Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

          --from William Stafford, "A Ritual to Read to Each Other"

She gets off the bus at the café, and not her flat. She closes herself in her walk-in refrigerator and lets the cold of it sink into her limbs and digits. She is glad that the freezer is just a small compartment in the fridge space, no larger than her guinea pig hutch; she’s grateful. The cold feels far too peaceful. If she had a walk-in freezer, her sister might have woken up in Klare’s minimalist Scandinavian bed to grim, ridiculous, embarrassing news, the only upside to which would be that it curtailed her stepmother's honeymoon plans.

You know, the worst thing is, that I fucking love you. No, don’t. No. Let’s just leave that out there just for a second on its own.

She cannot describe the feeling washing over her. How can anyone be so powerful and so devastated? So in awe of herself, and so godawfully lonely?

I love you, too.

She is the veritable goddess of despair.

Arriving home in pale blue pre-dawn light, she throws her bedclothes into the wash immediately, avoiding any future temptation to seek lingering scents. She quarantines all of her alcohol on one counter, and the very next day calls six or seven former friends to come over and belatedly celebrate Boo’s life, which they do, with toasts and stories and weeping and God, when was the last time she laughed like this? and then the alcohol is gone, and she doesn’t let herself replace more than half of it.

Goddess of despair, yes, but there’s no need to wallow.

She starts answering texts again, from those old friends, from her sister, from delivery drivers, from political campaigns. That night, and for weeks after, she cannot seem to sit down. She lies down to sleep and otherwise remains determinedly on her feet.

And the first six months are a bit of a blur, not so much in retrospect as in living through them the first time.

She grows out her hair and refuses Antony's entreaties even to trim it. She is making some kind of point—beneath the threshold of what she is willing to articulate to others, like so much else.

She installs a memorial shelf in her bedroom specifically for the Mum Statue and certain other keepsakes that signal where she thinks she's coming from. A bookmark, a book, a feather, a set of ticket stubs, a bracelet, a folded note with her name on the outside—these things let her touch her own eternity, though this is not how she explains it to herself.

She repaints her sitting room, and lets that feel like self-discovery.

On her father’s dime and at his instigation, she takes a feminist cooking class, which seems a contradiction in terms and largely is, though she participates in group texts there, too. She works, and when she isn’t at work, she makes plans for the café.  

Eventually, just like that—the first year is gone. For her father’s wedding anniversary, she joins him and her dear stepmother on a two-week-long trip to Helsinki where she fucks a man, by no means her first since the priest but one of only a handful (and the first for so many consecutive nights). He turns out to be Klare’s stepbrother—whoops—and after she slightly breaks his heart by conveying she's unavailable to hot Finnish men, Claire’s pained consternation tells her she still has a ways to go to ‘get her fucking life together.’

“You should see our couples counselor,” her one-time loan officer, Oliver, tells her, one morning in the café. He's there, as he often is, for a quick breakfast with his wife, Edith, a slightly mesmerizing woman who seems to see straight through everyone’s skin to their bones. “I actually have her card right here.”

“She could help you,” Edith says quietly. “If it’s, as it seems, a sex thing.”

It is only sort of a sex thing, but this does help.

Her new therapist—and from the instant they meet, she becomes “my therapist” and nothing else—understands her uncannily and instantly. Her therapist is old, nearly elderly; tan, white-haired, beautiful and so graceful that she conveys a restrained sexuality with every motion of her pen, something like glimpsing a nude statue draped temporarily in a toga. “What can you hope to resolve,” her therapist asks at the end of their first session, “if you give others such a small percentage of your truth?”

“But my truth is not the truth,” she says. “Not even for me. And Jesus, who wants to hear it?”

“Only one way to find out,” the infuriating woman replies calmly. And then, more emphatically: “I’d particularly like to hear what you least want to say.” 

She’ll regret that. She sighs. She understands this assignment. And, ultimately, she has known for a long time that there is no path to progress that doesn’t lead through it. “You’ll regret that, I think,” she forces herself to say aloud. 

“Maybe,” her therapist shrugs.

In the next four months in that office, she is questioned; scolded; gaped at; scoffed at; offered tissues; offered breaks to collect herself; offered medication; offered very little advice. But among the comments that her therapist makes that she writes down and repeats to herself are:

• “People who won’t speak their minds are by definition content to be right instead of to make anything right.”
• “What do people see in you, when they make you ‘feel seen’?”
• “You seem to think people reject you specifically to punish you, and not for their own reasons.”
• “My dear, there’s nothing terribly novel or interesting about using sex as a proxy for intimacy.”

She recounts, as far as she can remember, exactly what she said to Boo upon hearing that fucking ridiculous scheme to punish Michael for cheating. She says far too much about her dad, and her mum, her childhood, her guinea pig, several of her various forms of grief.

She doesn’t mention the priest, not really. The omission is an intuition. She wants, somehow, to still belong to herself, and so she holds those memories close.

She hears herself asking her therapist one February afternoon, “How the fuck is it so healing to talk about myself? All I fucking do is think about myself!”

Her therapist raises an eyebrow. “Need I say it?” she says.

“Is ‘it’ about how real self-understanding can circumvent my tendencies to recriminate, atone, strive, outwit, defend, et cetera?”

“Evidently I don’t need to say it.”

Now that she has said the truth once, it’s a compulsion. 

My addictive personality, no doubt.

She takes her truth to dinner with Dad and her godmother—not at that restaurant, of course, they’re not allowed back there, as her godmother loves to remind her in mournful tones. Her dear godmother, as usual, has invited along acquaintances—two, this time. Her effort to turn the meal into her usual visual tableau, besides being a work of art, also serves to circumvent meaningful conversation.

Well, that's the goal, anyway.

On this occasion, one of them is a professional scuba instructor who owns a personal submarine apparatus, that her dad—her dad!—had developed affection for on one of their recent holidays in the Caribbean. Somehow, the scuba instructor had been talked into bringing a diving mask with him! To a French restaurant so up its own arse that they’d named it Trembôl!

All our lives just my godmother’s canvas. 

“…lessons undertaken at a thousand feet underwater! Can you imagine? And then Fliss here stewards a charity…”

Escort agency for the elderly. Dying children theme park connection. Bird flu vaccination—

“…for struggling artists.”

Aha. Yikes.

“It’s a year-long residency program,” the bottle blonde and faultlessly well-kempt Fliss breaks in earnestly, the only person at the table not yet visibly discomfitted by the older woman dominating the conversation. “For artists struggling to make ends meet. We provide room, board, supplies, classes, community… everything.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” she says, and even somewhat means it. “And how did you get yourself mixed up with my stepmother? I thought her life motto was only to offer help to the poor in the form of ‘inspiration’.”

“Very funny, dear, but Fliss—”

That name. She hears it now, finally. Of course that’s why she’s here.

“—was kind enough to supervise an auction of some of my works. For the cause.”

“And we made quite a bit of money!” Fliss adds. 

Fuck, I wonder how much.

“How much?” the scuba instructor asks guilelessly. 

Wait, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing, she suddenly recalls. Speak some more of my intuitions aloud. Let people hear.

“Just over a million pounds!” Fliss says in a low, smiling, and slightly over-awed tone.

“Fuck me, a million pounds!” Well. That has simply burst out of her. Cool time to start speaking your judgments, Fleabag. “Sorry, sorry. I’m supposed to start speaking more of my judgments aloud. It’s a process. Give me a moment. A million pounds. Christ. Congratulations?” It’s absolutely a question. “Congratulations, I mean. What did you sell?”

“Just a few pieces I hadn’t displayed in the last twenty years,” her stepmother swans. “A self-portrait, a few photographs. Some of my more impressive phalluses…”

Please tell me one of them was Dad so I never have to see it again. She thinks this is something her therapist would actually advise her not to say.

“…not your father, of course. But one of the Beatles!” Her stepmother’s eyes go wide, inviting the admiration of the table for having seen and sculpted the cock of a Beatle.

She squints. “Ringo, was it?” 

Her stepmother glares at her, but she knows she’s right. No one would describe John or Paul as “one of the Beatles” and George was slightly too good a person to get tangled up with this one.

Hence it’s with a spike of revenge, and probably a lie, that her god- and stepmother adds, “And of course I would have auctioned off a certain wedding present, had it remained in my possession for more than twelve hours. Funny how that statue seems to slip away from me!”

It’s mine. She swallows. Try again. Be straightforward.

“Now that I know it’s my mother, I’ll be keeping it forever, this time.” There.

“It’s… that was, is… Katherine?” Dad asks. For him, the words come swiftly.

Her godmother pats his hand. “Of course it was, darling, you know that.”

“I… did not… I…” 

Able to apprehend the difference between mere slow speech and outright spluttering, she kindly cuts off her father. “Now that I know it’s my mother,” she tries again, “I am glad to tell you that I have built a special shelf for her in my apartment. Pride of place, memory eternal, a credit to your artistic genius. She sits with a few other keepsakes. I consider it a gift given in exchange for your wholesale erasure of every aspect of my family from my childhood home, and accept it gratefully.”

“Well, that’s just not true! And,” her stepmother’s jaw firms, “even if it were true, surely it’s only natural that we move on—”

“You didn’t allow Dad so much as a box in the attic,” she says wryly, on a roll now. She turns to the scuba instructor, and to Fliss, and this, oddly, is an effort at politeness of all fucking things. “My sister actually had to save our childhood photographs off the kerb. And I’m sorry, this must be an odd conversation for both of you. But my stepmother insists on attempting to convert her decades-long bitter envy of my mother into a show of loving grief, whilst transferring to me emotions that can no longer politely be directed at the dead, because my mother and I share certain… traits.”

“Careful, now,” her father says. “Be… try… kind.”

“Kind like you were when you last told me that you don’t much like me, particularly when I remind you of my deceased mother, whom you also often didn’t like? Dad, I’ve been too kind.”

Her godmother snorts. Fliss looks studiously at her wineglass. Her father, and the scuba instructor, both watch her warily. 

“Dad… you’ve always been right. You—you have a right to be happy. Of course you do. And she makes you happy, or at least not miserable, and you’re miserable alone. Do you honestly think I don’t understand that you made a choice between misery and her company? I even think you made the right choice. For yourself. But you married a woman who hates one of your daughters and barely tolerates the other. Obviously we don’t really trust you, anymore. Even though you have every right to put yourself first.” She turns to Fliss and the scuba instructor. “This is the basic family dynamic and we never talk about it, sorry.”

“Maybe that’s for a good reason?” Fliss offers, and her voice is weak but a certain set of her mouth says she’s enjoying this spectacle.

“That’s… sensible… point… most. Surely. Tonight.” Her father shakes his head, suggesting disappointment to the uninitiated, but she knows her dad, and she knows it’s really anger that he is trying to quell. Good. Fine. She has lied and kowtowed and swallowed her opinions to avoid this anger for too long. 

“Dad. Come on. Yes, I know that most people don’t say every little thing—that they let some barbs go, they ignore certain personality conflicts for the sake of family peace.” She hates that last word. “But she actually hates me. Not because I make jokes about her artistic process, or get sticky-fingered around her statues. It’s biological and existential. You don’t much like me, she hates me, and my occasional bad behavior makes everyone feel very justified. But now I’m sick of it. All of it. I may be a lunatic but I am a… well, I am a fully realised lunatic. A moderately successful one—as successful as I need to be. And I’m sick of being scolded by someone who hates me, and humiliated by someone who doesn’t like me, and only sometimes protected by Claire, who doesn’t usually respect me.”

She takes a deep breath. “With apologies to our guests,” she concludes, attempting a mask of grace and going so far to cross her legs at the ankle.

Her stepmother is, she observes, reeling, and it takes her some time to assemble her usual arsenal of pieties. “Of course I don’t hate you, my dear, I just… I think you need help—”

Her father has been frowning at her, and squinting slightly, and she can see that his mind—always much more rapid and ready than his voice—is taking everything in. Her godmother's mind, on the other hand, is very obviously kaleidoscopically rearranging reality so that she can carry on as ever.

“OK,” her dad says finally. “That’s enough, dear. Enough… now. For now.” And he pats her stepmother’s hand. 

And then he picks up his fork and puts some long-neglected watercress and jicama into his mouth.

“…Enough?” her godmother sputters. Dad pats her hand again. Her father turns to the scuba instructor. “How long… are you… London, Steve?”

And that is her reward for saying the proverbial quiet part, she thinks. Nothing has broken, at least not tonight. Her hands shake just slightly, but her stomach is calm when she takes to her own salad course. She notices that Fliss is smiling at her, just slightly—probably hoping not to be noticed by her patron, as she does it.

She feels very, extraordinarily, absurdly powerful. The goddess of pointed confession.

Oof. There’s a thought.

And the scuba instructor lets out a breath and still looks very much like he might run. “Just two more nights,” he replies, “before I head back to Costa Rica…”

Of course, she fucks the scuba instructor that night; Fliss is, as it happens, very much taken. He is intense, and true to his brand, fond of deep diving. She has no trouble respecting herself in the morning because she's not trying, she's actively not trying, for anything like celibacy. Though she notices that she seems to instantly forget his name each time she hears it, even as she tries like hell to remember. It’s like she’s stuck in one of the darker episodes of Doctor Who.

After she wakes up and sends him off, she does something she hasn’t let herself do in almost a year, and hops onto the St. Ethelred website. 

His name and picture are still there, under—Jesus Christ, Jesus fucking Christ—a menu item called “Meet Our Team,” from which she also learns that Pam’s surname is Tolliver, and through which she is introduced to a small cast of deacons and administrators and musicians she hadn’t previously imagined were in the church’s employ. 

More importantly, there is also a dropdown menu that says “Worship With Us,” under which she finds the menu item “Sacraments”—honestly, who is the Catholic church’s web designer, this is a slick experience—and it ultimately gives her the short weekly blocks during which confessions are heard by the parish priest.

She had first looked these hours up in the dark days after she sicced a fox on him at a bus stop, when attending confession would have felt like—would have been—an act of vengeance. When she was A Woman Scorned for Righteousness.

Now, this knowledge means something else. It feels like a circle that could close. She thinks of the ban he instituted, blocking her from “his church”—thinks of his deacons, his Director of Liturgy, his Parochial Vicar for the local college, his receptionist. She thinks of his God, his love, his choices. 

She thinks of her own.

He could always get rid of me. If he wants to. 

She knows that some would disagree. But as she meditates on it, she comes to believe he has no true, deep right to ban her from his holy sanctuary. 

She closes the café twenty minutes early to go to confession that same evening. 

Turns out: it’s a well-oiled machine when you go to confession during church-sanctioned hours. No dark magic, no unfathomable longing. Just a short line and an on-duty attendant.

Another man in a collar—Reverend Brian, so the website has informed her—stands in the narthex. He is there as Confession Guardian—not his official title; probably—to send in one person at a time and to guard the privacy of this sacrament of penitence by holding all others at bay.

“I’m sorry, I don’t recognise you. Are you a member of the church?” Reverend Brian asks her warily, and she understands this to be a condition of entry and responds accordingly.

“I haven’t been to confession here in about a year and a half, Reverend Brian,” she tells him. “I suppose you could say I’m… lapsed.” 

There is no line, and only one person is ahead of her; Reverend Brian doesn’t think it will be long. Confession may allegedly be good for the soul, but it is evidently unpopular. She chats with Reverend Brian, who is looking forward to supper at a pub trivia night when he leaves here.

A handsome man for one pushing sixty, she muses, more firm than kind. He has that pleasant sort of burliness that reminds a woman that she doesn’t have to do all the household chores. He waves her in.

She thinks about Reverend Brian's particular kind of masculinity to avoid thinking about where she is, and why she’s there.

Because then she’s alone in a room that she knows he is in.

The click of her booth's door is, to her, loud and portentous. She feels again what she felt before, which is that there may be dark magic in this ritual even if there is no God.

She sits and composes herself for a moment, and wonders if he can see her, if he has even tried to see to whom he is speaking. (She knows, from Professor Google, that he is meant to avoid that level of scrutiny, but… well, he is clearly not the most scrupulous priest in the flock.)

“Speak your confession, child. God is love,” he says gently, and how is that she hasn’t heard that musical voice in many hundreds of days? It crashes into her chest like water into a sponge and she loathes herself for everything in her that is still so… porous. 

Does he sound weary? No. A little, maybe. He mainly sounds kind. Damn him. 

She takes a breath. Then another. Then begins. “I’m here to confess… my sins, Father. It’s been about eighteen months since my last—”

“Fuck me,” he breathes.

“—confession.” She laughs. “Hello.”

“I thought I said you were banned!” His voice is tinged with laughter in all the shades of surprise, from mild panic to delight.

“Oh, I’m sure you didn’t use your authority as God’s worldly representative to keep me from holy love and eternal life, Father.”

He laughs again at that, then leans toward her—she can actually see him squinting through the screen, now. So much for the sacramental seal. He puts a hand up to it to cup the light—to see her better! She taps his hand meaningfully through the screen, and he lets it drop. “So what took you so long?” he asks finally.

“I had a few issues to sort out.”

“God help us all if you’re sorted.”

“I’m sure I still have a few minor problems.” 

“Oh, so am I.” 

He is still looking in at her as she leans back against her seat, and stares straight ahead. She feels very comfortable here, suddenly. “How’ve you been?” she asks.

“I’ve been—I’m fine—fuck you already, this is a confessional.”

“Fuck you, this is a confessional.” 

He sighs. “You’re right. Here I am assuming that this is a social call, but I guess I have to ask, did you have an actual reason for coming? One to do with, you know, your immortal soul and all that?”

She gives in to an urge to draw this out. “Oh, just wanted to catch up with Reverend Brian. It’s been awhile.”

He laughs, and seems to catch himself. “Be nice to him, he’s recently widowed.”

“Oh? How recently?”

“Not that nice, sweetheart.”

Now she laughs. “We’ll see,” she murmurs, just to torture him, and... does his breath stop being audible? Why is she still so attuned to his breathing? “No, actually, I really did come to confess,” she says, letting him off the hook.

“Ah. Have you—no, of course you haven’t had a spiritual awakening.”

"Oh, God, me? Can you imagine?"

"Yes, but then, I have a very powerful imagination."

"Yeah, well, you'd have to, in your line of work. Not a conversion experience, no. But, I did, er, lie to a priest early last year, and I am attempting to tell the truth now, and so I wanted to… correct my sin. Is that how you say it?”

“It’s how you say it that matters. When did you lie to me?”

“Damn, I can almost hear your brain spinning, trying to guess,” she laughs. “It’s just omission, Father. Not—commission.”

“Vocabulary! Impressive.”

“Fuck you again.”

“Well, get on with it. Which part of what you omitted are you here to spill?”

Which part? Christ, what does he know?  She catches herself thinking it. “I wonder…” She takes a breath. “I wonder what you think you know. About my omissions.”

There’s a long pause, and then: “I don’t play games in the confessional, my dear.”

“Don’t you? And here I thought I had already been party to one.” She hears his hand come down as a fist, soft on the far wall, almost hears him refusing to speak his thoughts. She sighs. “But as it happens, you’re right. No games. Just some—loose ends.” 

“Ah,” he says. Is that disappointment or fear in his voice? How does he convey so much possibility in monosyllables? “Well—go on, then. I’d say I haven’t got all day, but you know I have even if the man upstairs would rather I didn’t.” He sighs. “Pretend I stopped talking after, ‘go on, then.’”

“Sure,” she says. “Four quick things. Hang on, I have a list.” 

He mutters something, maybe: God help me.

“Right. First, my mother’s family was and is Catholic. We were baptised, Claire and I, at St. Stephens, to appease my grandmother, who died when I was fourteen. Until I met you, I hadn’t stepped inside a church since then, except to find a public toilet, on holiday in Milan.”

“Enterprising,” he says. “So you’re part of the tribe. Were you confirmed?”

“Yes," she says, grimacing a bit to think about what Sister Barbette would report to him if asked about her performance at that occasion. "But what I’m actually trying to say is, that is why my godmother reached out to you and wanted you to marry them. In the church, so to speak. Like my parents were. It was to take something—something else—from my mother. Claire and I, and probably Dad… no, definitely also Dad… all realised you were a bit of a pawn in an ugly, jealous game of hers. I’m afraid that some part of me wanted to, well, to take you back. For my mum.”

“That… makes sense. Though I can’t say I’m not wounded. Is that why—”

“I walked away in the alley, that first night, because I was trying to avoid the temptation to keep toying with her. It was, at the time, a bit of a compulsion. I was very angry. Mainly at my own father, for going along with it. Though I didn't know that, because my brain treats him as a well-meaning, but ultimately hapless, codger."

“Fuck,” he breathed. “The ‘Father’ thing—”

“Oh, no, that has nothing to do with Dad, that’s just hot.”

“True,” he says, and she can feel his shoulders shaking with near-silent laughter in the seat of her bench.

“I should have explained. It’s just that there were so many… subterranean objects, around. You know? And I didn’t have the words. To even begin.”

“Yeah. I guess I do know. You’re forgiven, of course.”

“Two,” she says, glancing back at her list, “when she died, my mum, I mean, I… I guess you could say I went off the deep end. You know I had this friend—this business partner, who ran the café with me?”

“Boo,” he agrees.

"How do you know that name?"

"I've been known to ask prying questions." 

Ah. Claire. 

“Beatrix. Bea, to most people,” she confesses, and it’s the first time she has said the name aloud in more years than Boo has been gone. Now, she associates the official name with a headstone. “Boo was a nickname I gave her in primary school. You know, the lovey-dovey thing—she was my boo.”

“The one who was actually into guinea pigs.”

“I got into them, too, pretty much” she says defensively. “Anyway. Boo had this boyfriend. Michael. They were always fighting, and he was honestly such an arsehole. A personal trainer for a living, and fucking obsessed with his own body. Wouldn’t eat a single item on the café’s menu, which I told her was a dealbreaker…” She is drumming her fingers now. “Fuck, I didn’t think I was going to avoid telling you this.”

