6. Priest #3
She was quiet for a moment. Then she stepped closer and took my hands in both of hers, turning them over, looking at the damage. Her thumbs traced the edges of the broken skin, careful as she’d handle stems that were fragile and worth keeping.
“That’s how I know what I am to you,” she said.
I looked at her. Standing in the shop she’d built from a cover story and turned into something real.
Her hair down, her eyes clear, the fear gone from them for the first time since I’d walked through her door and found her with the shade drawn and panic behind her smile.
She wasn’t performing. She wasn’t calculating.
She was just standing in front of me, holding my broken hands, being herself.
“Mia Hart,” I said. Just to say it. Just to hear it in the air between us, her real name in her real shop in the town that had become hers whether the Marshals planned it that way or not.
She smiled. A real one. The professional warmth she’d given me across all those counter-service mornings was gone, replaced by something unguarded, the kind of smile that changes a face entirely.
“That’s me,” she said.
I pulled her into me. Her head against my chest, my arms around her, my chin resting on the top of her head. We stood behind the counter in the quiet shop while the town just went about its business on the other side of the door.
I thought about my grandparents. About the cemetery on the hill where I’d bring flowers next Tuesday, as I always did.
About the woman in my arms who’d arranged those flowers since I first walked through her door, without knowing what they meant to me, and what she’d come to mean without either of us planning it.
I’d bring her with me next time. I’d introduce her to the two people who’d taught me that showing up was the thing that mattered most.
I held her and she held me right back.
EPILOGUE - THREE WEEKS LATER
I took her up the hill road on a Sunday morning.
She sat behind me on the bike with her arms around my waist and her chin on my shoulder. Comfortable. Settled. She rode like she’d always been there.
The house sat back from the road at the end of a gravel drive, framed by pines on two sides and open sky on the third.
White clapboard, green shutters, a porch that wrapped around the front and one side.
My grandmother’s wind chime still hung by the door.
I’d replaced the cord twice but never the chime itself.
Mia climbed off the bike and stood looking at it.
“Whose house is this?”
“Mine.”
She turned to me. “Yours?”
“My grandparents’. They left it to me when they passed.
I’ve kept it maintained. New roof a couple of years back, plumbing, the usual.
I just...” I looked at the porch. The wind chime turned in the breeze.
“Couldn’t live in it. Not alone. Their house without them in it felt wrong, so I stayed at the compound. ”
She stared at me. “You’ve had a house this whole time and you’ve been sleeping in that room at the lodge.”
“The room at the lodge was fine.”
“The room at the lodge had a mattress from nineteen-eighty-something and a window that didn’t close properly.”
“I fixed the window.”
“Priest.” She was fighting a smile. “You had a house.”
I took her inside. I’d been apologizing for it in my head the whole ride up.
The kitchen was thirty years behind. The bathroom tile was pink.
The floors were original hardwood, scarred and uneven.
The wallpaper in the hallway was something my grandmother had chosen in the eighties and I’d never touched because touching it felt like erasure.
Mia walked through every room. She touched things. The banister. The kitchen counter. The pressed-tin backsplash behind the stove. She opened cupboards and ran her hand along the shelf paper, faded and curling at the edges.
“It’s not exactly modern,” I said.
“Don’t you dare.” She turned to me from the kitchen doorway, eyes bright. “Don’t change a single thing in this house. The floors, the tile, the wallpaper. All of it. It’s perfect.”
She meant it. I’d learned to read her across months of counter mornings, stem cuttings, and conversations that were never as casual as we’d both pretended. She wasn’t being polite. She was looking at a house full of love that had outlasted the people who built it, and she recognized it.
I led her through the back door onto the porch.
The yard opened up beyond the rail. My grandfather’s vegetable patch had gone to grass years ago, but the bones were still there. Raised beds. The trellis along the fence. Good soil he’d spent decades building, dark and rich and waiting.
“Plenty of space for ranunculus out here,” I said. “Or anything, really.”
She looked at the garden. Looked at me. Then she walked over and put her arms around my waist and pressed her face against my chest, holding on the way she had during that first ride to the compound. But she wasn’t holding on because she was afraid.
She was holding on because she was home.