certainty was a cage, and I'm not in a hurry to build another one out of the opposite.
Maybe there's something. Maybe there's nothing. What I know—” he reached over and took my hand “—is that everything they told me was a sin turned out to be the only thing in my life that ever felt holy.
So whatever's up there, if anything is, I figure it can find me at the shelter. I'll be the one making up the beds.”
“Well,” Rox’s voice was thick, and she didn't bother to hide it. “I was going to make a joke there and I've decided against it, which has never once happened on this show, ask Bett.”
“Never,” Bett confirmed.
“Harrison Cole. Alec Friedman.” Rox lifted her BLESS YOUR HEART mug in a toast. “Congratulations on the wedding, congratulations on the shelters, on the—honestly, the whole beautiful mess of it. You came on Sinners and Saints and you made me feel something, and now I have to go lie down.”
“Thank you,” Harrison said, laughing.
“Go get married, you ridiculous boys.”
They went to break. Harrison kept my hand the whole way through it, his thumb moving slow over my knuckles, and I looked at him in the buzz of that pink neon light—this man who six months ago had been the most famous liar in America and was now just a guy who made up beds at a shelter and was marrying me on a beach next week—and I thought about the version of me who'd sat in a Richmond apartment a year ago and told my editor that love was silly shit you only see in the movies.
That guy had been so sure. So armored. So safe.
He had no idea what he was missing, and I will be grateful every single day of my real, actual, gloriously un-fairy-tale life that I got to find out.
* * *
I hope you enjoyed reading Alec and Harrison’s love story as much as I did writing it!