“You aren’t. Take your time.”

She lets out a breath. “Don’t take that old ‘I want to be told what to do’ thing too seriously, Father.”

“Hey, I’m a Catholic priest. I take virtually nothing but that seriously, in the entire world.”

“Ha.” She knows he’s giving her a gift, a grace, in opening himself up to teasing in this way. Letting her breathe. “So it’s not about love, for you, then, it’s all about power, after all?”

“Welcome to the history of Europe. You’ll be horrified when you get to the bit about the Crusades.”

She wants to laugh, and bites her lip. “I slept with him, of course. The boyfriend. Boo’s boyfriend, I mean. It was maybe… six weeks after my mum died? I was a mess. But that’s not an excuse,” she adds in a hurry. “They were constantly breaking up and getting back together and… Christ, that is an excuse. And there’s no excuse. There’s not. She was my best friend. She was more than that. There was no moment, no amount of time after a break-up, when I should have given anyone she dated more than a once-over. And it’s not even like he came onto me. I did it. And I was drunk, but not that drunk. Not as drunk as I was, say, the last time I was sitting here.”

He lets out a long sigh. “And she found out he cheated, and killed herself.”

“She wanted to get hurt to the extent that he’d rush to her side, and, you know. She’d tell him to go away, he’d persist, eventually she’d give in… He was a personal trainer. She had this romantic idea that he’d fucking teach her to walk again…”

“I see now why you’re the only one who thinks she didn’t commit suicide,” he says. “Did it ever occur to you that thing about walking, about the hospital, was just a story she told you? She stepped in front of a fucking bus.”

“How do you know?” she demands. “How do you know about any of this?”

“I looked it up. It wasn’t hard—your café comes up in the article. They quoted the cop on the scene.”

“He didn’t know her.”

“If she wanted to live, why didn’t she step in front of a moped? Even a fucking taxi?”

“She was distraught. She misjudged.”

“No mistaking a bus. Your guilt is clouding your judgment,” he says gently. Too gently. Far more gently than she deserves. She looks back at the list in her hand. This is well-worn territory, and she is here for accountability, not for… whatever the opposite is.

“Leave the mortal sins out of it, Father. Because anyway. She didn’t know I had slept with him. I never got to, well, to confess. I wanted to—even if it ended our friendship, she needed a reason to cut that cunt of a man loose, he was a goddamn parasite. And not getting a chance to confess—I wanted to tell you that I was thinking about confessing it. The last time I was here.”

“Well, that makes sense.”

“It does, yeah.”

“You are still allowed to grieve for her, you know—”

“The third item,” she interrupts firmly. “I pretended I was fine. But I didn’t want my dad to marry my fucking godmother. Whether it was a Catholic ceremony or not. You were the person who was actually doing it. Marrying them. Something… slippery happened.”

“Yes, something quite slippery as I recall…”

“OK, haha. That’s not what I meant, and Jesus, where do you get the balls to fucking joke about that?”

“It was a snap judgment, sorry. It seemed worse to avoid… referring to the truth. But I shouldn’t have made a joke…What did you mean?”

She takes that in.

“I meant that there was… slippage? Dad was marrying her, and you were marrying them. I wanted Dad to choose… me. I wanted him to notice that he was marrying a woman who was systematically erasing everything left in my past that I had loved. And who is… less than fond of me.”

“And who’s an irredeemable narcissist with self-understanding and empathy in unfortunate inverse proportion to her talent.”

“Yeah. That."

“Right.” There’s a beat. “Did your mum favour you, the way your dad favours Claire?”

She doesn’t marvel that he’s apprehended this—this must be obvious, now, to anyone paying attention, and one thing he does well is observe. And she doesn’t even note that this might be the first direct question of his, of a personal nature, that she’s answered. It feels easy, now, simply to answer it. “Oh, I suppose. Less blatantly. And she didn’t dislike Claire the way Dad dislikes me. But she did feel sorry for Claire. Her priorities never made sense to my mum. And, well, pity hurts Claire much more than dislike.”

“I can see that.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “Well. I hoped Dad would call it off, or—well, honestly, that you could—I guess I just kept hoping it wouldn’t happen. Not wholly consciously, but: I wanted something from you, something that would… save my family? Something I didn’t articulate even to myself. And that was unfair.”

“Yes. Well, but I knew that one, of course.”

“You… knew?”

“That you wanted the wedding to be called off, and that you believed I had some kind of power in that realm that I wasn’t using? I really am a little preoccupied by power. It wasn’t just a joke.”

“Christ.”
 
“Yeah, he’s sorta the master symbol as it were.”

She snorts. “So why didn’t you—I don’t know, pawn them off on another church, or counsel my dad not to marry her, or… I don't know. You didn't even seem troubled by it."

“Lots of answers there.” He meditates on the questions a moment. “I had seen other couples marry who were far worse-suited to each other.”

“Hmm. OK.”

“But the main thing is… I would have been doing all that for you, and I am meant to act on behalf of God.” 

“God is not in favor of my godmother’s happiness,” she objects instantly.

“Judgment comes in time,” he says evenly. “We minister with open hearts. Even to people who err and people with bad personalities.”

“Except not as bad as mine. Mine got banned.”

“Listen to me. Now. It wasn’t your personality that got banned.” There’s a sharpness in his voice now, like bare rockface on a cliff.

“No, it was my hot body,” she rolls her eyes. “Come on.”

She hears him take seven long breaths.

In. Out. 

In. Out

In. Out.

In. Out.

In. Out

In… Out…

In. 

Out.

“Perhaps you should tell me the last item on your list,” is all he ultimately says, with a new formality in his tone.

“Of course, Father, time is God’s currency.” With no regard to whether he is looking—simply as a kind of joke with herself—she crosses herself. “The last thing is to tell you that despite items one through three, I meant it. When I said I loved you.”

Silence. Not a breath.

“I wasn’t sure, you know. Once I pulled back the layers. I could see that you were... in some ways, you were a means to an end. For needling my godmother, for reaching my dad, for a confession I wasn’t quite ready to make. And not always—you know. Not always just… a person. I wasn’t sure that once I pulled apart all the rest with my therapist… well, honestly, I hoped you would sort of… disappear from the equation, so to speak. Once all the other variables were isolated.” She sighs. “It’s only that it turns out you were the reason….” She shakes her head. It’s not that she’s having thoughts she’s not saying. She’s just exhausted all the words she never said.

“The reason…?”

Those three syllables danced on that cliff's edge.

“You noticed. Aloud. You kept saying, ‘Where are you going? Where did you go, just now?’ because you knew… you heard, at least, that I was… withholding myself. And no one else did. Noticed, I mean. Aloud.”

He lets out his breath, now. “Don’t break my heart again,” he warns softly. “I need you to be well. And I need to be well.”

Her own heart breaks a little, at that. “I know that.” She wipes a tear out of her eye, knows in her soul that he is doing the same. “It wasn’t only that you saw me, and made me feel—you know, feel seen. I think… I saw you, too? Just the opposite of me. Right? You don’t hide your trauma—you wear it right on your sleeve—and you trust that if it’s so blatant, so visible, it will seem unremarkable and invite no conversation, no compassion… and somehow I didn’t need any real intuition, any fucking cleverness, to see it. It was so vivid to me.” She bit her lip for the feeling. “Why does no one else see it?”

“Just the occasional woodland creature,” he manages.

“Fucking foxes,” she laughs a little. “And that bit makes you seem more like a character in a book than a person, and you actually count on that, too. More than most priests, even…. You know, the internet says it’s probably just that you have slightly odd pheromones?”

“I’ve read the same, yeah.” He swallows audibly. “Don’t believe it for a second, of course.”

“Of course. The curse.” She sighs. “So that’s the last thing, except… I want to say what it all means.” She speaks in a rush, now, knowing that she’ll stifle herself if she doesn’t blurt it all out at once. “I will abide by your ban. From now on. But I want you to come by the café, occasionally. In the middle of the day. When other people are around, and never... never at other times. You can bring a friend if you want. I just think making each other off-limits has done me—done us, I can hear what you’re not saying—no favours. We need a new niche for this—us. This us-ness. And I think—I think I could be, and should be, your friend. Your best friend. The very best friend that you have, that you never, ever, have a private moment with.”

She has barely finished the last word before he says, “Fuck, have I missed you.” All at once, he surges to his feet and opens the door to his side of the confessional and walks around and opens hers, and it’s so honest—so relatively bright with the light of day—so unlike last time. He wraps his arms around her and holds her for a long moment, and it feels… disappointingly platonic? Extremely comforting? 

She breathes in the scent of him, understanding what the foxes must know.

“It’s a deal,” he says into her hair. “I’ll drop in for lunch.”

“Not on Tuesdays,” she stipulates.

“Why not—oh, right, Quiet Tuesdays.”

“Basically a Quaker meeting house, without the invitation for revelation,” she explains. “And honestly—I need it.”

“I bet. I should really do the same with mass one day a week,” he sighs. “Chatty Wednesday is a definite maybe, but… I think we’ll have more of a Thursday sort of friendship.”

“Friendly Thursdays,” she says. “No, stop it, of course that’s not a real thing. We don’t have a schtick every day.”

“Yet,” he winks. 

“You seem… how are you, again?”

“I’m wonderful,” he smiles, and it’s in his eyes, and she can see he believes himself, though she's a tougher sell. 

“Wonderful,” she echoes, and means it back.

“What time should I come? On Thursday?”

“You’re coming this Thursday? Three days from now, Thursday?”

“Is that not what you meant?” He looks genuinely confused.

“No, I guess… I didn’t really think about it happening, at a time, on a day. It was more abstract. Come on the later side. Midday crowd thins by 2. There’ll still be customers—and Jonah will be there, writing his thesis—but I’ll have a minute to talk.”

“OK,” he agrees.

Fuck, but I like looking at you, she thinks, and considers saying it. But no. The point of this has never been to say every single stray thought, but just to say more of them. The crucial ones.

“OK,” she says. “I’ll just go and see if I can get Reverend Brian's number, shall I?” and waggles a brow as he rolls his eyes to heaven. “Until Thursday!” she calls.

He notices the scrap of paper before she’s gone, and knows he could stop her. But doesn’t, and doesn’t know why. He bends to pick it up almost compulsively.

Sure enough, she made a list. It reads:

Speak Now, Or...

(1) on my proud Mulrooney lineage
(2) on my fuck-up
(3) about that fucking wedding
(4) what I think love is

On the back, a receipt for tampons and absurdly expensive shampoo. He folds it and puts it in his pocket. He already knows he intends to keep it. 

All the paintings stay on the wall.

Chapter Text

She tells herself, with no success, not to watch the door on Thursday, but she’s looking up every time the bell rings from 10 a.m. on.

So she sees him, and his companion, while they’re still crossing the street.

He walks into her café at 12:50, middle of the rush. There are, just then, nine customers dining in, others outside, and no open tables. He has Reverend Brian in tow, ostensibly as an unwitting shield, and she finds that… Damn. More than a little titillating, if she’s honest.

He needs a chaperone.

“You’re early.”

“Am I?” he asks, almost mockingly, flicking one of those expressive eyebrows at her. She hears what he doesn’t say: there is a way in which he is very, very late.

“Let me find you two a seat.” She scans her regulars. She is looking for people least likely to be charmed by him. (This is simple, and she understands it even as she doesn’t admit it to herself explicitly: she wants to keep him to herself.)

In her defense, she knows, from the outset, that this is a lost cause.

Her most reliable Thursday customer, Jonah the UCL history grad student, is in the corner as promised. His dreadlocks bent over an aged Macbook Pro, Jonah’s table is forbiddingly stacked with tomes comprising the collected letters of Charles Darwin. Not looking up, he gives one sharp, negative shake of his head to refuse to accommodate the clergy. How the fuck does he do that, she thinks for the billionth time.

So she takes her second-best options. “Oy, Ashleigh, Simon, got room for some priests?”

Ashleigh, who is asexual and aromantic, and her partner Simon, whose real age is unknown but gives the strong impression that he just stumbled into a punk rock concert on his way from his bar mitzvah, are her best candidates for treating these men with some much-deserved skepticism. But they squeeze their chairs together a bit too quickly for her liking.

“Are they real priests?” Ashleigh asks curiously.

“Are you a real Donovan fan, or is it just a t-shirt?” her priest asks, sinking down beside the pink-haired elfin young woman without it seeming to occur to him he might not be welcome—one of his gifts.

“Bit of both, I guess,” she says, looking at Simon. Simon nods while her priest touches his hand to his collar with a shrug as if to say: Well, same.

“We know like four of his songs,” Simon says. “Is he still alive?”

No one knows for sure, but they hope he is. She is bustling away when she hears Reverend Brian say, “Actually a real priest and a real deacon,” with his gruff sort of kindness.

She is busy, or she could be. She endeavors to attend to her patrons in the way she always does—warm, wry, impersonal charm—but the Cleric of Magnetic Authenticity has arrived and his charm is very, very personal, and virtually instantaneously, he is ministering to her people. It is… distracting.

And it makes her unaccountably angry.

Twenty minutes in, she hears Simon, who is definitely Jewish, tell Ashleigh that they should go to his church Sunday to “hear the story” which their new table companion has apparently been teasing the outlines of. The story involves something about a missing necklace he’d supposedly found in a locker room twenty years before, with the implication that it had gone missing during a particularly vigorous sexual encounter. “Can’t say more until Sunday mass,” he says apologetically, his dancing eyes telegraphing to everyone he's not apologetic at all.

All of this catches the attention of the next table. The ladies she has mentally dubbed “the Permanents” because they run a temp agency across the street, have been unabashedly listening for quite a while.

The Permanents are well-dressed professional women in their fifties, one stout and one slender, both unnaturally cheerful. “Did I hear you say that you’re from St. Ethelred?” Stout Permanent asks. “Did you know, I was confirmed there, many years ago.”

He gives her a quick, assessing glance. “Sister Amelia Rae, was it?” he asks easily. “Who led your catechism class? She’s still alive, you know. Retired to a convent in Wolverhampton but comes down twice a year to list my various insufficiencies.”

“Sounds like her,” Stout Permanent chuckles. “Still alive! I would have never guessed. She seemed ancient already when I was a child.”

“I was just reflecting recently that my boss at my first job, who seemed ancient to me at the time, was all of twenty-nine,” the priest tells her confidingly, “about fifteen years older than I was.”

“Where was your first job?” Simon asks him curiously, evidently finding it hard to imagine a priest doing anything but priesting. (She barely overhears this, because she is busy delivering minestrone and roast beef to the last of the lunch crowd on her patio and strains to listen with the door open.)

“Oh, that was a carpentry shop in northwest Belfast, part of a chain of two called Harry’s Fine Woodcrafts. It was quite a rebellion. My very tony parents, who are barristers for the robber baron class and—” he lowers his voice dramatically—“Protestants, if you can imagine—were not well-pleased. They wanted me to focus on school and stay out of trouble for a spell. But their real problem was that this shop was in a neighborhood just past a peace line, which as you likely know is Northern Irish for ‘poor’. And Catholic, usually. In this case, definitely.”

At this point, she leans her hip up against the counter and gives up every pretense that she’s not listening, as do the remaining three tables around him. (Even the newlyweds, who work at far-flung offices but use her café as a halfway point on the days that they can’t bear to be apart from one another, are rapt, now.)

He looks around the quiet room expansively, seeming to include everyone in this recounting even as she suspects (or maybe just hopes) that this particular story is mainly for her.

“My boss at the carpentry shop, Angie, was Harry’s daughter and there was so much distance between us—age, religion, culture, class—that it was odd to me she even understood me when I talked. I mean, it was somehow strange that we spoke the same language. We made a lot of things in the workshop there—including some… mistakes, but that’s another story…” He darts a quick glance at her.

Ah. His virginity, she thinks, but something in his eyes warns her it’s less than simple. “…but mainly frames, for pictures and prints and paintings. And we repaired chairs. Now, I was and am a clumsy thing. I put a nail into this finger two separate times. But I can still just about fix a wobbly leg.”

This fucking clergyman’s charisma is so unself-conscious that he winks at the Permanents when he says ‘wobbly leg’. And it fucking works! Slender Permanent clutches her throat, all but literally gagging for it!

“He’s being modest. He’s made fourteen new pews at St. Ethelred’s in the last six months, just at the cost of wood and nails,” Reverend Brian cuts in, his brusqueness not masking his pride a whit.

“Only because one of our parishioners offered me use of her table saw,” he demurs. I’ll bet she did, she thinks, and he seems to catch the look on her face because he sends her an exasperated look that says, Get your mind out of our gutter.

“Cherry wood, with real wood nails, stained so they almost match the oldest ones, which were built of mahogany in 1764,” Reverend Brian says, coming into his role as the warm-up man.

She sees the pitch implicitly being made here to her customers—her customers!—and cuts in accordingly. Hot Priest Thursdays are dicey enough; she cannot run a café with Arcane Mystic Thursdays. Boundaries. I don’t have them, so some of these people will have to.

She redirects. “Simon, what was your first job? Or,” she grins at his babyface, “have you had it yet?”

This cuts off the Parish Antique Showcase and sets off a round of conversations in which people share their teenage employment. (Her own first job had been at a little café not wholly unlike this one but for the official lack of rodents, but she instinctively lies and says it was at a hair salon.)

It begins to feel like Chatty Wednesday. As a result, she can feel the irritation virtually pouring off of Jonah.

Her intervention is, ultimately, fruitless, because as soon as she has to pivot to the register to box and ring up pack-and-go sandwiches for a big cluster of crisp lawyerly types, everyone reverts to peppering the priest and his companion with fascinated questions. By the time the lunch rush winds down, she can see, plain as day, that Ashleigh (a person whose sexual orientation the Catholic church probably wants to illegalise), Simon (still Jewish) and Stout Permanent (who likely hasn’t been to mass on a day not adjacent to Christmas in three decades), are all going to end up in one of those fucking cherry pews on Sunday morning.

By and by, though, the traitors (this is a feeling she would like to examine at some point with her therapist, except she doesn’t and can’t know about the priest) are all gone. Only Jonah, the priest, and the Reverend Brian remain. She flips the sign to CLOSED behind Slender Permanent’s neat behind, almost too annoyed to bother to appreciate the view.

“Well. Hope your sermonising this weekend is as good as your proselytising today,” she says.

“Are you angry at me?” he asks. “I wasn’t trying to convert anyone.”

She looks at Reverend Brian. “It’s quite annoying when he pretends to be helpless against the swirl of his own charisma, isn’t it?”

The reverend cracks a smile. “I rather enjoy it when it’s not happening to me,” he admits.

She sighs. “I’m just the opposite,” she confesses the perfect truth. The priest makes a come, now, face at her that implies he thinks she’s shining him up, or maybe just wants her to think he’s modest enough to think it. Which she emphatically does not. “Can I get you gentlemen any more coffee?”

“No,” Brian smiles at her. “I think we’ve stayed, hoping more for a bit of your company, instead.”

“Oh, reverend, don’t lead a lady on!” she tilts her head toward him. Then she sobers. “Hey. I heard about your wife. I’m so sorry about that.”

She attempts to offer him the kinship of the mutually bereaved with a squeeze of her hand, not knowing if it will work nor if she really has the right. He accepts it with a gentle pat on her fingers.

Testing her audience, she tries a flutter of her lashes: “But moreover, I’m heartbroken to hear that the church won’t let you marry again. Once you become a deacon, if you’re not already married… Do I have that right?”

 “You do,” Brian says, his face cracking open with a slight grin at her foray. “But one time is enough for me. We had thirty-five years. When it’s right, one time is more than enough.”

“I believe your friend here’s speech at my dad’s wedding had part of that thesis, but with a twist. ‘Love is a bit shit, even when it’s right,’” she paraphrases, looking oddly determined.

“Oh, did he officiate your father’s wedding?” the reverend asks. “That must mean your parents are parishioners.”

“Of a sort,” she says. “My grandmother was, anyway. Well, not at St. Ethelred’s.”

“And that’s how you two know each other, is it, the wedding?”

“Let’s say that it is. How long have you been with the parish?”

“I moved back to London last—”

“OK, enough.” Her priest grabs her arm to command her attention. “You can get to know Brian on his weekly lunch day. I haven’t talked to you in eighteen months.”

“We talked on Monday!”

“No, we didn’t. You cleared the air on Monday. Brian is here not to become your bestie, but to keep me honest while I become your… well, your friend.”

She shoots him a warning look, as if trying to tell him he’s saying too much. He extends his hands expansively to the room and holds her gaze, daring her to stop him. She can almost hear him taunting her: I fucking dare you. She just rolls her eyes at him.

He is undaunted. “Brian, Jonah—this is the aforementioned Jonah, right?—you may as well know, because the bishop sure as fuck already does, that she and I have a sexual, and romantic, history, that coincided with my arrival here at the parish.”

She buries her face in her hands and strains her ears for the sound of a pin dropping.

When she finally looks up, Brian’s expression could best be described as ‘only slightly fazed’; his left eye just barely quirks shut as he takes in this information.

Jonah, as usual, hasn’t looked up from his computer, but after an even longer silence says: “Yeah, I kind of figured,” into his screen. “You two have quite a bit of chemistry.”

“True,” the priest affirms, as she buries her face in her hands again. “It is true,” he says to her directly. “And this can’t be like last time, where we have our little secret glances and double entendres et cetera, in the company of others. It would defeat the whole purpose of this endeavor.”

“And what exactly,” Reverend Brian turns squarely to him and leans her way, for all the world looking like a protective father of a woman he met three days before, “is the purpose of this endeavor, then?”

“Friendship,” the two of them answer in unison.

Was that a cough from Jonah, or a scoff? Either way, he still has not actually looked their way. The deacon, for his part, is impassive.

“We would like to have a friendship within the constraints of my calling,” the priest elaborates.

“And one which doesn’t interfere with my love life,” she adds bluntly.

The priest does not react to that with so much as a blink.

“It’s not so odd, surely,” he entreats Reverend Brian. “Have you ever met someone with whom you have a swift sense of understanding?”

“Yes,” Reverend Brian says, and he is a bit pitying, because, she supposes, they have only just been discussing his widowerhood. “I have.”

“Imagine what kind of God would tell you to abandon that person. Imagine what that would mean, about God’s love.”

“I don’t have to imagine,” the deacon says quietly, “what the church would tell you. About that person. Because we both already know.”

Her priest sighs, deeply, as if this idea is more tedious than painful, And he looks to her, and the look seems to include an entreaty and a question. He wants to be rescued, does he?  She clears her throat. OK. Speak, again. “I was… pretty alone, for a long time.” She looks up at one of the guinea pig prints on her wall. “And I’m sick of feeling alone. I don’t make friends that easily. And I’m not Catholic, not really. So I don’t feel ashamed of wanting to be friends with someone I once… hooked up with.”

One side of his mouth lifts up, to hear her reduce the wild storm between the two of them to a hook-up.

And he probably knows she is lying and is desperately ashamed to have asked him for this… this… Weekly date with constraints.

But before she can cobble together any kinds of vaguely true promises about her sexless-ish intentions and her relative wellness, Jonah sighs, in some exasperation, and he closes his laptop and begins to stack up his books. “Is this going to be a whole thing, like the thing with Rami? Do I have to find a different café on Thursdays?”

“No one else would have you,” she doesn’t miss a beat. “And besides, you met Tim at Chatty Wednesday and he’s a romantic. You can’t quit this place.”

She feels rather than sees the priest watching her curiously during this exchange. He wants to ask who Rami is, and knows he can’t, she guesses, but here again, worries she is hoping rather than understanding.

“I don’t need a chaperone every week,” he says quietly, to Brian, as if he’d heard her inner monologue when he first walked in the door.

This is deflating, like someone stuck a knife in her libido and all the juices came pointlessly out.

“Are you quite sure?” Reverend Brian asks, his tone suggesting he thinks eternity may be at stake.

“It’s an experiment. We both will know if we have to abandon it. You can bloody well trust me on that. But I didn’t want to begin in any kind of secrecy.” He meets the deacon’s gaze, now, and then hers. “The Catholic church is not a cult. I am allowed friends outside the church,” he says emphatically.

“Well, it obviously is a cult,” she says. “Lighting, costumes, ritual, hierarchy, the tithing thing. But don’t worry. I’m in a better place than I was a year ago. My therapist keeps me honest,” though not about this, specifically, because I haven’t told her, “and I am committed to only being sexually and otherwise available to people who are, themselves, available.”

This last, she hopes, is actually true.

“I don’t care. About any of this,” Jonah cuts in. “Though Tim will. My boyfriend. Please don’t tell him there are not-at-all-clandestine meetings going on between his favorite restaurateur and a hot priest. It’ll be hard to keep him away. And I have fucking work to do.”

The deacon looks consideringly at each of them, Jonah included, before resting his gaze on his parish priest. “I’m not your confessor. And I’m not the bishop. And you haven’t asked for my advice. I will be coming along some Thursdays, though,” the deacon looks her way with a bright light flickering in his eyes. “For the company.”

“That’s fi—that’s… fuck. What the fuck is that?” the priest bursts out.

Fuck, he saw it, finally.

She’d considered taking it down but her pride hadn’t allowed it.

“What the fuck is what?” she tries.

“You know what. On the wall. Has that been there the whole time?”

“Calm down. It’s not a fox.”

“It sure as hell is a fox.” He scowls at the wall. “Foxes eat guinea pigs, you know.”

“It’s a picture of a firefox. It can’t hurt you or Hilary, because it’s mythological. Although I suppose that can’t stop you from putting on a collar and organising your life around it.”

He sighs, and misses her quip entirely, still looking at the firefox. “Fine. You’ve a right to be angry at me, after all.”

Reverend Brian is watching him oddly. “Do you have some kind of fox phobia?”

Her jaw drops a little at that. Do other people not know?

“Something like that,” the priest says. “How long has it been up?” he asks softly, as if the words come out despite himself.

“I picked it up at a street fair in Helsinki about, oh, six months ago,” she replies. He nods, slowly, walks over to it and winces and seems to force himself to touch the frame. The little painting shows a fox tail painting the aurora borealis—a gold-red fox in a green-gold sky.

It had made her feel powerful, to hang it on her wall. Perhaps it had been some kind of totem. And it makes her feel powerful now, to see him beside it, to see him guessing at meanings somehow both clear and opaque. This is her oldest power, this willingness to almost be vulnerable, and she relishes its return.

“Should I take it down?” she offers eventually. She almost means it.

“It’s just a picture of a firefox,” he reminds her. Then he squares his shoulders and looks back at her. “I’ll arrive a little later, next Thursday. We’ll chat about the weekend. What we’ve seen on the telly. And so on.”

“You’ll tell me which of my regulars is becoming one of your parishioners,” she accedes.

“Oh, we’ll try to be more interesting than that.”

She smiles, a little tightly. “Alright, Operation Friendship is launched, then?”

He nods, tossing a few bills onto the table that she knows without looking will include a nice but unremarkable tip, in keeping with the tenor of unremarkable friendship he’s trying to establish.

Alone in her refrigerator, taking a quick inventory, she thinks, So this is a Thursday afternoon friendship.

She is well now… right? She is the goddess of telling the truth. She is the goddess of naming and taming her feelings.

She is still not going to tell her therapist about… any of this.

I’m pretty sure it’s better than nothing, she thinks.

Apropos of… nothing? Probably nothing—she remembers admitting to her angel investor, at a not-so silent retreat two years before: I just want to cry, and cry, all the time…

She lets herself stand in the refrigerator, next to the ham salad and egg & cress, for longer than she has stood and stared there in many months.

Protestant, she is thinking. Carpentry. Necklace sex. Angie. Recognises Donovan. New pews, cherry. Belfast. Peace lines. Nail through his left ring finger, twice. Foxes are secret. 

She went so long without a word, and now she is awash in them. She cannot tell if she is reveling or drowning.

The next Thursday, he arrives at about 13:20. Reverend Brian is not with him. “Doctor’s appointment,” the priest says briefly. “He’ll be along next week, I expect.”

“You can take our table, sir, er, Father,” Simon says. He and Ashleigh are already packed up. She already learned from them, when they arrived, that the sermon last weekend centered on serendipity, a word Ashleigh hadn’t known—on finding something other than what you were searching for. In the central anecdote, the priest related having been searching for a condom and having found instead a crucifix necklace, which raised other questions (which Ashleigh and Simon could not answer) about what sort of Catholic preaches about contraceptives. “That was a cool service on Sunday. Crazy amount of Latin you guys must have to learn.”

“Reading Virgil in the original is at least thirty percent of the appeal of the seminary,” he smiles.

Simon is not much of a fan of the Aeneid, and has begun to explain why when Ashleigh tugs his sleeve and reminds him they are late, though for what she seems reluctant to say. When they get outside, Ashleigh waves goodbye at the priest through the safe distance of the café window.

“They won’t be back,” he says to her quietly as she slides him his mug of coffee. “At the parish. I’m sure they’ll be back here. They were just hunting for experiences that mean something to them. That felt true to them. It happens all the time.”

“Simon said he’s thinking about rabbinical school now,” she tells him. “So you may have ensorcelled them, after all.”

He nods, unsurprised, and she supposed catching religion must feel unremarkable in his life. “I’ve often thought I would be a terrible rabbi. It’s all about questioning, you know. Getting others to question. I’d rather…”

“Enchant,” she inserts. “I know.”

“The world is just so…”

“I know,” she repeats. He looks weary today, and it’s not her imagination. “Guinea pig?” she asks, because she also understands the power of distracting with wonder.

“No thanks, I’ll have the ham salad again.” He looks up at her hopefully, wanting a laugh even if it’s pitying.

“You’ll have to work harder than that,” she pats his shoulder. “Milk and sugar, right?”

“No, that’s Reverend Brian. Just milk, or cream,” he says easily. "Lots of it, though."

“…OK.”

It’s so extremely strange that she hadn’t known that, that it knocks her off her stride.

The café never hits a rush as rushed as the previous week, but ups and downs from week to week are normal. A big part of the restaurant business, she has long since learned, is rolling with unpredictability. She closes, but for Jonah and the priest, at about 2. And then, with a deep feeling of anticipation, sinks down into the chair across from her former lover, with coffee of her own and, though she won’t admit it to herself because she is not a perfect person and avoids thinking of aging whenever possible, a very sore back.

“So why the long face, Father?”

“I was up all night with a parishioner. Well, with her daughter.” He looks searchingly at the wall across from him, his eyes unerringly finding fox in the aurora borealis. “The daughter died, at hospital. Breast cancer. She was 51.”

This wipes all the thoughts out of her brain. “Sorry,” he says, seeing her stricken face. “Fuck, I should have thought. In fact, I did think of you, last ni—”

“It’s OK.” And it is, or at least—it’s not like it’s news that other people are still dying of breast cancer. “Was it… it was expected, then?”

“Yeah.” He has the coffee mug awkwardly held up against his body, like a tiny blanket, as he rocks back in his chair. “She’d been in hospice for about two months.”

“Two months, shit.” Her own mum hadn’t lasted two weeks in hospice. “What do you do for people when… I mean… what exactly are last rites?”

“So there are three things,” he says slowly, as if nervous that this was a rhetorical question or that she’s about to make fun of him for answering in sincerity. “Confession, which you know about… sort of.”

“Uh-huh.” She isn’t touching ‘sort of’, not now.

“She hasn’t spoken for about a week, but that’s expected, so I did the confession a while ago. And did the anointing of the sick at that time, with help from Reverend Victor, another of our deacons.”

She remembers Reverend Victor’s picture from the website, and gives a low whistle. “You boys are a trooping around giving hot oil and massage to the dying, and the rest of us think it’s a marvel when you achieve an occasional miracle return to health.”

She gets a ghost of a grin, at that. “We did the final communion on Sunday night, because the doctors thought she was in her last hours then. She… lingered. So I came back, and her daughter asked me to pardon her. Strange ritual, that.”

“Because it offers you a peak experience of nearly unchecked power over immortality?”

“Oh, I wish. No, it’s because… I guess because it reminds me of my last career,” he says heavily. “Before seminary. Did you know I was a corporate accountant? I’m sure I must’ve told you.”

“No! No, I believe I would have a very strong recollection of picturing you, eighteen months ago when I was still susceptible to your various charms, wearing nothing but a calculator.”

“OK. Stop that." Jonah is looking, now. “I’m trying not pay attention to you, because I have too much shit to do. But when Tim asks about this later, and he absolutely will ask, he’s going to get all worked up about shit like that and then he’ll start trying to get me to fucking transcribe your whole…” He waves his hand generally in their direction, not looking up. “And I truly don’t have time.”

“Sorry, Jonah,” she says, chastened. “Sometimes I can’t resist.”

“Try,” he mutters darkly.

“Do try,” the priest adds, but the new light of laughter in her eyes is hardly an inducement. “Anyway. Forensic accounting. I lived in the weeds of institutionalised money management. Abatements, P/E ratios, disincorporation—”

“Ooh, watch it now with the dirty talk, you’ll have me thinking thoughts that are… less than friendly.”

“Ahem,” Jonah says from his corner.

“Sorry, Jonah,” she says, running a tongue along her teeth to tell her priest the opposite.

He gives her a quelling glance, but his shoulders seem like a stone has been lifted off them. “Anyway, to me… last rites are somehow like that. They are technical. Like it’s my job to reduce the complexity of the world to a balanced table on a spreadsheet, to a single result. ‘Et reddituri sunt de factis propriis rationem. At his coming, they shall account for their own works and deeds.’ You know?”

She doesn’t, yet. But she tries. “When you gave last rites, you felt that much of this woman’s life was being… reduced.”

“Yes, exactly. The whole meaning of her life, something to which the ritual gestured, and which it could not touch, like a spreadsheet can’t tell you what and who and why and how. But, with a final pardon, there’s a kind of reaching past the veil. You can feel the life beyond, hanging all around in the air. And then….” He makes his hands into a poof! gesture of sudden disappearance.

“Yeah, and then it’s all just gone.” She looks toward Hilary, now, and keeps looking there. “You know, I wasn’t there when mum died. I mean, at the exact instant. I’d gone to get Dad and Claire something to eat. Just from the kitchen—she was in home hospice. But she stopped breathing while I was buttering toast.”

He tilts his head, consideringly. “Who was with you? In the kitchen?”

“No one. Martin was in the parlor, watching telly on mute, and the hospice nurse was also in there, no doubt fending off his weasely my mum-in-law-is-on-her-deathbed-I’m-so-sad advances. And Henry came straight away after he got off work, of course.”

“And Henry was your boyfriend.”

“Yeah. In an easy-come, easy-go sort of way.”

“And Boo was…”

“Oh, Boo was toddling around Edinburgh with her brother, who’d recently gotten out of rehab and wanted to celebrate his new lease on life. Inevitably became a bender. Anyway, I didn’t want to bother them. She hadn’t seen her brother in months.”

This is all true, but she doesn’t love the (also true) image of herself that emerges from saying it.

“Is her brother… alive?”

“Benny? Oh, yeah. Extremely. What happened to Boo sobered him up pretty good. Security officer at a Barclays by day, stripper over at the Blue Ball by night, and you know, he’s honestly not half-bad. He does a Cupid bit on Valentine’s that’s… muah.”

“Is that the extremely posh one, on King Street in Hammersmith? Yeah, I’ve been.”

“Oh, you have, have you?” She refuses to ask this infuriatingly worldly priest any earnest questions about this sort of thing, though she’s truly very curious. But she will take the piss. “Was it as a guest or a performer? Clergy night is always popular. And I suppose you could use the extra income, what with your heating costs. I mean, the bell tower alone….”

“Anything for the Church,” he laughs.

Jonah slams his book closed loudly.

“I guess this is our version of banal water cooler chat.”

She smiles, at that, and realises she feels lighter, herself. “Right. ‘So, what are your weekend plans…?’”

“Oh, just the usual. Back-to-back performances Saturday and Sunday, a little singing, some meditation, some gladhanding, a bit of light transubstantiation. Perhaps, if I’m very lucky, some quiet contemplation in my garret with Aquinas or, let’s be honest, the graphic novels my niece has been sending me and, for my sins, a backlog of Bakeoff.”

“You… bake? No, scratch that, you have a niece?”

“Yeah.”

“That you’re in touch with?”

“Yes. You knew I had a brother…?”

“Who’s a paedophile.”

“Yes. He’s still in prison.”

“And his daughter…”

“Has never met him in this life.” His face, which she feels is open virtually to a fault, closes like a vault.

“I see.”

He is telling her that his niece is safe, and she hears that plainly. But the question that has occurred to her has shaken her so badly that she feels as if there’s a cup of viscous liquid in her gut that is sloshing over its rims. It’s this:

What did your brother do to you?

They have never shied away with eye contact with each other—it’s part of what makes this, er, friendship, unlike any she’s ever had. And they don’t now. He sees her searching. He might even know why, because she has not tried to keep the light of alarm from her eyes. He lets her look.

He gives her nothing.

She weighs what it would mean to ask, what his stony face is telegraphing. And decides.

“As for me,” she says, with false brightness, “I’ll be working, too. Friday evening, out with my feminist cooking class. Like Bakeoff  but with no actual baking. The class itself ended ages ago. But we did have to tolerate excessive amounts of festive bunting and ‘on your marks, set, bake’ and the like.”

“Your…?”

“My feminist cooking class, the FCC we call ourselves. Feed the woman within. Well, that’s the company slogan. Mandy made t-shirts for us that say ‘Eat me, I’m a woman,’ and that’s more our vibe. Mostly a lot of mums who are looking for outlets for their vulgarity.” 

His face has cracked open a bit, now. “And Saturday?”

“Yes. I do have a date. Stop fishing. I’ll ask you to refrain from follow-up questions next week, as well.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” they hear Jonah say, not quite under his breath.

“Will be sure to refrain,” the priest holds up his hands in surrender.

“On Sunday, I’ll do my usual. Weekly shop, call on Dad for tea, curse myself for letting yet another week go by without joining a congregation with a hot Protestant minister I could torment….”

“Don’t you dare!”

“I guess you could have been that hot Protestant minister, by the way?”

He raises a confused brow.

“You converted. As a… teenager?”

“Ah. You heard that. I guess, in that sense, I could have been the… hot Protestant minister,” he says. “And I’ll tell you about it sometime, but for now… I actually haven’t slept since the hospice visit, and….”

“Oh, God. Yeah. Go and sleep.”

“OK.” He starts reaching for his wallet and she waves her hand. “Your money is no good here, save it for the downtrodden,” she says.

“Do your other friends pay?” he asks cautiously.

She thinks for a moment about people she has not charged. Her dad (who has been in exactly twice, and who slips her cash anyway); Claire (who has been in perhaps five times, and slips her cash anyway); various men she was fucking or trying to fuck; Boo’s brother, Benny; the occasional indigent person. “I don’t think it’s relevant,” she says. “And I invited you here.”

He keeps her gaze while he drops a bill on the table. “Just so Jonah doesn’t have to report us to Tim.”

“Thank you,” Jonah says.

The priest leans toward her, as if to hug her, changes his mind like she might be lava, laughs at himself.

And hugs her, fiercely, quick and hard.

“Don’t have too much fun this weekend, Father,” she tells him.

“I… won’t say the same.”

And then he’s gone, and she pretends to restock and balance the register while Jonah types like he might run out of letters. She wonders if any of them realise she’s been closing early, because of him.

It’s 3 in the afternoon, but her Thursday feels over.

Chapter Text

May desire be as pleasurable as its fantasies.
May the fullness of our suffering, the lack at the heart
of it, ring us around the edge of pressure and relief
and idly past it. May we be admitted to dim rooms
of alone, finally and not meet disappointment in
our long wants...

--from "Blessing" by Constance Hansen

Already in that first week after he abandons a woman he loves at a midnight bus stop, he develops a new ritual. He calls it ‘fantagising’, for its twinning of fantasy and strategy—strategies that would never work, fantasies he never intends to enact.

The ritual, like most rituals, builds a bridge between worlds; in this case, the life that he loves and the ones he won’t allow himself.

His earliest fantagies, concocted in those first weeks when it still seems perfectly possible to just show back up in her life, are admittedly juvenile. He envisions, for example, simply walking by her café at a little after closing each evening until he ‘happens’ to bump into her.

(The appeal here is that he only half has to intend finding her—he is simply walking by, not outright knocking on her door—and hence he accrues only half the guilt.)

His imagination is powerful and detailed—always has been, between it and the foxes and his brother, it's one of the three ways he knows himself to be cursed—and he seldom gets to enjoy it. Ritually, he lets himself revel in these dark, buzzy hours, in how real he can make it feel, with just a little time and effort.

By and by, they gradually develop whole conversations—whole arguments—whole riffs and recurring inside jokes. She has opinions, in his visions, about his preferences for breakfast (nothing, nothing at all, until after 10), his style of driving (annoyingly cautious), the music he likes to listen to before he falls asleep (women folk singers). And he shares his opinions about how her family treats her (like she’s a problem to be isolated, but not solved), how long it takes her to respond to texts (days), what cool beverage she wants to drink on a hot day (lemonade spiked with gin) and what warm beverage on a cold one (just coffee).

In his mind’s eye:  perhaps it takes him days, weeks, months, of wandering by Hilary’s, before he sees her at all. When he is feeling melodramatic, she has sold up, partnered up, is drugged up past reason, is held up at gun point and needs him, needs safety, needs money, needs liberation, needs an ally, needs counsel. Sometimes she is aggrieved, and needs comfort, needs to fucking shout at him like he deserves. Or… once in a while she is just straightforwardly glad, very glad, to see him, and needs… just him.

On those occasions… oh, well, he can think it in the safety of the church grounds at night. She invites him inside. Lost wayfarer that he is. 

And—fuck it all, fuck everything—perhaps, once in every twenty of these imagined evening strolls, his imagination allows him to find a kind of peace with her, or the bliss that masquerades as peace, however temporarily. 

Once or twice in that first year, he even imagines fucking her again without regret.

But that last—it’s nothing. Well. Not nothing. But it’s just his cock doing his thinking, nothing that a man who understands the deeper, spiritual value of celibacy can't surmount, mostly. Sometimes. At least while he's awake.

He recognises that these visions conjoin his beliefs and his desires, that those desires and beliefs are incompatible, that he needs the alternatives to all exist at once. He cannot pull them apart, in case the rope of his life is really just two or three separate strings held together only by that tangled knot, as he half-suspects.

Over time, this simple fantagy comes to seem quaint, and his more complex visions take root… but those, he does not share with anyone, not in confession and not even in prayer.

He is trying to reserve some small part of himself for himself, so he holds his cursed imagination damnably close.

It is all fucking ridiculous, of course—every sad, stilted fantagy—but, sitting on the ground and leaning against the hard bar of the bench seat, he allows himself the luxury of alternate endings.

In that first year, he never once sees her outside of his mind’s eye, nor any of her family, not even her odious ex-brother-in-law and his odd son, whom he understands have left London for Martin’s hometown outside Chicago. Her father and stepmother, once married, don’t darken the door of his church, and her sister never arrives, as he half-expects, to vengefully excoriate him for what he’s done.

He wishes he could say that she becomes less real, as a result of her long absence from his real life. But imagination and memory are bound together. And his cursed imagination won’t allow him to forget.

Through the year and a half in which he never sees her, he is dedicated, voluble, and intentionally charismatic within his calling. Sometimes he’s manically so, as if he seeks universal love precisely because he cannot be loved singularly.

His congregation grows, almost doubles, in that first year—and hence he builds those new pews for the chapel, work which is salutary and healing in itself, improbably brings a part of his childhood back to the fore as a virtue and not mere survivance. On good days, that pleases him, both the fact of growth and all the forms of new creative work it creates. On great days, it fulfills him. It reminds him that he is changing mortal lives, building true community. He feels he is touching eternity.

That is how he explains his life, to himself.

But… it is just that he keeps thinking he’ll see her, somewhere; and in that first year, and another half a year again, he never does, not even once, not even at a great distance, not with any certainty.

Maybe, he thinks, you remember your last time even better than your first. 

(He hates to think about the first even more than the last.)

Whenever he thinks of her, whether during this ritual or at odd moments in the workshop, the pulpit, his shower—is always an exception. It is, every single time, an aberration. The larger truth, which he knows everywhere else and at all other times of day is, he was right. 

It will pass, as everything always does, and has, and will. 

But then she comes to confess.

And now, it’s been a dozen Thursdays since the launch of Operation Friendship. He has come to build his schedule around the steadying rhythm of their weekly appointment. There is no sinning, here, he feels; and so he doesn’t question it. What he knows about this weekly trip to her café is that it keeps him level, something like opening a drain at the bottom of a bathtub before water can splash over the sides.

This particular Thursday, the third in June, however, there is a crisis of overflow:  a pipe bursts in the rectory, in the wall between the hallway and bathroom on the second floor. Pam has a meeting in the city, so he is left sopping up elderly carpets, moving occasional tables, and waiting for their plumber as Thursday’s midday comes and goes.

He looks at her website, to find the café’s phone number—he doesn’t have it, and the boundaries they’ve drawn have meant he can’t ask for it.

Hilary’s Café’s web presence, he learns, features a giant leering cartoon guinea pig and looks like it was designed by a madwoman using Geocities in 1994. It has little more than the address, telephone number, and hours.

Wait. The hours.

He notices that Hilary’s closes several hours earlier on Thursdays than any other day of the week.

Is that… for me?

Iciness hits the nape of his neck.

Enough. You should have called hours ago. But he hadn’t—he couldn’t. Calling would have been an unleveling.

He also knows she’s waiting, and possibly worried, and probably quite annoyed, and that waiting to call has made him an arsehole.

She picks up on the third ring. “This better be a clergyman with a very good excuse—”

“It is,” he interrupts, and the cold he was feeling moments ago is gone. “Burst pipes. Soaking wall, damage to the ceiling. Saving the rectory through manly chat with surly contractors. Did you… Is Jonah still there?”

“It’s 6 p.m.,” she laughs. She sounds… relieved. Had she worried something had happened to him? Guilt claws at his neck; familiar feeling, that. “He is, actually. But I take it… are you asking if you can still have lunch here?”

“Fuck, I thought it was…” he sighs. “Earlier. Somehow I was watching the clock the whole day and time still got away from me.”

“Well, the FCC is on its way over for a game night,” she is smiling, he can hear it, so now he is, too. “Mandy’s in charge.” In addition to being her friend from the feminist cooking class, he has learned on previous Thursdays that Mandy is her weekend manager and also runs special evening events, seemingly always and only for the female-identified.

“Ah.”

“But you’d be very welcome if you wanted to raise some church funds tonight by… defrocking,” she says brightly. “I haven’t forgotten about the strip club thing, you know.”

He smothers a laugh. “Maybe not tonight, I haven’t made up my show mix yet. I’ve got the theme. ‘Just Like Heaven’ and ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ right at the top, but after that…”

“That is a fucking miserable-sounding dance routine, but at least the puns will be on point. Some ladies, and gents, are into that kind of thing.” She pauses a moment, and he has the sense, for no reason, that she’s wrestling with herself. Then she says, a trifle impatiently: “Just come tomorrow.”

“What?”

“Tomorrow. For lunch.”

“But it’s Friday.”

“Yeah. You didn’t sign up for Thursdays in blood, did you? Didn’t tell the archbishop to excommunicate you if you came to my café at one minute past midnight?”

“It would actually take a papal decree to excommunicate me. Theoretically. But OK. Yeah.” He feels something still inside him, and leans back on the wall of the chapel. “Yes, I’d like to come tomorrow, if I may… a little later to get past the end-of-week staff meeting? We start after lunch and it usually goes about an hour and a quarter, so….”

“Sure, yes.”

“How’s Jonah allowed to stay?” She doesn’t follow. He elaborates. “You said he’s still there, but the FCC are on their way in?”

“Right. He’s on a submission deadline and has refused every fucking hint in the last three hours.” He might believe her if he didn’t know her. As it is, he’s sure that she has implicitly told Jonah he can stay at least until ladies’ night is fully underway. “He’s annoyed at you, actually.”

“For not showing up, or for refusing to take the anti-evolution side in that debate last week?”

“Apparently Tim asked to be on speakerphone today.” She has a laugh in her voice. “He believes we have real ‘will-they-won’t-they’ vibes and he’s, quote, enthralled, end quote.”

“They don’t understand.”

“No,” she agrees. “I think they’re sort of… stuck where we were. When we first met, you know.”

“Our will-we-won’t-we vibes were fairly extreme, at the time.”

“Yeah.” She sighs. “This is working, though. Right? Thursdays, I mean. And… well, Friday, tomorrow.”

“It’s working for me,” he says slowly. “Being friends is…” He weighs what is kind, what is useful, and what is true, not on his priestly scales but on his human ones. “I like to know what you’re up to. Stops me from jumping at shadows, seeing a cheerfully drunken woman with a bag of G&Ts in every passerby.”

“You… imagined what I was up to?”

“Didn’t you? For me?”

“Oh, yeah, of course. Well, if by ‘imagine’ you mean ‘rage speculate.’”

“Oh?”

“A lot of tripping and falling onto pointy religious art, mainly.”

“Ah.” He looks around him warily. “Yeah, that’s a definite possibility. Particularly now that you’ve said it.”

“I forget how superstitious you are.”

“It’s not me, it’s Him.”

“If only I could believe you.” She pauses. “I should probably go help Mandy set up. We’re playing Secret Agent tonight.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like Among Us… but in real life.”

“Not clarifying.”

“Get on the internet.”

“Terrible advice, my dear. Tell Mandy that Charlie says hello.”

(He’d met Mandy at a Thursday lunch some weeks before, when she’d stopped for café business. She had said, upon seeing him: “Oh, fuck, Charlie? No. Fuck you, you didn’t become a priest!” He apparently looked like her ex-husband’s arsehole best friend from college, and she couldn’t stop saying, “Just when I fucking forgot about Charlie.”)

She laughs. “Will do.”

“Hey, wait. Is this—Thursdays—is it working for you?”

She pauses, likely enough doing some of the calculations he had. “It’s like… like the difference between being barefoot, and wearing in a pair of shoes. You know?”

“…Yeah, actually. I really do.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s fucking odd, though.”

“Yes!” she laughs. “Not that I’ve tried explaining it to literally anyone. Shut up, Jonah.”

“Guess I’ll meet Tim one of these days?”

“Stop in for a Chatty Wednesday and he’ll be all over you.”

“Whoa, now, we can’t just put every day of the week in the mix at once.”

She laughs again, and so does he, and it’s so easy and so strange. “Oh, my strategy is to add one day at a time, Father.”

“Until tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“Bye now.”

“Bye.” She waits a beat. “Are you still there?”

“…Yeah.”

Several ponderous heartbeats later, she reiterates: “OK, see you tomorrow.” And hangs up.

He learns that there is no magic that changes how the café looks, and feels, on a Friday versus a Thursday, but then he already knew that sinning often feels like doing nothing at all. She spends her lulls with him, getting up only to clear tables as they’re abandoned, or when someone walks in the door. He’s arrived late enough that some people are stopping in to pick up sandwiches, a hand pie, or a quart of soup for supper. It makes him wonder how much business she loses, closing early on Thursday afternoons.

He can’t bring himself to ask. They’re having too good a time talking about their respective experiences of school trips to Paris; doing impressions of ‘90s British pop stars; and, after a fellow patron ostentatiously sneezes, guessing what the other would be like as a patient in a hospital ward.

When the phone rings, she jumps. It’s a rare moment of physical loss of control; he is much more accustomed to seeing her face go unnaturally still while she fights to mask her first reactions. He thinks of it like a wrought iron fence going up, because he imagines it protects her in some cases… but often it is very easy for him to see straight through.

This, too, is easy. It is two things at once. She had momentarily lost track of what this is, what they are to each other.

And there is something she is intentionally keeping from him.

She catches herself. “Two landline calls inside twenty-four hours,” she says lightly, getting to her feet. “Like I’m running a telethon in here!”

His table abuts the wall with the phone, and he hears every word of both sides of this call with perfect clarity. It is her sister. Claire is, perhaps, somewhat less abrupt than he remembers her being.

“I’m calling from a toilet at Turnham Green station. I don’t have a lot of time.”

“You’re in London? But what about the baby?”

“Listen. We’ll be at the café in twenty minutes.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” she asks warily.

“Rami wants to surprise you—”

“Absolutely not.”

“—and take you out to dinner. And I am asking you, for my sake, to please, for once, be gracious and accept—”

“Absolutely not.”

“—his invitation. Fuck’s sake! The man is in love with you!”

“He is very definitely not! He just tells you that he is so your husband will keep paying him his idiotic salary.”

“God, you are determined to self-sabotage for the rest of your life, aren’t you? In any case, we’ve no time for this. We’ll be there in twenty. Act surprised. Let the poor man take you to dinner.”

“Please don’t—”

But her sister has already hung up.

“Well, fuck,” she says to herself. She glances over his way, seeming to remember he is there. “How much of that did you hear?”

“I’d just like to know what’s wrong with Rami?” he asks, slightly mockingly to try to keep his distance from this unwanted knowledge. “The man is in love with you.”

She slumps back down in her seat across from him, looks up at the ceiling as if praying for guidance (which, obviously, is not whatever she is actually doing) and then back at him. She blows out a breath.

“Yes. Well. Here’s the situation. I told you how Claire married Klare, early last summer?” He nods impatiently. “I went to stay with them in September and…” She shrinks down in her seat a bit, uncomfortable with telling him this. “I slept with a man I understood to be Klare’s personal assistant?”

“Ah, OK… and that’s Rami.”

“Yeah, except turns out he is also Klare’s stepbrother. They have a complicated relationship. Klare basically hired Rami to keep him out of trouble. I guess his parents begged him to do it. When they all found out we’d shagged…” She shrugs, a little fatalistically. “For my sister, it started as just one more tally in the spreadsheet she keeps of my fuck-ups. But Klare went a little ballistic. Rami is a bit of a player, and Klare is besotted with my sister, and he over-reacted. Decided I am his sister, now, too, and I needed to be rescued.”

She says this with light disdain; this is, blatantly, unwelcome and paternalistic, possibly prudish and definitely a bit ridiculous, given this woman’s sexual history and the fact that she’s in her thirties and not her teens.

Good on you, Klare, he thinks, but aloud he says, and also means, “Foolish man.”

“And Rami is not an idiot. Realises that if his boss-slash-stepbrother believes he’s been playing fast and loose with Claire’s family, he’ll lose his meal ticket. Invents a deep, abiding, downright tragic level of love for yours truly. And so I’ve been fending him off, whenever we’re within a hundred miles of each other, ever since.”

She is strumming her fingers on the table, now, realising she is being cornered.

“And the reason you can’t just tell him to fuck off is…?”

“Thanks for the opportunity to rehash questions my therapist also loves,” she says. “It’s just that Claire, who is normally not susceptible to this sort of bullshit, really wants to believe this is real… She’s entertaining fantasies where I move to Finland and snow-shoe my soon-to-be-born niece to my new Finnish café.”

“…Because Finnish people mainly travel by snow-shoe, in this scenario.”

“Yeah. And honestly, I feel a little bad for Rami. His family truly treats him as if his hands have explosive powder on them and everything he touches might go kaboom.”

“Ah. So you and your therapist have been working through the ways in which you identify with him as the family fuck-ups.” And how and why you’re drawn to Claire’s sisterly reunion fantasy. To any show that she needs you.

“OK, shut up and help me strategise. How can I get out of dinner with Rami tonight?”

“Well, you could always just go, enjoy a free meal, and then slam the door in his face?”

“Have we met?”

“Right. Post-therapy you thinks he needs rescuing from you, because you’re a man-killer.” He rolls his eyes. “Just tell them you’re coming to the church hall tonight to bake for tomorrow’s charity fundraiser.”

“Have we met?”

“I thought the FCC, and also running a café for a living, might have imbued you with the requisite baking skills needed to produce a few dozen edible biscuits, but clearly that’s insane—”

“I can make edible biscuits. But why on earth would my family buy into my having a… religious baking emergency?”

“Have we met?” He taps his collar. Then he sighs, because this truly is a bad idea; what if they end up having to go through with it, and sit, just the two of them, waiting for bourbon creams to come out of one of the four ovens in the low evening light of the church hall? Maybe it’s time to investigate the boundaries between them and make sure they hold: “Don’t you think—”

God is real, so he doesn’t have a chance to ask her a question he knows he’ll regret asking, because the door chimes, and the Finnish trio have arrived. Her back is to the door, and she winks at him to let him see her preparation for the show he’s about to get. She turns around with the door chime and lets her jaw drop in faux shock.

“Oh, what a surprise!” she cries out. There’s an edge to her voice when she says the next. “Claire specifically told me she was staying in Helsinki until the baby was born!”

“We decided to have the baby here,” Claire says thinly, a hand automatically going to her abdomen and patting it twice, systematically. “The labour ward at our local hospital was very… cosy.” She shudders slightly as her sister hugs her and admires her genuinely enormous baby bump, briefly.

“Hello, Klare. Hello, Rami,” she turns to the men.

Rami is taller, perhaps a bit older, and neither as muscular nor as blonde as his stepbrother, and he has a lived-in face and sensual droop to his mouth. He is the only one of the three newcomers who is wearing casual clothing. When he bends his head to kiss the cheek of the woman he purports to love, he audibly whispers, “I have missed you, kulta.”

The priest lies more than he should—more than he thinks God would wish. But he does not, as a rule, lie to himself. So he knows that he feels those words, and that casual gesture, graze against a wound deep in his gut. He acknowledges it. He accepts it for what it is.

“Rami wants to take you for dinner, and I told him you mentioned you were free this evening when we spoke on the—wait a minute. What the hell are you doing here?”

Ah. Claire has, finally, noticed him. “Hello, Claire,” he says. “You look very lovely, and indeed, much more pregnant than the last time I saw you, though I believe it was from behind?” It was the removal of her wig, more than running out in the middle of a ceremony he was officiating, that had captured his memory of that particular moment.

She ignores that, repeating, “What is he doing here?” this time to her sister. “You’re not still—”

“No.”

“And he’s still—”

“Yes, Claire. We’re friends. He comes to the café on Thursdays. We have lunch.”

“It’s Friday,” Claire hisses, “and it’s literally closing time!”

“Yes, well, you see,” her sister spreads her hands openly, an expression of pure innocence lighting her eyes, “there was an accident with the plumbing in the rectory yesterday—”

“OK. No.” Claire draws a calming breath, begins to speak, cuts herself off, and takes another breath. “You are absolutely going to tell me the truth about all of this later, but—”

The priest cuts Claire off. “She is telling the truth right now,” he says sharply.

“I’m sorry, Father, but your past history doesn’t exactly leave me with a lot of confidence about the nature of whatever this weekly… thing is.”

Ah. So she knows, and intends to fight, on her sister’s behalf. In some sense.

“What past history is that?” This, surprisingly, is Klare and not Rami. For his part, Rami looks mildly amused. He has the look of a man who sees all of life as one long, moderately entertaining carnival.

“It’s none of your business,” his partner in past extra-clerical crime cuts in, looking annoyed. “Nor, Claire, is it any of yours, actually.”

“There’s no reason not to tell them,” he offers now, with a slight shrug. He turns to the Finns standing as centurions on either side of the café’s door. “Your sister-in-law and I have a sexual, and a romantic, history. From awhile ago. I have made the appropriate confessions and reparations within the church. We have decided to remain friends. It’s not that complicated.”

Well, that last part is a lie.

“That’s a ridiculous lie,” Claire says. “It’s absurdly complicated. Why wouldn’t you tell me he was in your life again?”

Oh, God. Oh, no. Claire sounds hurt. Her sister will not respond well; this will go downhill now, quickly.

“Let’s see, which reason do you want?” Her sister’s tone is pleasant, but the coldness of her eyes could keep fish fresh at market. “One. You’re not my keeper. Two, you literally never ask me about anything but my job and whether I’m dating. Three, you are presently in the last stages of a high-risk pregnancy and instead of staying in bed like your doctor told you to, you have apparently gotten on a plane and shown up in my café with the intention of trapping me into falling in love with your arsehole of a brother-in-law.”

Well, so much for going along with Claire’s fantasies ad infinitum, he thinks.

Rami’s hand flies to his chest, as if he’s contracted a mortal wound there, and he lets out a choking sound.

She spins to Klare. “Why are you going along with this? You should have kept her at home, jotting off memos and organising takeovers from the comfort of the chair in her home office!”

Claire appears to be in a kind of shock—probably still unaccustomed to her sister’s new practice of actually speaking her mind, aloud. Bewilderment, on Claire, looks like self-loathing on the verge of a tantrum.

“Have you tried denying your sister something she insists on having?” Klare raises an eyebrow.

Claire manages to cut in. “I’m not a child to be managed—”

“You fucking well are having a child which you are not managing,” her sister says, at the same time Rami says, “I think we’ve all forgotten the purpose for this visit.”

Claire takes a deep, steadying breath. “Yes, you’re right.” She reaches out for Klare, and gestures for him to pull out a chair for her. “I need to take better care of myself.” She looks at her sister entreatingly, and now the priest can’t tell whether she’s putting on an act or has actually been swiftly, startlingly chastened. “We didn’t fly, you know. We took the ferry, and then the train, and now we’ve hired a car. It’s outside.”

“So you can head back to your flat…?” her sister says softly, seeming also not to trust Claire’s sudden change in mood.

“Yes,” Claire says. “That’s what we’ll do.” She has definitely given in far too swiftly. “If you and Rami could just go and pick us up food at that Persian place I like?”

Aha.

Her sister’s eyes narrow. “You want me to go, with Rami, to a restaurant so inconveniently located that we’ll need to switch trains three times, to source Persian food we ate once twelve years ago.”

Claire opens her mouth, and then closes it, and then… oh, Christ, her eyes are filling with tears. “It’s only that I wanted to have the baby here!” she says.

Now he presses a hand to his own abdomen. Fuck. A crying Claire.

“Oh, Christ. Fine. We’ll get this ridiculous food.”

“Of course we will get you anything you need, Claire,” Rami says soothingly, as his stepbrother looks at him approvingly.

Claire’s un-pin-downable sister quirks one eyebrow, and he gets just a quick flash of mischief before she speaks. “And we’ll have a holy companion come along with us, to ensure our safety,” she says.

He raises an eyebrow at her, telegraphing her a quick message. Surely she doesn’t need me and my bake sale excuse anymore. “I’m very sorry,” he says. “I actually already have evening plans.”

“Oh, that’s right,” she says, deliberately ignoring his cue. “Yes, I’d… almost forgotten. We have baking to do tonight. Charity bake sale tomorrow, and… scads of people dropped out at the last minute, so… we’ll have to make the Persian food a quick drop-off situation.”

Now Claire’s still-damp eyes narrow in consternation. “What’s the charity?” she grits challengingly.

He can see that this is a trap, heaves a deep sigh, and holds up a hand to stop Claire’s sister from plummeting into it.

He gives in, as he often has, with her.

Funny that she said I’d be their priestly chaperone, when it’s obvious Rami will be ours… but an evening with Rami, it is.

“It’s for a partner parish in Lebanon,” he says evenly. “Poverty alleviation and funding for a school outside Beirut. We’re… commandeering the reception hall kitchen to make biscuits for the annual fundraiser. Fucking awful situation, with the children. The ladies of the FCC have been experimenting with recipes for weeks. Fundraiser’s tomorrow.” Every individual sentence here has been true, he’s relieved to notice, though not all of them relevant to each other. “So… it’s our last chance. To bake.”

“Oh, wonderful!” Klare says. “We’ll have to stop by. Do you think they’ll have any of those… what do you English people call them… jam dodges? Claire loves them.”

“Jammie dodgers,” his sister-in-law grins, shooting him a grateful glance. “I’m sure we will, yes.”

“Oooh, Claire….”

Claire is gritting her teeth, scarcely able to believe that she’s been out-maneuvered. And Rami is looking at him consideringly—weighing his intentions, weighing the relationship between them. “I can’t wait to learn how to bake real British biscuits with the two of you,” he says lightly, finally.

“I…” Why hadn’t he anticipated this maneuver? “That would be fine,” he says finally.

They’re supposed to have a chaperone, anyway.

Claire nods firmly, once, obviously satisfied with this outcome. “I’ll text you our order for Chafez,” she says to Rami. “Call me first thing in the morning, though,” she tells her sister. “We clearly need to talk about…” she waves her hands around the room. “Everything.” Her tone adds, very plainly, I look forward to bailing you out of whatever this is.

“Will do,” the younger sister agrees with apparent aplomb.

When Rami steps into the restroom, and Claire and Klare retreat into their hire car to return to their flat for the evening, he realises, finally, that all of the café’s other patrons have been gone for a long while.

“Never alone,” he mutters. He shakes his head like a dog shaking off water. “I’ll come with you to the Persian place, of course. After that… any advice on how to acquire some homemade-seeming fucking jammie dodgers by morning? Klare seems like the type to actually show up.”

“Oh, yes, they’ll definitely show up,” she sighs. “Sorry. I was telling the truth, I actually can bake them, you know. The FCC worked some small miracles. Does the reception hall have an industrial oven?”

“It has four separate, er, regular ovens,” he says. “Can you not bake them here?” 

“I only have mini-ovens here,” she says. “Café, not a restaurant.”

Before he can reply, Rami returns, his sky blue scarf tossed casually around his neck over his burgundy linen blazer. “OK, gang, let’s ready set bake.”

“Oh, fuck right off,” she says. “You can go straight to whatever club you’re going to end up in tonight, I won’t tattle.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rami says sardonically. “How often does a man get to bear witness to a beautiful friendship between the woman he loves and a church man? What the fuck is going on between you two, anyway?”

The priest just shakes his head. “Call in the order at the Persian place,” he says, trying not to watch as she swiftly reapplies dark red lipstick in the tiny mirror on one of the shelves on her wall. “Looks like I’m gonna let you back into my church.”

There’s a Tesco three blocks from Chafez, and so it’s there that they go. “A priest, a sex deviant, and an arsehole all walk into a supermarket,” she mutters under her breath, and though he normally understands her well, he cannot decide which of the latter two monikers she is using to describe herself.

He has never seen her under fluorescent light before. It strangely suits her, but perhaps only because dramatic light and shadow always suit her. He files the image away.

The recipe she has selected suggests three kinds of jam, and he goads her into saying that she’ll make them from scratch, “for the children.”

“Finnicky fucking children,” she says, but she loads a quart of apricots into the cart alongside strawberries and raspberries. “Forcing me to show off.”

“You could not do otherwise,” Rami says behind her. “You shine by simply being.”

“Just, seriously fuck off already,” she rolls her eyes.

Rami just laughs, evidently accustomed to her manners.

They are an odd trio. He usually gets a few second glances from people surprised to see him in public in clerical garb. He doesn’t mind, and doesn’t go out of his way to seek out lay clothes in which to shop, as he’s aware some of his colleagues do. He thinks it’s important that people see religious authorities in their midst, double-checking cartons of eggs for cracks and comparing the unit price of competing brands of laundry soap.

They move on to the baking aisle. They lose Rami temporarily in the produce section, where he’s flirting amiably with a buxom middle-aged woman next to the literal watermelons while the woman’s tween-aged daughter looks on balefully.

“Kid has bigger tits than me, too,” she mutters as he rolls their cart away.

“Am I supposed to be pretending not to hear this shite, or can anyone join in on your itty bitty titty pity party?”

She rolls her eyes at him, a gesture he is growing a bit sick of. “It’s an off-limits topic for you and I, surely,” she says sulkily. “But I’ll call Rami over and you and he can compare notes, shall I?”

“Oh, yes, absolutely. Because that’s what men do,” he says derisively. “Listen. If I want to talk about your tits, I’ll talk about them with you.” Her eyes dart meaningfully to the older couple standing a ways down the aisle, who had been debating shelled versus unshelled pistachios but are now openly gaping at them. She looks back at him. Shut up, she is saying. People will hear you.

“If I want to talk about your tits,” he continues, at the same volume as before but with more irritation, “I’ll talk about them. We are not in a cult of silence to protect my reputation. How many times do I have to say it? Reality is real, my dear. It’s real in my church, at your café, and it’s real here in the baking aisle of Tesco. And,” now he’s on a roll, “the reality is that you know that your tits are gorgeous, that there are a wide variety of men who prefer small tits categorically—”

“The same men who prefer boys, whom I suppose you know a disproportionate number of.”

He sets his jaw at that but continues unabated, “—and that fishing for compliments, from a priest you’ve shagged, in the fucking baking aisle at Tesco, is beneath you, your beauty, and its real point of origin, which is not mainly in your, again, gorgeous, albeit not bountiful, chest, but rather in your alarmingly intuitive mind, your winsome personality, and your generous heart.” Her eyes go soft, now, and at that sight, he takes a step back and turns, in one motion, to the cart. He speaks his last point to the flour selection. “So stop being a fucking idiot and sulking over a man that you don’t want, not wanting you.”

“Are you talking about Rami or you?” she asks now. Perhaps the bright lights have also made her bold.

Not wanting you. He lets the idea jangle around in his brain, and then he does what he does best:  accepts the pain of it, and smiles. “Rami,” he says easily. “Just Rami.”

“What about Rami?” the man himself reappears, his blazer now slung over his shoulder, looking pleased with himself as he drapes an arm over his alleged lady-love’s neck. “Did I miss something weird here?”

“I think he’s right,” the older woman down the aisle speaks up. “Your breasts are perfectly nice, dear.”

“Easy for her to say,” her husband guffaws in the general direction of his wife’s ample proportions.

“Oh, just a generalised discussion of my tits,” she tells Rami. “Did you get her number?”

He gives her a what-do-you-take-me-for-an-amateur harrumph. “I also got a text that says the dinner order is ready,” he says. “We should go get it. The Clares are waiting.”

Rami’s idea of gentlemanly virtue is particular. He insists, both at the Tesco register and at Chafez, on paying.

That both places have sexy cashiers with large eyes and slow smiles is one thing that the priest, who is open to all manner of observation about himself and the world, doesn’t notice even for an instant.

He stays in the lobby of the building where Claire’s company keeps a penthouse for when executives are in town, while the other two go up to drop off zereshk polo and shrimp kebabs. He puts his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, sacks of butter, flour, sugar, and fruit around his feet. Suddenly, alone, able to take stock of what this day has become, he feels he has, perhaps, erred.

“Monsieur le Comte!” someone calls, and his spine goes rigid, instantly.

That fucking nickname.

“I’d know that posture anywhere. Hard day crunching the… hey. Did you become a fucking priest?”

He sits up slowly. It is a former colleague, that much is obvious—the nickname had evolved in some unreconstructable sequence where by bean-counter had led to Count had led to Dracula and had somehow become French. He remembers this man instantly, with his deliberately scruffy beard, an open shirt collar, and half-rim glasses he probably doesn’t need. But what the hell was his name? Bart… something? Sebastian?

They had worked in different branches. He remembers snorting cocaine with this man in the bathroom of a London club during one of his semiannual trips to corporate headquarters. He remembers how fucking sad he felt, that night, and he remembers why. He remembers, vaguely, the woman he went home with, who’d had photographs of Tuscany all over her bedroom walls. He could probably, with use of an app, find the club. This man’s name, though…

A lot of his twenties are like this, although the haze was much more typically booze. It’s no matter.

“Yeah,” he allows Bart-bastian his trademark rueful grin. “I sure as fuck did become a priest.”

The man lets out a sharp, startled crack of laughter. “Holy shit. Wait’ll I tell Callan and Brett. Hey, are you around tonight or….” He snorts. “Never mind, I guess you probably don’t party like you used to, ha ha ha.”

The elevator opens, and his party of three is reunited. Though he knows both she and Rami have robust social lives, his instinct is to protect her from… this. Whatever this man is. “Nice catching up with you, er…” he says, dismissing himself from this unwanted blast from the past.

“Ha, ha, ha, wait, can I just get a picture for Callan? He’ll lose his mind!”

Now the woman he sought to protect moves to protect him. “Hey. He’s a priest, not a zoo animal, fuck off.”

“Oh, are you one of his… congregation people? What do you call it?”

“Congregation people, yes,” she says. “That’s the term.”

“You know, I used to do coke with your pastor. Insane, right?”

“Shocking,” she says drily. She turns back to him. “Shall we?”

“Wait just a minute,” Rami says. “Did you say something about a party, just now?”

Rami, selfish bastard that he is, kisses her cheek and his before peeling off into the night with… Brooks! That was his name.

They walk silently, perhaps both marveling at Rami’s particularly unabashed hedonism, to the parking garage; the Clares have given them keys to a hire car.

“I think you’re right,” he tells her, lowering himself into the passenger seat.

“Obviously,” she says, “but about what?”

“I don’t think he’s actually in love with you.”

He lets his head fall against the glass of the window when she smirks and tells him, “Guess you’d know.”

They reach the church hall at a quarter to nine, and it’s June, so it’s only just getting dark. Well. As dark as London gets on a summer evening.

And it’s strange, because they only have two rules—they socialise only with others present, and she doesn’t come to his church—and right now they’re breaking both of them, but… he feels, as he unlocks the side door of the building to enter the kitchen directly, that something is stilling in his deep heart’s core. The image that comes to mind is a steady hand placed on a finely vibrating tuning fork.

Maybe if they don’t acknowledge this Friday aberration, He won’t notice it, either.

(He should know, by now, that he can’t convince God that Friday is Thursday, but it will not be the first lesson he learns the hard way.)

The church hall equipment runs to copper-clad pots, but two of the ovens are older than either human in the room, and there is not a hand- or stand-mixer in sight. She throws a heap of butter and sugar into an oversized bowl, simply says, ‘Those forearms ought to be good for something,” while she busies herself with berries and even more sugar, at the stovetop.

She looks… competent. Given that she runs a café, and quite a homely one, at that, this should be no surprise.

He is surprised. He doesn’t associate her with… well, with any of this. Stoves, sugar, butter, recipes, directions in general, the domestic arts. She is obscenely feminine, but not in way that propagandists of the 19^th century had wanted everyone to think was natural and eternal. She probably does not know how to cross-stitch or sketch a lily, although watching her now, he doubts his own judgment.

She has found an apron somewhere. He knows she abhors clutter, and has a native pragmatism about basic human needs. Perhaps that is all anyone needs to seem at home in a church kitchen.

And he feels just a slight hum from the tuning fork inside him, for a moment, when he hears himself reflecting that she really looks like… she belongs here.

He knows she doesn’t.

He decides to put his own hand back on that humming tuning fork by cutting off his own line of thought. “Should I be making conversation, or are you attempting to concentrate on,” he fumbles for what he has learned from holiday baking shows, “pectin networks and acidity and whatnot?”

“Vocabulary!” she mocks him. “Impressive.” She is mashing berries against the side of lightly bubbling pots. “If you don’t expect much, I wouldn’t mind some chat.”

“Sounds like a good rule of thumb. So what’s your favorite non-rodent pet?”

She smiles, but thinly. “Sadly that makes me think of what I’ll do when Hilary dies, and the first order of business will be attempting to avoid walking into traffic, so…”

“Jesus.” He thinks a moment. “Are you sure you’d notice if I replaced Hilary with a similarly colored guinea pig every three or four years?”

She is opening and closing drawers, looking for and swiftly finding, a whisk. “I’m not, but my veterinarian has records from her dental cleaning, so…”

“Well, fuck.”

“Yeah, that’s pets for you. You have to love them every day knowing you’ll outlive them, like if your parent also became your beloved and comforting child. Hilary is also more than that.” She whisks the raspberries briskly. “So much for light chat. But you? Are you allowed companion mammals, of the non-human variety, in the rectory?”

“If you’re asking about the Church’s stance on bestiality…” They both laugh. “No, it’s not for me, not at this point. I do like dogs, but there was a study a few years back that said priests who have them are more prone to anxiety and depression, and, to be honest, I don’t need the help.”

“Shit. That’s the opposite of the dog brand, isn’t it?”

“Yes, when you buy a dog, they come in a box that says ‘guaranteed to bring joy and delight’ but there’s some small-print warning text for clergy, evidently.”

“And cats?”

“They don’t help, apparently. Help priests, I mean, According to the study. Anyway, I don’t much care for them.”

“Foxes would probably get them anyway. If they went outdoors.”

“Yikes, I s’pose that’s right.” He wants to set one thing straight, though. “You know, ‘association with foxes’ isn’t actually a guiding principle of my life. For example, I liked Le Petit Prince as much as any sensitive fifth-former who’s ever been in a French class.”

“Ah. I wondered.”

“About my… reading of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry?”

“Oh. Well.” He sees her drift into her mind, and wrestle herself back to speaking aloud. He knows, now, after these weeks of Thursday friendship, that he can simply out-wait her process. “It’s just that the fox thing is… preoccupying. To anyone who’s spent time in a literature class… it truly seems like God has invested your life with symbolism and left the rest of us to unpack what it means.”

“Oh, fuck, you think the foxes aren’t foxes but are a fucking metaphor… for what?”

“Well, one idea is that it’s the Little Prince thing. You know? If one catches you, you’ll be… tamed. As long as you keep running, you’re independent. And free.”

“But lonely. To complete the analogy to the book. Lonely in my, what, in my monastic calling. My clerical cell. My…” He meets her eyes over the bubbling strawberries. “My celibacy.”

“Well… yeah.”

He shakes his head, looks away. “The problem with that theory, of course, is that they truly are literal foxes, and that this has been happening since I was teenager. Long before God found me and saved me, or I saved myself, or…” he waves a hand, hoping to convince her that this point is of no interest. “Whatever. I was not celibate at the time. The point is, the boy found one fox, like the rose, unique in all the world and so on... but I have been stalked by many, many foxes. Most of the foxes I knew in Belfast are long dead. And new ones fucking find me wherever I go.”

“Right, I suppose that brings us to another metaphorical possibility. They’re a physical manifestation of the way in which you’re… besieged by your primal nature.”

“Ah, ‘the beast within’, but in this case,” he gestures around them, “without.”

“Yeah.”

He thinks about it. “Should I be taking this seriously? Is this something you really believe?”

“Oh, I’m not sure even I know the answer to that. I just wonder… when was the first time you noticed one following you?”

He cocks his head to the side. “Oh, you’ll love this story. Let’s see, I would have been about twelve. I had taken the bus out to a girls’ school in Andersonstown. I had a terrible crush on a girl I had met through county-level maths competition.”

“Oh, you were a mathlete, were you?”

“It set me on my road to a stable career in accounting, and its attendant occasional cocaine-inflected revels, didn’t it?” He shakes his head. “So. The fox. Andersonstown is a west suburb of Belfast with as many Catholic churches as people. Nora went to a school associated with one of them, and we’d made a plan, as twelve-year-olds with landline phones, for me to meet her at the school and walk her home. I had a paper bus schedule in my pocket, because it was the nineties. And I felt very exposed. Out on a limb. The way only a twelve-year-old who’s left town on a public bus and whose parents don’t know where he is, can feel.”

“Your first time running away from home.”

His eyes go dark at that. “Not quite.” He bends over the biscuit dough roller, letting her flick some flour over the top to make it go smoother. “The fox was waiting for me when I got off the bus.”

“No!”

“A veritable sentry of my indiscretion. It leapt for me when I tried to disembark, if you’ll believe it. Horrifying. A woman at the stop tried to shoo it away with her bag, but it kept following me, so… I hopped back on the bus and took it on a full circuit until I got back home.”

“Poor Nora.”

“She never spoke to me again, though obviously I’ve looked her up on social media and she seems to be doing fine. An arborist, on the public service.”

She doesn’t touch that. “So it’s one of the first adult things you do, hopping on public transit to cross a city boundary and a religious one, pursuing your first fucking love of all things. And that’s when the foxes found you?”

“It does give weight to the pheromone hypothesis.”

“Yeah, they are definitely not a metaphor for your bestial nature. Just the opposite.”

He thinks for a long moment. “Yeah, that’s probably true.”

She has found biscuit cutters somewhere and is deftly cutting out rings and loading them onto trays. She slides the first two into oven number one and turns his way. “These are too old to have timers, can you believe it? Can you set an alarm on your phone for fifteen minutes?”

“Sure, I… no, wait, mine’s dead.”

“’kay. Mine’s in my bag just there,” she nods, “just scroll up from the bottom and you’ll see the timer icon.”

“Right, sure.” He picks up her phone, thinking how strange it is he’s never seen her on it and couldn’t even have pictured her red and gold case. Most people don’t go twenty minutes without picking theirs up, but she has a peculiar, quiet ability to focus on the people around her that he’s never stopped to appreciate before.

And then he sees it.

She has a single missed message from someone saved in her phone as “Sexy Schoolteacher.” It reads “caught an early flight—surprise! see you at yours by 11 xx” with a kiss emoji. She has a picture of him in her phone in which he is sitting in her bed—he recognises the headboard—and not wearing a shirt, though only his broad shoulders and upward are visible.

He sets the timer mechanically, then sets down the phone. His stomach is sick. The tuning fork, and more, are thrumming in his heart, his gut. He feels, from his legs down, oddly heavy, and from his waist up, oddly light. He’s suddenly aware of how cold the air is, in the kitchen.

Should I tell her? He’s annoyed that there’s a part of his brain that is even asking the question. What if I don’t? It will mean too much if I don’t. “You… er, you have a message,” he says, and he can hear that his voice sounds a bit hollow but he’s never been adept at hiding his feelings.

Though this would be a truly ideal time to start.

She gives him an odd look, takes the phone from him, and then says, “Oh.” She sighs. “Fuck… I think this is why we’re not supposed to spend time together without chaperones.”

He gives her a weak smile, and then hears himself ask a question that’s almost what he really wants to know. “Is that one in love with you?”

She looks at him steadily, one of the glances they seldom give each other, where each can see everything. “I think he might be,” she says finally.

“Have you been seeing him a while—you know you could have fucking told me, right?”

“It’s been three months.” About the same amount of time that he’s been coming into her café on Thursdays. “He teaches second form. Little ones. Has a sense of calling about it—I guess you’d have to—like you.”

Except he’s available.

“Claire’s going to eat him alive,” she adds after a long beat.

He lets out a breath. “Now that I’ve met her husband, I’m not sure I understand your sister at all.”

“She enjoys humbling the men around her.”

They go about clean-up methodically, working in tandem. It has been a while—a long while—since he’s been in the kitchen with anyone else.

“Did you used to bake with your parents? In childhood?” he asks her.

“Oh, no, Mum had many enjoyable hobbies, but baking was not among them. And my dad… he can cook, and because he’s a closet lunatic, he particularly enjoys the timing element of it all, but he absolutely requires that nothing and no one, including a little girl’s feelings, depends on the outcome or he’s utterly paralyzed. Doesn’t seem like your household was the kind where the kitchen was the heart of the home?” she asks carefully.

He appreciates it. “The heart of our home was the mudroom, because we all stored enough stuff there to make it easy to leave. But all the same, my mum did teach us how to bake.”

“And what were your—”

He will ask himself, later, whether he cuts her off in order to forego this line of questioning, or because he can’t keep the question he wants the answer to inside any longer. The moment will become a locus of a series of fantagies, where he does other things—more forceful, more demanding; less forceful, less embarrassing.

“Are you in love with him? Sexy Schoolteacher, I mean?”

She looks at him sadly. It’s regret, or it’s pity, or it’s pining, or it’s despair. “Maybe, yes,” she says, opens her mouth as if to elaborate, and then closes it and looks at him challengingly.

He lets out a breath again. “He should come around the café sometime. Would be glad to meet the man who could hold your heart.” He says it gently. He aims to be gentle with both of them.

“School hols aren’t for another few weeks,” she says cautiously. “If we’re talking about a Thursday do.”

He hears the pop of one of the pans inside an oven, just before the timer on her phone goes off. God is speaking, and he understands Him perfectly.

“Oh, yes,” he says, sliding on an oven mitt. “I think we should probably stick to Thursdays.”

Chapter Text

Otherwise

...All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

--Jane Kenyon

Her therapist still does not know about the priest. She does, however, know about the sexy schoolteacher.

Said sexy schoolteacher also does not know about the priest. He knows about her therapist, in a glancing way. (“Healthily damaged” is the byword of the 21^st century Londoner).

The priest knows about her therapist. Actually, she thinks his knowing was a linchpin of their reunion. Now, he also knows about the sexy schoolteacher. He has suggested a meeting. He would like for all of this to be above-board. She thinks that this is the main way that he lies to himself and to God about what all this is:  he pretends that nothing can be erotic if there are no mysteries and no secrets. “We are not in a cult of secrecy to protect my reputation,” he had told her over a sack of store-brand bleached flour, as if so saying would drive a knife into their libidos.

It hasn’t worked, of course. She acknowledges that that may be because, in not telling her boyfriend or her therapist about it, she has ensured that it can’t. She is in a cult of secrecy, more to protect her libido than his reputation.

Therefore, she stands in the middle of this triangle—therapist, priest, schoolteacher. She enjoys her own centrality. It helps her to reclaim what the priest had taken from her at that bus stop nearly two years before. She has read about it on the internet, and she calls it, privately, Main Character Syndrome, though she treats indulging in it rather as a show of confidence than narcissism.

And sure. It makes therapy less helpful. Her therapist can sense she is asking the wrong questions but cannot find the right ones, and that, too, is satisfying and makes her feel a bit more herself.

Since her therapist does know about the sexy schoolteacher, she asks, near the end of each session, “Are you going to introduce Nathan to your family this week?”

For ten weeks, her answer has been: “No, thank you.”

She gives these reasons:

“Claire will eat him alive.” (This may or may not be true of post-Klare eight-point-seven-five-months-pregnant Claire. She can’t decide.)

“Did I mention he’s excited recently to have moved to Dulwich Village?”

“I honestly just don’t want my godmother’s hands on him.”

“I’m worried he and Klare will drive off in a sedate sedan into the sunset together.”

“Given his profession, it will be very hard to hide from my dad the fact that he loves children.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if it happened organically?”

“He has three different Belle & Sebastian t-shirts, so the odds that he’ll wear one to tea are basically incalculable.”

“I thought you said that ‘No’ was a complete sentence.”

These responses provide them, obviously, with plenty to unpack.

She can be predictable, at times, like when she moves to incorporate her boyfriend into her life on a whim and on a Thursday.

“So you said you wanted to meet him,” she says, flipping the sign on the door ten minutes early because fuck off, there is no ‘closing hour’ police. The priest and Reverend Brian have been doing the crossword, passing it back and forth between them, while they wait for her to be free for their usual chat. She has agreed to screen the homily for Friday mass. She is looking forward to it. This is… normal?

“Meet him?” the priest asks, but he also understands whom she is talking about, instantly, though it has been weeks since he suggested this. “Is he coming today, then?” She can see the effort he takes not to take any action at all, from his eyebrows to where his legs are idly crossed at the ankles, as he asks.

“No.” She makes rapid calculations. “I’m having a dinner party. Thursday next. My house. Eight p.m. You’re both invited.”

Jonah, in his corner, has taken to erecting a sort of half-wall with blue posterboard to which he has taped a set of notecards with impenetrably dense notes. Aside from being a writing technique, this helps him keep his distance from other patrons and signals his extreme unavailability for chat. He is reading, just now, and not writing, but he looks up, eyes clear and fully present for just an instant. “Tim,” he says.

“Yes, obviously you and Tim are invited, I’ll ring Tim about it later,” she says.

Jonah nods, having made the whole contribution he intends to, but she answers him as though he’d stated the natural question aloud.

“Mandy and her husband, obviously. I’ll invite the Clares, but her due date is twelve days away and I sincerely doubt they’ll grace us. And Nathan has a twin sister who’s also his best friend, so…”

“Who’s Nathan?” Reverend Brian asks.

“Her boyfriend,” the priest smiles, and damn him, it even seems to reach his eyes, though like always he may simply be privately laughing at himself. “That’s his name. Apparently.”

“Ah.” The deacon looks at his friend searchingly, then smiles at her readily. “Well, we’ll be there, of course. Unless there are crises of faith to be managed.”

“Only thing is, I chose Thursday ‘cos it’s the day I close early. Gives me time to get provisions, get set up…”

“You don’t want to see us here, only there,” the priest clocks her meaning. “Got it. Should we bring anything?”

“Plonk and a four-pack like we’re at uni? Nah. If the two of you do bring wine, make sure you don’t accidentally…” she waves her hands in a wand-suggestive ‘doing magic’ motion over his coffee mug.

“Oh, God, thanks for that reminder,” he says, and Brian adds, “That iron taste, and the stains! I do hate it when that happens.”

The homily is on pessimism as a saving grace. She does not fully understand the passage from Ecclesiastes on which it is based. She asks Reverend Brian, who has much better handwriting than the priest, to write down the chapter and verse for her. He erases her daily specials—carrot coriander ginger soup and ham on rye—and puts it on her chalkboard, on the wall beside her register. She thinks she may leave it up there for a while, so writes her Friday specials around it.

Sometimes, she quite enjoys giving the wrong impression.

The days between Thursdays are often slow, but in this week, she feels as if she is aware of every minute. In her worst fears about this evening, and she has allowed herself to dwell in many of them in the last week, it hadn’t occurred to her that Claire and the priest might show up to this is-it-carefully-managed-or-totally-unmanageable dinner party at the same time.

When Claire takes off her dark purple velvet jacket, it quickly becomes the least of her considerations.

“Hello, welco—… wait. Are you… where’s your baby?”

Claire shoots a pointed look past her sister, at the strangers clustering in her kitchen. “That’s private,” she says firmly. She turns to the co-host without missing a beat. “You must be Nathan.”

“And that makes… you both… Clare,” the bemused man says.

“Wait. Claire.” She is reeling. “You are not… pregnant anymore? When did you have the baby?”

“On Saturday,” Claire says blithely. “Six pounds, twelve ounces. A girl. Perfectly healthy.” She turns back to Nathan. “So. You teach seven-year-olds. For a… living.”

The priest winces, pushes into the entryway behind Klare, and attempts to intervene. “Hello. Nice to see you, nice to—meet you, Nathan. This is Brian. He’s a deacon. I’m—”

“What is my niece’s fucking name?”  

“Lucy.” Claire anticipates Nathan’s next question readily. “A glass of something white, please. Klare will have a sparkling water, he’s the parent on call.” And she sweeps into the makeshift dining room that her sister has artfully, and temporarily, carved out of her parlor and breakfast nook. Klare meets his sister-in-law’s wide, outraged eyes, shrugs lightly, kisses her cheek, and says, “She did wonderfully. The whole thing took under eight hours. And she couldn’t bear you or your dad making a fuss. You know how she is.”

“I am going to make a really big fucking fuss if I don’t meet her first thing tomorrow,” she says warningly.

“Of course,” Klare says. “Now go give your sister a hug, we hired a nanny and a flat around the corner for the evening, our baby monitor app isn’t working, and we haven’t slept in a week. But she had to be here tonight. For you. To meet him.”

She moves to obey this edict, but then remembers. The priest. She shoots him an apologetic glance, and his says clear as day that he’s a bit astounded at Claire. Seriously? his eyebrows ask her.

I fucking know. Wait, fuck.

She had forgotten about the triangle. She tilts her eyes meaningfully toward her boyfriend, and mouths back at him, He doesn’t know. She touches her fingers to her chest and points at him. About us.  

The priest rolls his eyes and waves her away, his whole posture communicating amused resignation to her insistence on the, what was it again? The cult of secrecy.

And then she leaves her ex-lover behind with her unsuspecting boyfriend. “Claire, you will answer for every single text you sent me this week without mentioning you were in a fucking labour and delivery ward. Beginning with your response to me asking you whether you had seen The Queen's Gambit, and you said, quote, 'Wrapping up project here, please resend tomorrow'...!”

The priest considers himself a good actor. If he’s being honest, he thinks he’s a very good actor and has exploited the talent for personal and professional, and, in the last decade, godly, ends. The heart of it is that habitual sincerity means he's not really acting, even as he can try on multiple flavours of sincere without always sensing the contradictions. It’s a skill that comes part and parcel with having a very powerful imagination, and spending much of his childhood enacting various polite public fictions.

It's just that, here, tonight, he has no fucking idea what role he’s meant to be playing.

He steps into the kitchen with Nathan, the boyfriend, gamely accepting his pretense to need help serving the aperitifs. The priest, not being an idiot, understands it as a maneuver to give the two sisters more time to respectively air and ignore grievances, and to make himself available to his girlfriend’s friends.

He strikes the priest as unsuspicious and undefensive. In fact, what the priest dislikes about him immediately is how extremely comfortable he seems—in this kitchen, in her house. In this conversation. In his own body, on this planet.

Belle & Sebastian’s Tigermilk is playing on a portable speaker. Having spent his share of quiet afternoons at Hilary’s, he knows whose taste this is instantaneously and it is not hers. “Stuart Murdoch guy, huh?” he says, arranging the last of the martini glasses in a row. “You know, I had the album up on my wall as a teenager. Thought I was fooling my mum, because, you know…”

Nathan grins. “All the tits but none of the blonde bombshell sprawled across a Ferrari? I wasn’t plugged into it until later. This album was playing the first time my girlfriend and I, er… Christ, sorry, Father.”

“The first time you had sex?” He rolls his eyes, and can’t tell whether it’s at the man’s sense of religious propriety, or the choice itself. “I suppose she wanted to hear ‘She’s Losing It’, or is that one about a mental breakdown…?”

“They’re sort of all about a mental breakdown.”

“Yeah, that’s true. Olives or lime? Only they’re both on the counter, here.”

“Lime. The olives are for the salad.”

“Right, then. So what’s on the menu for tonight? Funny, I eat at Hilary’s once a week and have no clue what to expect.” Another little bafflement, the kind they have all the time, that he doesn’t truly know what she would serve friends.

It turns out he won’t be learning the answer to that, tonight.

“Well, she let Regina—that’s my sister, have you met her yet?—decide the menu, said she couldn’t be fussed. And Regina can be a bit… Well, the long answer is that we’re starting with gondi, which is an Iranian dumpling soup. Salad is what Reg calls a ‘Greek-style’ watermelon with feta and olives, and then there’s sauteed flounder in coconut rice with vegetable ragout from the farmer’s market. Post-prandial awabancha or there’s some dessert wine around here… somewhere. There’s also a flourless pear and almond torte with some kind of white chocolate something-or-other. You’re not the one allergic to almonds, right?”

“No. I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to whatever that was that you just described as a ‘salad’, though.”

“Yeah, that’s the trademark Reg move, alright.” The priest takes this to mean that his sister enacts whatever her own class insecurities are on hapless food, on a regular basis. “And, well, there are crisp greens in the fridge if it comes to that.” Nathan grins, now, as if in memory. “Teabag said she put Reg in charge of the menu mostly to stop her from ‘fucking around with the bits that are actually important’, though I think she mainly just wanted to bet on various people’s reactions. This guy Tim, I haven’t met him, getting a feeling he might have a bit of a sensitive stomach.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Tim, either. I know his partner, Jonah. Tim’s a Wednesday guy, and I’m…” he trails off, having no idea what Nathan has been told and feeling like somehow the word ‘Thursday’ means too much. Although, fuck, that’s probably just in his own ears. In the pause, he hears Nathan’s last speech anew. “Teabag? Is that… some kind of joke, about that awful nickname she has for herself?”

“Yeah. Wow, I didn’t know other people knew about that.” Nathan looks at him consideringly.

Now the priest wishes he weren’t in lay clothes. When you can’t act your way through a scene because the casting notes weren’t posted, a costume can do your work for you, after all. Feeling no natural dialogue springing to his lips, he says something he knows he’ll regret, that he regrets virtually instantly: “Yes, well, confession is a part of the job, after all.”

“…Right. Though a café is a strange place to administer it, no doubt.”

And now the priest, feeling the odd burst of conjoined anger and relief surging in his chest, is forced into self-confession; he recognises that he was fishing, to get a sense of what she must have told her boyfriend about him, since it wasn’t the truth. He makes a split-second decision to prompt Nathan to ask a few more questions.

“Yes, well, but it’s not as if we met at the café, is it? I was fucking surprised when she showed back up at my church after a year and a half of absence. That must have been just a bit before she met you, I s’pose… how was that again? She’s been a bit cagey with me, well, but then...”

He doesn’t know what he’s trying to imply, or why he’s trying to imply anything at all.

“Oh, it’s a good story, though! Gavin—do you know Gavin, Mandy’s husband?” The priest does, glancingly. “Well, you know, he’s a physio. And actually, he was my physio. Tore my Achilles pretty good coming home from my last tri, last year—sorry, triathlon, I run them. Or, I used to, twice a year, before I toasted my tendons in Perpignan.”

The priest raises his eyebrow. “Triathlons in the south of France? Do you run them with your teacher colleagues?”

Nathan smiles wryly. “No, no. Obviously not. It’s no secret that Reg and I have family money. And yes, we have a house there.” He lowers his voice. “It would be a kindness if you don’t ask Reg what she does for a living, when you meet her, tonight. Neither of us really has to work, and Regina doesn’t. Never had a calling like me and Gregory, that’s our other brother. You must know about that, though. Not like you went into the priesthood for the money.”

“Oh, no, it was for the glory,” the priest dodges reflexively.

“Of course. Anyway. Gavin and I became mates, and he got me involved with a water polo league. In his line of work, he knows a lot of gits like me with busted parts, and surf’s a bit easier on us lot than turf. That, and the gentlemen’s division of the FCC had to have somewhere to convene. Oh, the FCC was this ‘feminist cooking—'”

“I know about the FCC,” the priest cuts in, a bit too bluntly. He tells himself to modulate. “Although you’re breaking the news about the, what, male allies swim league.”

“Ha, close, that. We call ourselves the NAMS.” He pauses for effect. “The hashtag Not All Men Squad.”

The priest knows he is meant to smile, but he is not a perfect person and, after all, in the course of this conversation, he’s switched off assigning himself parts ranging from ‘emotionally open acquaintance’ to ‘protective father checking on son-in-law’s prospects’ and has inadvertently verged into ‘aggrieved ex-boyfriend’ territory. He’s lost the plot; so he lets himself wince, openly. Having done it, he feels obligated to add, “Are you sure about that nickname?”

“NAMS? It’s a joke. You know. Playing on the hashtag-me-too, thing? Where, like, some women kept saying, ‘you know, not all men’—”

“Fuck, no. Not the acronym, although… I mean, the nickname.”

“Teabag,” Nathan concludes after a long beat. He takes a long breath, and then shocks the hell out of the priest by apparently re-casting him as friend and confidante. “Yeah. She can be hard to read, you know. She says like ten percent of what’s on her mind. I had to ask if I could come by the café for six weeks before she gave me a day and time when the café was actually open to the public. Don’t get me started,” he tilts his head toward the doorway, through which peals of the sisters’ laughter is ringing, apparently in response to something Klare has said, “on the family. In her description, it’s unfathomable and all sort of seems like it was cast by Wes Anderson, minus the midcentury color palettes.” He shakes his head. “Do you think, then, that she minds? The nickname?”

The priest knows one thing, rock bottom, instinctively; whatever this role is, he absolutely does not want it, irrespective of whether or not he has, in fact, long since chosen it. He opens his mouth, intending to say, I think you should ask her.

But God is a brilliant arsehole of a director who demands more, and gets more, out of his cast than they intend to give. So what he actually says is, “No. In fact, I think she probably likes it.” He forces Nathan to meet his eyes—one of his superpowers. “And you should ask yourself why. My guess is, it reminds her to feel bad about herself.”

“Fuck.” Nathan, and the priest will, forever after, credit him with this, sees the justice of this insight instantly. “It has to go.”

The priest claps his shoulder, thinking, OK, fucking exit stage left, please. “Yep. Shall I help you pass around these… what are these fucking things?”

“G&T Italiano. I have to warn you. They’re very bitter.”

He sighs, and thinks that that sounds like the house special, tonight.

Before Claire can begin to enact her strategy for the evening, she is cornered by an ash-blonde woman in a Mimi Papavan jumpsuit who looks a bit like she has wandered offstage of her Tory husband’s concession speech in a tony southcoast constituency with four times as many mansions as warehouses.

“I’m the other sister,” she says, with a practiced smile, and extends her hand.

Claire looks at it. “Pardon?” she says.

“Nathan’s sister. His twin sister. Regina. You’re Claire.”

“Ah, er, yes.” Claire takes her hand belatedly. “Pleased to meet you. Have you known my sister long?”

“Oh, we’ve met up for dinner or drinks eight or nine times, I expect. You see, Nathan is not only my twin, he’s my best friend!” She says this brightly, like it’s the good news Claire has been waiting for. “She’s quite a singular person, your sister.”

This, Claire knows from a hundred past cocktail party gambits, is a bid, and she has firm pieties about the moment and method in a conversation when this move becomes appropriate.

This is far too soon. So she says simply, “That she is.”

Claire is aware that her tactic of extending a long silence makes her seem awkward; she believes that this makes a strength of the fact that she is awkward, exceptionally so. She is also aware that it’s particularly effective with other women, who generally do not bear the ostensible, silent judgments of others easily. Therefore she simply raises an eyebrow at Regina, as if to say, “Would you care to elaborate?” and watches Regina falter.

Not a woman of business, then, or at least not a good one.

In the midst of this, fortunately/unfortunately, Klare arrives with her Pinot and presses it into her hand. To Claire’s eyes, her husband is a bit subdued in his handshake to Regina—neither of them has had more than three consecutive hours of sleep all week because of the baby—but she knows it’s also the most enthusiasm Regina will probably see all night.

Zeal is the base magic of Klare.

“The hosts’ two sisters, how marvelous! Regina, that is a lovely outfit! Are you coming today from work, or home, or something else altogether?”

Regina smiles, a bit thinly, Claire thinks. Ah. Un- or underemployed. “From errands, actually. I had suggested to Nathan that this gathering should be catered, but they were committed to a, what did he say, homely feel. So… here we are, in this… lovely home. Still, there were a number of last-minute supplies. I had to run all the way to West Brompton for my favourite locally-produced angelica bitters. And I wanted to be sure to pick up tarts from Poinsettia in case, er….”

In case my sister’s baking is a disaster. Fuck her even if it is. “Oh, in case what?” she says aloud, schooling a politely interested expression onto her face.

“In case, well…”

Klare takes pity on her; except he actually doesn’t. “And what is it you do for a living, Regina?” he breaks in genially. She never knows if he intends these apparently kindly interruptions to be as devastating as they often are.

God, but she loves him.

It was good to get out of the house tonight.

Regina, of course, has answered this before, and except for a slight narrowing of her eyes, Claire detects no class guilt whatsoever in what follows. “I’m a philanthropist,” she says easily. “Environmental causes, mainly. I chair the board of an organization committed to preventing climate change-related coastal erosion in southeast Asia.”

“You’re trying to… save Fiji?” Claire hazards, and she has no idea why she is being deliberately rude. Maybe it’s that her sister has lately been so oddly vulnerable and honest, simply telling Claire how she feels at every turn.

“We’re funding research and resources to preserve the population centers of Indonesia, the fourth most populous country on earth,” Regina says, and now it’s sharp.

“Oh, simply wonderful,” Klare claps his hands delightedly, as if nothing could make him more pleased than imagining dense urban areas narrowly avoiding climate apocalypse. He meets Claire’s eyes, transmits that he understands that she needs this woman to be somewhere else, and puts a light hand on Regina’s toned and bare upper arm. “Perhaps you could tell me about it, and also introduce me to the other guests…?”

Claire is not here to help Regina assess her sister as a prospective sister-in-law. She is here, on the contrary, to assess Nathan’s suitability; to test the obscenely expensive custom-made formal-wear pumping bra she is wearing for the first time; and to get to the bottom of whatever the fuck is happening between her sister and the priest.

Even once Regina and Klare drift over to the chaise, she still can’t quite hear Nathan and the priest’s conversation in the kitchen. When she first glances in, she sees the priest turn up one corner of his mouth and quirk an exaggerated eyebrow at Nathan with that faux sincerity, which seems all the more sincere for its exaggerated veneer of irony, that has fooled legions of fools. Her sister among them.

They don’t notice her. Too focused on each other. She cannot tell in which of them the jealousy in the room is rooted, and to whom it’s oriented.

Fiddling with her phone to ward off the approach of any interlopers, it’s out of the corner of her eye that Claire sees the priest clap Nathan on the shoulder, and look him hard in the eye, as if giving him a lecture. Although Nathan is two inches taller and a bit broader at the shoulders, the effect of this moment and this posture signifies in the other direction.

Innocent like a child, powerful like an elf, her sister, deep in drink at Claire’s bachelorette party, had said once of this priest. Claire had laughed until her sister quit crying into her cocktail and laughed, too.

Watching Nathan shrink beside a pitcher of G&Ts, she thinks of that description now and struggles to recall why it seemed funny.

She is restless. Lucy has never been more than fifteen metres apart from her before, and the odd sensation of this distance is slightly driving her mad. “Klare, I’m excusing myself,” she says primly as she passes him, Regina, and a couple she knows to be her sister’s business partner, Mandy, and her husband Gavin.

She pumps in her sister’s second-floor bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub. It is undignified, but she doesn’t fucking care because it’s so interesting. She meditates on how little she previously knew her own nipples. She leaves her cold-control storage bag plugged in next to her sister’s bed. She thinks about how many worlds are turning in this dinner party, tonight.

She walks downstairs newly committed to conversation with Nathan—the first item on the agenda. But the priest’s friend, what was his name? The deacon. Richard, maybe? The deacon and his companion, standing as they are slightly under the stairs, don’t hear her coming back down them, and when she overhears the priest’s name in their conversation she stills to an indiscreet halt above them.

“…so do me a favour, Tim, and tell him a bit about what your work entails.”

“Of course,” the other man—Tim, presumably, so one of the gay couple who are regulars at the café—objects. “I had hoped to ask him a few questions about your mission, in any case. I already know about what he—well, speak of the devil.”

“We often do, don’t we. Too often, probably. Hullo. You must be Tim.” Claire hears the priest, now, but doesn’t see him.

“That I am, Father. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Oh, I’m well aware of that.” The priest’s tone is bone-dry. “I’ve considered coming by Chatty Wednesdays to say hello—Jonah intimated, in his way, that it would be welcome—”

“Oh, let me guess, raise an eyebrow vaguely in the direction of the middle row of a calendar and say the word ‘Tim’, did he?”

“Just about. But, you know how it is. Thursdays are my…”

“Oh, yes. I’m fascinated. The two of you have an oddly Victorian arrangement, don’t you. You come to call on her at the appropriate hour, under supervision, in daylight…”

Claire isn’t sure whether the light cough she hears is coming from the priest or the deacon. But then the priest speaks.

“Well. I see that the two of you, you and Jonah, that is, both have one foot in the nineteenth century.” The priest sounds one part wary, two parts amused. “Are you an historian, like Jonah, then?”

“Oh, no. Definitely not. Actually, the deacon here was just saying I should talk to you about… er. Well, I work for UNICEF. The job title is Child Protection Strategist, but basically my team works to move public and private funds into organizations and communities that need help protecting children from sexual violence, most of which happens domestically. In the child’s own home, I mean. I work on the research part of the endeavor, but you can imagine it’s operationally complex. There’s a fundraising component, education and networking, all of it happening in nineteen locations which use six different languages…”

There’s a long silence, long enough that Claire not only apprehends it but has time to begin to fathom it, before the priest replies. “I suspect Reverend Brian here told you that our parish is particularly interested in child welfare initiatives.”

Not Richard—Brian. Right.

“He didn’t have to tell me. Your parish has made headlines—well, you’ve made headlines. And I’m in a line of work where they didn’t pass me by. How did the Sun gloss it? 'Priest to Parishioners: Bring Me the Sex Deviants'?"

“I’ve got that one in my scrapbook.” The priest is laughing, but Claire is a brand-new mother  and this conversation is putting her on high alert. “I don’t have any tolerance for mistreatment of children. I wanted to be crystal clear about it. We’ve built out the policies to match. There isn’t any reason for any religious authority figure to be alone with a child, and there isn’t any reason why children shouldn’t be taught about how to notice and report danger.”

“You’ve ended up with rather a lot of reporting of your own parishioners, I heard.”

The priest makes a low sound in his throat, halfway between disgust and a growl. “That we have. We tell the truth. By and large, I find that everyone but liars and perpetrators are drawn to the truth.”

“A colleague of mine said that the rumour is that your parish is also becoming a haven for survivors of sexual abuse and domestic violence.”

“There are some people returning to the church because…” the priest slows down here, and Claire has the sense he’s struggling for words. “Because… well, because they know it’s a place where reality will feel real, and will feel surmountable. One of the effects of sexual assault is that your perception of reality is both unstable and overwhelming. The church emanates stability. It helps.”

“There’s also a rumour that you’ve absolved teenagers who’ve had abortions.”

“That I cannot confirm.” Nor deny, Claire notices. So he drinks, curses, seeks out child sex offenders, and is permissive about abortion, in the Catholic church? Oh, and occasionally has sex with my sister. How has he kept his fucking job?  “You’re remarkably plugged in to the St. Ethelred grapevine, Tim. Do you want to come to mass this week and join the community, or do you already know too much?”

“Oh, right, I suppose I should tell you—my uncle is a parishioner. Ewan Morgan. Loads of my cousins, too, at least on Christmas and Easter. We’re fifth generation at St. Ethelred’s, only I wasn’t baptised there because my mum married a Muslim and broke my Gran’s heart.”

“Ah. I would say that that explains it, but to be honest Ewan Morgan never struck me as a man who would be told gossip, let alone who would repeat it.”

“That would be true, but there is a strain of child sexual abuse in my family history, so… like you, he takes it all quite seriously.”

“Right,” the priest says. Just that, with no comment on the implication. “So. Does your team do any work on this continent, or is it all just impoverished kids in post-war zones?”

“Yes, well, actually, our team works with a number of religious charities abroad. In many places the Catholic church has been an especially eager partner, actually. But there hasn’t been a lot of interest here at home with respect to child sexual abuse.”

“I wonder why,” the priest says dryly. “Listen. It’s no secret that this is—personal, to me, and central to our present mission. Brian is right, I’d appreciate a further conversation. Would you come to the parish office sometime to chat about your research, or perhaps I could come by… where do you work?”

“Oh, it’s a cramped little set of rooms in an ancient government building near Imperial. The team is scattered around the globe. We’ll come to you—my research partner and I. Don’t tell my uncle, he’d get the wrong idea.”

“I don't generally condone secrets," the priest reaches out a hand, "but this one feels pretty fucking harmless."

Claire gets up as Jonah approaches—he can see her—and she brushes off her skirt and steps down the rest of the stairs to join the gathering, just as though she hadn’t been snooping. She introduces herself to the deacon and to Tim and Jonah, and nods curtly at the priest, who raises a bemused eyebrow at her as he wishes her well.

“I trust you’re not being a lunatic,” Jonah says, ostensibly to Tim.

“Oh, what. I’ve barely bothered him about the tragic-romance-slash-forbidden-longing thing at all. Tell him, Father.”

“I started to believe his supposed prurient interest in my total lack of a sex life was just something you fabricated, Jonah.”

Jonah makes a choked sound of disbelief. “I’m not the one who’s been calling my uncle once a week, supposedly to ‘catch up’ but actually to mine tidbits about the fucking sermon for evidence that he’s about to break his vow of chastity.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” the priest mutters, simultaneously with Claire. Is he looking at her, beseechingly, for support? Does he think she’s on his side, and that they’re, what, the ‘sane’ ones, here? “I know that’s not the strangest thing any of the parishioners are doing with the sermon but, you know, it actually takes a fair amount of confidence to go up there and you lot are not helping. In fact, do you want to do the Sunday mass this week, Brian?”

“It’s all about your homily.”

“Fuck. Fine.”

“And it’s your literal job.”

“Yes, I think that’s the whole theme of this part of the conversation. Maybe I should start taking some kind of interest in their relationship.”

"I draw the line at offering specific sex advice in group settings," Tim says instantly.

"Sure, now you do," Jonah mutters, but a reminiscent gleam in his eyes belies his amusement.

"But we can talk about it at our next meeting."

“…not your best strategy,” the reverend decides.

“Probably not. Though Pam’s an inveterate gossip and it would help to have something to talk about besides the fascinating fine print of the diocese’s fire insurance policy.”

“Ah, but you’re also an inveterate gossip.”

“And very good at changing the subject. Say, Tim, do you live near the rest of your family or did you and Jonah str—”

“Dinner time!” Claire looks up to see her sister’s cheerful face in the doorframe 

Claire moves slowly, placing her hand on her lower abdomen as if to pantomime ongoing pain from childbirth, which, fine, she actually has, but she would never show it if she weren’t trying to visually justify lagging behind.

She moves through the doorway but sits at the far end of the table, closest to the stairs, and so she can just barely hear Jonah pull the priest aside. “Father. In all seriousness… May I…”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I see the way you look at her.”

The priest drew a deep breath. “I know. We don’t need to speak of it. I'd rather not be any more self-conscious about it, to be honest.”

“I’m not sure that not speaking of it is doing you any good. It’s only—if I may—you look at her, and it calls to mind what Robert Louis Stevenson said about Fleeming Jenkin, in the last years of his life.” At least, Claire thinks she hears ‘Fleeming Jenkin’, ridiculous though it sounds. “He died when he was only fifty-three, you know.”

“…Stevenson?”

“No, no. Jenkin. Obviously. Scientist, economist, inventor of the cable car? Great critic of Darwin’s, and an ideological racist, but quite beloved to his many friends. Anyway. Stevenson said, at the end, ‘he was not only worn out by sorrow, he was worn out by hope.’ For him, to see a world laced with telpherage wires, the telegraph connecting everyone, all over the globe. His idea of utopia. He needed a holiday to recover from all the hoping, and died before he could take it, possibly a stroke. It somehow makes me think of… well, for you, it’s not telpherage wires, obviously. It’s her. You look at her like… that.”

“Well. I think you would have to know… how wearing it also is, not to look at her. Come now. Soup’s on.”

Claire’s heart hurts, now.

Mandy, Gavin, and the deacon, sit at her end of the table, with the priest, Regina, Nathan and her sister in the middle of it all, and Tim and Jonah on the far end. Klare has left the house cocktail at her place, with the tines of the fork resting on its base—their long-established gesture that they’re thinking of each other across a gathering. She knows he has run home to check on Lucy, and has taken her expressed milk.

“Well, hello, we heard you just had a baby! Congratulations!” Mandy enthuses as she sits down, moving to hug Claire, who freezes in place instinctively.

“Oh, poor thing, are you still hurting?” Mandy asks. “I had third degree tearing with my first, and I know it’s no picnic. I’m surprised to see you out and about, actually!”

Gavin frowns at her assessingly. “It’s too early to worry, but let me know if you want a referral to a pelvic floor physio specialist. Works wonders. A lot of people think kegels are the beginning and ending, but stomach breathing and bridges, even manual stimulation work on pelvis—”

She spits the swallow of G&T she has just taken, directly in his face.

“I beg your pardon, that was quite bitter,” she says.

Her sister is looking on, horrified, while Nathan looks studiously toward the other end of the table to politely pretend he hasn’t seen. The priest is fighting a grin while Mandy is outright laughing, and Gavin is thankfully one of those hyper-prepared people who keeps handkerchiefs in his pocket.

Regina is all showy politesse, trying to turn the conversation at her end of the table to the ethics of zookeeping and away from what she clearly sees as Claire’s spectacle.

The priest shoots her a commiserating look; she accepts it, holding his gaze for a long while. “I should’ve warned you,” he says. "About the bitterness."

“Yes, Father. You should have.”

Regina thinks she has had better gondi. But the bigger problem she is having is that she can sense emotional undertow, and this gathering is pretending to float atop it.

News of the Clares’ recent ascent into parenthood was greeted as both a miracle and a lark, except by Claire’s sister, who cannot stop complaining about a short delay in getting the news. Mandy and Tim are both the sort of people who instinctively include the whole table in their humorous anecdotes and sly musings, except that immediately on Reg’s right, the sexy priest—and what is a fucking priest doing here?—has one arm sort of folded across his stomach and seems in no mood for it.

It is also possible that Regina is imply embarrassed, having just confused Johnny Cash for Elvis Presley when the ‘Fulsom Prison Blues’ came over her brother’s playlist.

“Well, it’s true that ‘Jailhouse Rock’ made Live at Folsom Prison possible,” Jonah says meanderingly. He doesn’t look at her when he says it, and she thinks she’s not supposed to notice that Tim nudged his knee under the table for having laughed at her in the first place. “Not, uh, Elvis’s best song though.”

“What do you think is Elvis’s best song?” Tim asks him curiously.

“‘Suspicious Minds,’” Jonah says without hesitation.

Tim rolls his eyes. “Yeah, that was a test and you failed it, love. Every decent person knows that the answer is ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’.”

“I love it when you intone the most subjective possible statements as if you ran samples in a lab. At least there are other people here to test the theory.” Jonah turns to the gathering.

Regina mentally takes a deep breath. She feels, as she often feels at social gatherings, that Tim was not joking and that this is, in fact, a test.

Mandy and Gavin immediately get into an offshoot argument, debating the merits of “ubiquitous” songs like ‘All Shook Up’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ against “school dance” songs like ‘Always On My Mind’ and ‘A Little Less Conversation’.

The infuriating woman her brother is dating opines, “There’s never been a sexier song in world history than ‘All Shook Up’, I mean have you listened to live versions? It’s how I know that sex appeal is real.” Then she winks at the priest and says, “But I’m gonna go with ‘You’re the Devil in Disguise’.” He ostentatiously rolls his eyes at her, but he’s smiling while he does it. Nathan, who has a history of failing to notice undertow, also grins and says, “What do you say, Father? And you, Reverend? I suppose men of the cloth are partial to ‘In the Ghetto’…”

Reverend Brian pounds his hands on the table like he’s about to explain his preferred strategy for invading Korea. “See here, children,” he has a twinkle in his eyes, “as the only person here old enough to be a fan of the King in his own lifetime—”

“Oh, I might've caught wind of his death in time for my first word to be ‘hounddog’,” the priest laughs, to Reverend Brian’s glare.

“—I will tell you, and I will brook no backchat, that the only correct answer to this question is ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ And it was also my late wife’s all-time favourite song, so pipe down, all of you.”

Then Claire, whom Regina hadn’t pegged for being particularly clever, says earnestly, “I’m sorry to hear about your wife… particularly that she never had a chance to hear ‘Love Me Tender’.”

The table roars with laughter, except Claire, who leans back in her chair and takes a sip from her wine glass, permitting herself a creeping smile.

Regina laughs, too. She feels somehow that she is faking.

“I agree with what Tim said originally,” she says, as soon as the laughter dies down, and so saying she feels she kills the tail end of the jollity.

Nathan clears his throat. “I think my strongest opinion here is,” and he looks at Jonah, “that whatever it is, it’s not fucking ‘Suspicious Minds’, you madman.” The jollity turns back on, like a switch. Her brother has a talent for it. “But Father, you never voted.”

The priest pauses a long moment, and his eyes flick everywhere but at the woman sitting across the table from him. “Regina is right,” he says finally, “because Tim is right. It’s one of the most perfect songs ever written. The song is only about Brian’s age and it feels like it will be sung around post-apocalyptic campfires in ten thousand years. You can’t fight that.”

“No,” Regina echoes softly. Something has surged in her heart.

“HA!” Tim exclaims. “Now, maybe I can get them to settle the score on the fruit tart debacle of 2018.”

“Oh, please, God, no.” Jonah blinks. He turns to Reverend Brian on his right. “Did I just pray?”

“I’m afraid so,” he responds gravely, “and I’m sorry to tell you it’s not the first time tonight.”

“Well, fuck.”

Laughter, again.

By the time the mains are on the table, the party is a raging success and Regina's hands are shaking lightly. She takes bites swiftly and leaves them in her lap in between. She believes she is hiding her nerves well. She believes no one is paying any attention to her. Both of these things are somehow the cause of her shaking.

And then, “…are you cold?” the priest’s slightly lilting Irish voice asks her quietly.

She feels a shudder rip through her body. “I guess I must be,” she tries. He reaches out to her, beneath the table and out of view of everyone else. (She thinks he is working at the level of instinct. Something about him is very… immediate.)

And he grips her hand. And holds it. And keeps holding it, not loosely but not too hard. “I’m afraid I don’t have a sweater on that you can borrow,” he says, gesturing to his navy button-down.

“It’s July, after all,” she says, fairly breathlessly.

“’So ‘tis.” He smiles. “Have any holiday plans coming up?”

He listens, with almost all of his attention, while she talks about her upcoming Jakarta and Surabaya trip—part holiday, part business—and about a family reunion that she Nate will be  attending in Virgin Gorda. She realises that she is talking at great length, and perhaps flaunting her family’s wealth. She bites her lip. “And what do men of the cloth do for holiday?” she asks, a trifle guiltily.

He lets go of her hand, now.

She can’t believe he was holding her hand all that time.

She feels calm and disquieted, at once.

“In my case, I visit my niece in Ballycastle,” he says easily. “Once in a while, when I need better weather, I fly to somewhere Mediterranean and touch ancient rocks for eight or ten days. And then…” he trails off, and his eyes drift from her, and at no one in particular, except she senses he is listening to her brother speaking. “Well, I used to live quite differently, of course. No one is born a priest.”

She wants to ask him what he means, but her brother’s girlfriend is fending off attempts from around the table to guess how much the café’s mortgage runs her per month, and the priest begins gamely refereeing.

Well before the flounder and ragout are cleared, she feels dreadfully alone, again.

The priest, his phone buzzing in his hand, retreats to take a call on the street. The party’s hosts disappear into the kitchen, ostensibly to slice tarts—but this interim lasts long enough that Tim and Jonah challenge Mandy and Gavin to a game of Celebrity, and Reverend Brian and Claire reluctantly follow to the parlor.

Regina smiles in a way she hopes is friendly. “I need a breath of fresh air, I’m afraid. Childhood asthma…” she says vaguely. She often relies on her asthmatic childhood as a reason to leave indoor spaces. It’s not particularly persuasive, but then again it would be quite rude to call her out on it explicitly, and no one ever has.

No one does, tonight.

She sees Nathan murmuring into his girlfriend's ear in the kitchen as she slips into the night, shivering, again, feeling an odd current of portent. The priest is around the corner and up the alley a ways, but she can hear him.

“—no, Mum, I understand. I understand. You need to get home, surely. Is Rachel still there, or Ollie? OK, put her on the phone… how are you holding up? I’m just… no, I’m at a fucking dinner party of all things, I only just saw your text… Yes. Listen, I'm sorry I'm not there. You need to ask the nurses if there is anything that needs to be taken care of tonight. And then if you could get Mum home. Yes, awful. Yes, your dad could probably handle that fucking much. I’ll be there by tomorrow evening. No. Hire car, probably. Yes. Hand me to Rachel.... Hi. I love you, too, sweetheart. Hold tight to your Nan and your mum. Yes. Tomorrow. Good night, love. Call if you need to.”

His back is to her when she comes around the corner. So he doesn’t see her as he throws his phone with maximum force onto the ground and yells “FUCK!”  He draws out every letter, like he’s trying to be sure he vomits up every milligram of poison.

She realises she has stumbled onto something she does not understand, and, with no time to think twice about her decision, quickly ducks into a doorway on the far side of the alley, thirty degrees out of his sightline.

He paces. He says fuck and you fucking, fucking bastard several times. She begins to feel trapped, and considers revealing herself when suddenly, another voice pipes up.

“Hey. Did you seriously advise my boyfriend on endearments he can and can’t use?”

Her brother’s girlfriend. If her nerves were an electric grid, they’d be lighted up by this query.

“I—Christ. Give me a second. OK, yes. Wait—no. ‘Teabag’ is not a fucking endearment.”

Regina winces to think her brother is calling this woman ‘Teabag’. Is it some kind of sex thing? 

“That’s not for you to decide. That’s for me and Nathan to decide.”

“Ah, well now.” The priest sounds intent, now. He sounds… dangerous, somehow, Regina thinks. “Perhaps you should have handed me a script so I could perform to your standards, instead of shoving me into a situation where I have to enact congenial lies.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Our relationship is not that fucking simple to talk about, you know.” Regina draws in a breath she hopes in inaudible. “Particularly while I was in the process of trying to convince my boyfriend I'm relatively stable and sane. And, anyway…”

“It’s always fucking ‘anyway’ with you. Just get to the part where you admit that ‘anyway’, you didn’t want to tell him about us in case he objected to our friendship. Because that might give him a chance of getting in the way of exactly and precisely whatever you wanted to do. As always.”

“Wow. And this from a man whose objection to a nickname was that I’m unkind to myself! Ha!” she scoffs.

“You… you are not simple. A person can be kind and unkind. You, for example, are a hedonist who is drowning in guilt for thought crimes. You’re impulsive but crazily, terrifyingly thorough with it. You’re careless with eighty percent of the objects you touch but somehow every fucking square inch of your apartment is meticulously organised. You are compassionate, so soft that you are terrified of what the world will do to all that softness and you think terror has made you hard. And yes, you are abjectly cruel to yourself. And I am—I am meant to be—what I’m saying is that what I can be, here, is your best friend. And in that capacity, I will say to your boyfriend whatever the fuck I want to say… And honestly, I’ll say one more thing to you. Teabag? Really? Sweetheart, this man you’re dating... he thinks humanitarian slumming is a personality. His own moral incentives are turned up so high it’s like you can’t see the lack of basic empathy beneath them. And don’t get me started on his taste in... well, anything.”

“Oh, fuck you." Regina agrees with this entirely. "He’s good to me. He washes my morning dishes before he heads to work. He kisses my forehead before he goes to sleep at night. He… he is that man, you know, that man that walks between you and the edge of the sidewalk.”

“I claim my right—as your friend—to tell you that your standards are too damn low. Listen. Listen. Does he make you laugh? Does he make you feel understood? Does he make you want to tell the goddamn truth?”

“He… What is… is that your phone?”

“…Ah. Right. Yes. Sorry. I’ll clean it up.”

“What… I mean, did something… happen?”

“Yes,” he says, and his voice is easy again now, like the conversation has turned to the usual nighttime topics, bumming a fag or decrying urban light pollution. “Something did. My father died, apparently.”

The silence stretches unbearably.

Her blood buzzing with having heard so much she shouldn’t, Regina cautiously peeks around the corner to find out why she's heard nothing for so long.

There he stands. This woman Regina’s brother is dating has wrapped her arms around him. He is standing tall, and giving her none of his body weight; his arms are as loose and casual around her shoulders as hers are gripped tight around his. He looks, if anything, as if he is comforting her.

The priest sees her watching. She feels him pulling her gaze to meet his. And she knows, suddenly and certainly, that he had known she was there for at least a little while, because he simply waves a hand at her in the direction of the house, as if to say, Go, child, and tell your brother what you must.

But what on earth is this that she has witnessed?

In the aftermath of dinner parties is hard domestic labour. She is not surprised that Regina, having created much of the complexity, is no help at the end, having disappeared into the night with a polite thank you text sometime before the dessert course. Nathan, of course, stays up to help her, chatting amiably about his fond and favourable impressions about everyone. He hams up a rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel”.

The next morning, she leaves early to the sound of Nathan humming while he washes the next round of dishes in her ceramic sink. She opens the café for the morning rush, her most lucrative time of day. But she hangs the CLOSED sign at a quarter to ten because her sister has promised her that today, she can meet Lucy, can stay for lunch and “as long as you like, as long as you don’t like too long”. For Claire, an invitation that open is as good as groveling.

She gently shoos out her last lingering customer, changes out of her work uniform in the loo; empties the till and locks its contents in her safe drawer. She brings her special chalkboard inside, and notices that it still has that passage for the homily on it, from yesterday. The wise will not be remembered any longer than the fool. In the days to come, both will be forgotten. So I came to hate life because everything done here under the sun is so troubling. Everything is meaningless—like chasing the wind.

She feels a twinge in her her chest as she erases it. She thinks of her mum, and of Boo. She remembers days in her life when that passage would have struck true.

She wonders if the priest is having such a day, today.

She doubles back to her kitchen to be sure that the freezer is closed; and nearly screams when she comes back to the front room to find that he--the priest--is standing there, by the counter, watching her.

“God in bloody heaven!” she says. “Sorry. How are you this morning?”

“I’m well,” he says easily, and his expression is so placid that she almost believes him—almost, except that she has learned to watch the small twitches of his irises. His next line steals that line of thought from her. “Come home with me. For the funeral.” He looks oddly exhilarated, when he says it.

Instantly, everything around her solidifies and brightens. The image of a linked chain, forming and extending, springs to mind and stays.

She thinks about that chain, and she barely thinks about her answer before she gives it. “Of course. When do we leave?”

And then, before her eyes, he crumbles onto the table in front of her and sobs his broken heart into polished pine.

Chapter Text

What are we now but voices
who promise each other a life
neither one can deliver
not for lack of wanting
but wanting won’t make it so.
We cling to a vine
at the cliff’s edge.
There are tigers above
and below. Let us love
one another and let go.

-Eliza Griswold, “Tigers”

There’s a lamp on in the front window of his parents’ house—his mother’s house—that she notices while he’s entering the code at the gate. Their long day of travel included taking a bus to see the Clares and Lucy, the train to the airport, an endless airport walk to a secluded gate, flight, car rental, and now, they are… here. It’s about this time she begins to apprehend that his parents are—his mother is—really very rich.

“Your mum waiting up for you, then?” she asks cautiously.

They talked all day, non-stop, like they were making up for every late night they might have had in a diner if they’d been friends as teens, every inside joke they would have cultivated on mad last-minute jaunts abroad on break from uni. The conversations have veered, inevitably on a day like this one, from sublime to ridiculous and back, a dozen times. For example:

He has a half-cooked idea about starting an urban vegetable garden at the parish, but has so far met opposition at every turn. “Plus, all the fucking headstones.”

On that note, he already knows she’s allergic to melons including bananas, but has he ever told her he feigned a legume allergy in seminary to get out of a heinous split bea-based weekly dinner? “Terrible penance for that one. I should never have confessed. Far worse than the bollocking I got for shagging you. Shows you where the bishop’s priorities are, I guess.”

He had a very, very bad relationship with his father, with whom he had also spoken very frequently but with little substance.

On that note, yes, he does want to drink vodka on a 90-minute flight, and that reminds him of a story about a childhood trip to St. Petersburg; no, the one in Florida. The story involves his father puking at 11 a.m. into the hotel swimming pool on the day of their arrival, and his mother shooing him and his brother away and point-blank denying it had ever happened, for years, until it emerged from its chrysalis as a story in which the protagonist was his uncle rather than his father. “I believe this story is one of the base algorithms of the universe.”

She already knows that his niece, Rachel, is eleven, reads graphic novels, sends frequent postcards. She learns that Rachel is also enthusiastic about her various statuses as a Gemini, a birdwatcher, and, most recently, an heiress. “Didn’t I explain? Paul, my brother you know, married Ollie, that’s Olivia, my dad’s business partner’s only daughter. It was Paul’s way of getting back into my parents’ good graces after blowing up our childhoods with his sexual deviancy. Which, of course, he then did once again, hence… prison.” Rachel had found out she was an “heiress”—“bit of a glamourisation, obviously”—in relation to being allowed to watch the Downton Abbey film with her grandparents.

Is it a glamourisation? This house looks large enough to have eight or ten bedrooms.

Her suitcase is light. Back at her house after stopping in to meet her niece twelve hours before, he had bustled into her bedroom while she was taking too long with the packing. He came in without knocking and without significant eye contact or exaggerating any embarrassment. As ever, he would not avoid their sexual history either as a geography or as a basic fact. He looked at the four separate black dresses she had piled atop her suitcase and tossed two on the bed. She watched him rifle through her drawers and emerge with sweatshorts, t-shirts, and a lightweight hoodie. (He doesn’t even react to the first dildo he finds, and the second one makes his eyes shoot up with what she takes to be interest more than surprise, though he does roll his eyes her way with a certain sense of obligation.)

Hushed reminiscences, half-forgotten family fuck-up anecdotes, in-flight reading preferences, shared awkward chat with a slightly-too-present yellow cab driver, the clutch of her hand on his knee, intended to comfort, in that moment—that moment—when the plane is about to touch the ground at hundreds of miles per hour.

She thinks: this is not Thursday.

“My mother has always been a night owl,” he replies briefly, now, and he grabs their weekend bags from the boot. He stands for a long moment, looking up at that white ceramic lamp, framed by white curtains, in the window. He squares his shoulders and extends to his full height. “Come on, then,” he says softly, half to himself.

He has a key, and she wonders idly if he carries it every day. They enter through the side door into a dark kitchen, and they hear voices, both female, in low tones but not unhappy ones—ones that seem conscious that there are others asleep in the house.

He leaves their bags by a back staircase, perhaps up to the bedrooms, making his footsteps louder as he walks through the hallway into a front parlour. The voices quiet, and his mother stands as they approach. Her mouth wobbles when she sees her son.

“Hi, Mum. Aunt Christine.” If she had to describe their embrace, she would call it ‘excruciatingly perfunctory’. “Here’s the friend I told Ollie to tell you was coming.”

The priest’s mother is tall and, if she loses a half stone in her bereavement period as some do, will progress from her present ‘angular’ to ‘gaunt’. She is wearing a rust-toned halter top, a loosely draped white silk shawl, and the sort of linen-blend summer trousers that would call to mind the phrase ‘coastal grandmother’ if her eyes didn’t lack smile lines, as if her face after all this time wasn’t fully lived in. Her hair is gathered in a loose chignon and dyed to a color similar to her son’s, minus the gray flecks that his has started to acquire. She does not seem wholly present, but gives the impression of vagueness, the way that dogs seem human until higher-order concepts appear.

Aunt Christine, whom she knows from their conversations today is his father’s late brother’s wife, is wearing jeans and a pilling pink long-sleeve quasi-flannel shirt. She’s barefoot.

“Yes. Hello. Glad you two finally got here.” The priest’s mum doesn’t attempt pleasantries, nor even look her way for more than a moment. “I’ve put her in Paul’s room,” she tells her son.

“No.” The denial is calm, instantaneous, and absolute. “Who’s in the guest rooms?”

“Ollie and Rachel are here, of course, and,” she gestures to the woman beside her, “your Uncle Matthew, and Aunt Christine and the boys….”

“Will isn’t coming back, then?”

“No,” Aunt Christine says. She takes pity on the newcomer. “Will is my son, who travels to Chengdu for work frequently. The boys—his boys—are my grandsons, and they stay with me when he’s away.”

“Is Paul…?” he seems to hesitate to finish the question, his eyes darting to the woman he’s brought home with him.

“They denied the release this afternoon.”

“Ah.” She feels his hand drop to the base of her spine and suppresses a totally, utterly inappropriate shiver. “She’ll sleep in my old room, of course. I’ll take the couch in the den.”

She understands he intends to leave his brother’s childhood bedroom empty and runs her own hand over his shoulder to communicate understanding she does not actually possess. And then she musters her courage to face his mother. “I’m so very sorry for your loss,” she manages.

Her eyes, physically so exactly like her son’s, have more than enough room to drown in. “I suppose I will have to get used to hearing that,” she says. “And call me Nell. Mrs. Moss is my late mother-in-law.” One side of her mouth quirks up at that, and that expression is so familiar that she almost takes a step backward.

“Gambling on pinochle in hell these twenty-five years and more,” the priest adds.

Nell raises a brow. “Got some insider information, have you?”

The smile fades out of both their eyes simultaneously. Nell’s stray back to the book that had been on her lap when they arrived—actually, a photograph album. Fuck.

“I’ve left the kettle on, in case you need something warm,” Aunt Christine says briskly, now. “Otherwise, let’s save all of the rest of it for morning.”

“Do you need a cuppa, Mum? Aunt Christine? Or anything else from the kitchen?”

“No, no.” She waves her hand. “It was nice meeting you.”

The back stairs are steep and narrow. “I’ll give you the full spit-out-your-gum-and-save-your-questions-til-the-end tour, tomorrow,” he says softly, understanding better than she does how and to whom their voices might carry. “For now, let’s just…”

“Yes, of course.”

He pauses with his hand on a doorknob. “I should probably say,” he whispers, “there are still a few things from my childhood in here.”

She rallies the dregs of her waking mind and exaggerates rubbing her hands together with delight.

“Try to contain yourself.”

“Never.” The word catches a bit, in her throat.

He turns on a bedside lamp with a boyish ship’s wheel on it. It casts the whole place in an orange glow. She is weary, or somewhere past it. So she takes in mere impressions: a wall of official milestone photographs he almost certainly didn’t choose or hang, a shelf of carved wooden figures, a tall CD rack, bookcases with books that very clearly span multiple life phases. A midcentury desk with nothing on it, at all. Given that he must have left home about two decades ago, the place is clearly a guest room with a sort of after-image of his one-time personality, like a street mural painted over with one too few coats of whitewash.

Still. It had been hard to imagine the priest was ever a child, here or anywhere. All at once, it’s very easy. She steps closer to the CD rack almost unthinkingly. But he calls her back.

“Like I said—save your questions ‘til the end. And let me show you where the loo is.”

She hears his fatigue, the fatigue he has for once let her hear, and relents, shooing him on his way. She brushes her teeth in the mirror of a bathroom she hazily supposes he must have shared with his brother. She does it mechanically, so tired, and so much in a different place than she’d expected to be when the day began, that she feels a bit outside of her own body. She packed—or had he?—a lavender cotton shirt and shorts that had struck her as appropriate for the unlikely-but-terrifyingly-possible eventuality of running into a widow at 4 a.m. on the way to the toilet. She puts them on to slide between the priest’s literal sheets. It feels strange to be alone, and without him. But though it is sharper now than usual, she is used to that feeling.

She dreams.

In her dream, she becomes a godmother.

Wearing vivid white, she holds Lucy in a baptism at St. Ethelred’s.

And then the priest baptises her, as well, holding her eyes while he pours water slowly over her forehead so that it trails down the tip of her nose and into her mouth.

He speaks.

We anoint you with the oil of salvation in the name of our heavenly father…

She wakes up to feel someone on the bed beside her—just one deep impression on the bed, and then nothing else. There is a moment where it feels like the extension of her dream.

But she knows it’s him before she is conscious.

When she opens her eyes, he is sitting there, the man from her dreams, just sitting on the side of the bed, one foot still on the floor and the other crooked up beside her. He’s wearing a dark tshirt and darker boxers, watching her in a patch of moon- and streetlight coming in from the window overhead.

He opens his mouth to speak, and she holds up a hand and shakes her head. She rolls to the wall side of the bed and pats the empty space beside her. He lets out a long sigh. When she feels him shift the covers around himself, she rolls back to him, puts her head on his shoulder, slings one leg over his, and closes her eyes. “Sleep,” she murmurs. “Just sleep.” It is description, defense, command.

She feels his lips, featherlight, in her hair, and she is called back to her dream.

They do as she says.

She wakes up to the sound of a shower turning off through the wall of the bedroom. She’s alone, and if she weren’t so familiar with the smell of him, she would think it was dream.

As it is, it feels somewhat as if she is still dreaming.

There is a note on the pillow beside her.

Towels are on the desk. Come down to the kitchen when you’re hungry. x
P.S. I will take exactly one question about whatever it is you see in this bedroom, so choose wisely.

With just a little reflection, the shower is not a place for quiet contemplation or any sort of pleasure. As soon as the tantalising thought occurs to her that he must have wanked in here as a teen, it occurs to her that his paedophile brother must have, as well. Her mouth goes sour.

The place has, in any case, clearly been recently remodeled, with lightly marbled gray tiles and pale salmon paint. She lets the excellent water pressure hit her neck, stares at that tile, thinks of those boys’ dead father and all the other missing pieces.

She is fucking finally going to figure him out.

And then… well, she has never been one for planning aftermaths.

“Psst.” A little girl hisses from the doorway of a room down the hall as she tiptoes out of the shower wearing only her towel.

Fuck. She knew she should have gotten dressed in the bathroom.

“Hello. You must be Rachel.” She hears the laugh in her voice and hopes the girl knows she’s laughing at herself.

“Yes, of course. You’ll want to get dressed, I suppose. Your shoulders are very pretty. My uncle said that I should make sure you get downstairs alright. I think he and mum and Aunt Christine just wanted to argue with Nan without me sitting nearby. Of course,” she shrugs, “we can hear every word of it from the top of the stairs, can’t we?”

“I suppose… we can? And thank you, shoulders are important, aren’t they. I’ll just get dressed and meet you back here.”

She applies makeup in seconds, with the ease of old habit, slides into trousers and a t-shirt and wishes she had any fucking idea for what occasion she was supposed to be dressing.

On instinct, she finds herself hunkering down next to Rachel at the top of the stairs to the kitchen. As it happens, Rachel had been perfectly correct. They can hear every word clearly.

“…for the last time. It’s your father’s funeral. I would never have imagined that the two of you could be so heartless.” The priest’s mother is hissing as much as she is speaking.

“Maybe your mother has a point, dear…” Aunt Christine’s tremulous voice ventured.

“The point,” the priest says—and they struggle to hear him, his voice cold and strained like the creak of ice under falling snow—“is that you can have only one son at this funeral, regardless of what the board decides. If he were released, I would leave. As I tried to tell you twenty-five years ago—you cannot be on both of our sides at the same time in the same way. It amounts to collusion.”

“Now, now,” it’s Christine again, “it’s just an appeal. It probably won’t succeed, so would it be so hard to…?”

“You ought to be utterly ashamed of yourselves.” The disgust in the priest’s voice is thick as well as cold.

“But what if he came only for the service?” Nell pleads. “No conversations, no… talking. He would just be present. That’s all I’m asking.”

“I have a court order that says he has no right to be in Rachel’s presence while she’s a minor,” a new voice, this one steady and artificially light.

“That’s my mum,” Rachel murmurs, sticking her chin on her hand. She is not giving the impression of being particularly enthralled. Perhaps none of this sordid stuff is news to her.

Rachel’s mum, Ollie, continues: “He won’t say it. But I protect my daughter from Paul in part because you didn’t protect him. Either of your sons. Or anyone else for that matter. I do appreciate that this is one of the most difficult times of your life, but you have to understand that Paul was the source of the most difficult time in mine, and your granddaughter’s. And every time we have to go back in front of the board...”

“We will go,” the priest says. “We will make the case against him, again. And then all of us will enter into this never-ending dance of whether we can forgive each other all of the betrayals. If you could just once acknowledge what has—”

“Ow!” Rachel, playing with her hair, hits her elbow on the wall beneath the banister.

“Rachel, you up there?” They spring to their feet as Ollie climbs their way. “Ah, there you are. And you brought a friend. Hullo. We’ve heard so much about you.”

She has, personally, heard nearly nothing about Ollie, but smiles and agrees. “Same, so glad to finally meet you. Anyway, what’s for breakfast?” she asks, affecting a sunniness she absolutely does not feel or mean. “And then perhaps Rachel can show me the tourist-y bits of the city while all of the rest of you take care of your business.”

Rachel’s face lights up.

Damn.

Breakfast is a chaos of restaurant-style catering to choice—and this is her expertise, the one element of this situation she finds easy, so she simply slides in and takes orders. Aunt Christine’s three grandsons have different waffle preferences, Ollie and Rachel share an egg allergy, Uncle Matthew sheepishly tells her that he has a habit of cooking up some beans for his toast of a weekend morning but wouldn’t like to be in her way. She remakes the coffee, a great deal stronger, and lightly rearranges the tea cabinet for efficiency.

The priest just leans on the counter nearby, sipping black coffee and taking in the sight of her turning Luke, Caolan, and Rachel into sous chefs. When Caolan cries, “Order up!”—the cousins’ new favorite phrase—and grabs a plate of eggs and a blueberry waffle to take to his four-year-old brother, Ethan, he closes his eyes and doesn’t open them for a long while.

Of course Rachel takes her to the Titanic Museum. If she’d known it existed twenty-four hours before, she might also have guessed that a sensitive but self-conscious tween girl would select it as a destination, when given the cover of playing tour guide to shield her from her own inner cringe.

But then, a day ago, she hadn’t met Rachel. Rachel, it seems, has no inner cringe. She is neither voluble nor quiet—you didn’t hear every single thought she had—but she peaceably parses her way through the world with no dread of remorse.

It is refreshing as fuck for a woman who's at least forty percent constituted by dread of remorse, not to mention the remorse itself.

“Yes, of course I’ve seen the film,” Rachel says as they walk into the exhibit on the largest rope-making company in Ireland and the role of cordwaining in industrial maritime activity. “I think Jack was miscast. That guy looked about my age and Rose looked about yours. I guess you didn’t have any Hemsworths back then?”

“We didn’t, indeed,” she replies, alight in the idea that, to a tweenager, she looks the same age as twenty-two-year-old Kate Winslet. “There were only Jude Law and Jared Leto, really.”

Rachel gives her a pitying look and now she feels keenly that she might as well have said Paul Newman and Richard Burton. “Come on,” she says, “my favourite part is the boiler room.”

The boiler room, as it turns out, is very cool, and a place where it’s easy to avoid all the couples and children doing the prow of the ship routine; but still, it must be a fucking awful place to work.

For quite a while, Rachel is happy chatting with her about the number of times each of them has seen Titanic, various of Kate Winslet’s other films, Doorgate and the logistics of ‘never letting go’, which menu items in the first class dining room they've respectively tried and how much they each enjoy 'consommé tapioca', what Rachel wants to be when she grows up (a painter), and answers even more questions about her café than the cousins had peppered her with this morning.

There comes a grim moment, which she supposes in retrospect she should have expected, when they go through the “portrait gallery” with photographic montages of the Titanic’s passengers.

“All of these people died, then?”

“I think we learned in the introductory film that two-thirds of the passengers did, yeah,” she said carefully.

Rachel pauses. “What do you think happens… when you die?”

She takes a deep, steadying breath. “I think that’s the big question, the one that plagues us all our whole lives. I think being plagued by it is part of being alive. And so I’m… I guess I’m just plagued by it, and I don’t really know.”

This is the cowardly answer, but it feels braver than the nihilistic version, and kinder than her inclination to simply turn the question back on Rachel. She hears in her mind’s ear the priest asking her why she would believe something terrible when she could believe something wonderful, and for the first time hears the cowardice in his opinion, as well. Oh, God, she realises, why didn’t I realise he was running, too?

Rachel is staring at a cluster of ovals grouped together—clearly a family, parents and adult-aged children—who are listed among the dead. “That makes sense,” she says slowly. “I don’t think my grandfather believed in heaven or hell.”

“What was he like, your grandfather?”

Rachel thinks for a long moment. “He was… specific.”

“Oh. I see.” They make their way out of the portrait gallery and into the daylight. “Actually, no I don’t. What does that mean?”

“It means that Papa always wanted things to be very… I dunno, specific. Like, he liked to have the same thing for breakfast every day, oatmeal, tea, and grapefruit. And he liked to do things at the same time every day. He didn’t like when things… you know… changed.”

“Things like what?”

“Like the prices at restaurants, or, let’s see. I remember one time that we were driving back here to Belfast from my house—my mom’s house—and the traffic intersection had been redesigned, so there was a stoplight where there used to be a stop sign. And he turned around and drove a different way. Oh, and Papa would call me once a week, on Thursdays at 6 p.m., and we would talk. It took me a while to notice that the call always lasted twenty minutes, like, exactly twenty minutes. He once cut me off in the middle of a story about my friend Grace’s pet hamster!”

A little nervous that she herself may now be obligated by politesse to hear that story, she inserts: “So he was fairly regimented, then.” Seeing Rachel’s curious look, she says, “It’s an army word. Means that he had a lot of rules.”

“Oh. Yeah. I think he was in the army, too.”

“My grandfather was, too.” She is not confident in this conversation, and that’s why she makes this offer: “Do you want to, you know, do the thing?”

Rachel does, and decisively chooses ‘Leo’ when asked. And that’s how, in forty minutes of standing in line, she learns all about Grace’s hamster--stories that leave her indignant, touched, and in odd solidarity, during which she finds herself confiding all about her own experience of the order Rodentia. A tour guide explains, somewhere along the way, that this part of the museum is popular because viewers of James Cameron's Titanic tend to conflate two different iconic scenes that took place on the prow of the ship, an explanation that they, like everyone else, blithely ignore.

At the end, she has the singular pleasure of feeling a tween girl wrap her sturdy arms around her chest and scream in her ear: “I’M KING OF THE WORLD!”

She laughs and laughs, to feel her own mortality thumping heavily in her chest.

Per a text she gets from Rachel’s uncle, they don’t head back to the house, but instead reconvene with Ollie and the priest outside a tony coffee shop which her mapping app tells her is in a place called Andersonstown. Rachel’s mum gives her a quick squeeze of the arm and a thanks for spending the day with her daughter, and they head off on the errand of finding Rachel a black dress to wear to the funeral.

“Did you do the thing?” the priest asks, throwing his arms out crucifixily and pantomiming wind in his hair.

“Oh, yes,” she says. “But the real friends are the lessons we learned about life vests and water rescues along the way. What are we doing here?”

“Reverend Pendergast was having a morning swim at the community pool.” He points across the street, she gestures impatiently. “Minister at my parents’ church,” he clarifies. “Officiating the funeral. We’re here to give program notes. You should know… he’s an old friend. One of my oldest.”

The coffee shop is all glass and concrete, the kind of cheap décor that is intended to look expensive. Reverend Pendergast is a good-looking man of around their age who does the requisite waving and nodding when they enter and signal their intentions to order at the bar. When they finally sit across from him at a sharp white table with stainless steel corners, his hair and collar are damp, and the faint smell of chlorine cuts across the musk of the coffeehouse in a way that recalls to her a memory of trying to huff cleaners with Boo in an alley behind a shisha bar when they were about fourteen.

She feels suddenly fond of her idiotic younger self. She even tried, a bit, to talk Boo out of it, she remembers, and now the chlorine smells a little like wisdom. And then she realises she is smiling too much for a discussion of a funeral program, but the reverend’s greeting sets her straight:

“Seems the old bastard kicked the can a mite early, then.”

“That he did.” The priest pulls out her chair and slumps into the one next to it. “Been waiting for us long?”

“I’ve only been here twenty minutes so I have, just long enough to jot down an order of ceremony for the funeral. Tuesday, isn’t it a bit slow?” He looks her way. “We bury the dead quickly in Ireland.”

“My mother is still hoping that her appeal of Paul’s compassion leave denial will succeed by then. It was denied for the first time yesterday afternoon.”

“That’s unfuckingbelievable, by the way. Haven’t had a chance to say it to you,” she tells the priest.

“So you’ve met Paul,” the reverend says to her.

“No,” she says lightly, “just heard the rumours.” Albeit precious few of those.

“Have you been to visit him recently?” the priest asks Reverend Pendergast.

“More recently than you, no doubt.” He takes a short sip of his gigantic mug of green tea, staring into it contemplatively for a moment. When he looks up, he seems to have steeled himself and says, “He has a red hand tattooed on his shoulder, now.”

“Of course.”

“Is that a… Nick Cave thing, then?” she says lightly, but hazily knows the truth already.

“It’s a Loyalist paramilitary symbol. Because my brother is a bigoted prick.”

“And it says Mark 9:43 beneath it,” the reverend concludes resignedly.

Before he has a chance, the priest elucidates, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. A bit of a problematic pairing with the other. But then, I forgot to say before, ‘because my brother is a bigoted prick with limited reading skills who has no idea what decade it is and regularly confuses bullies and victims.’”

“He won’t get out. For the funeral.” The reverend says it as a statement, but she hears the question.

“Not until Mum acknowledges that she’s going to have to hold a second, private funeral for her and Paul, only. He’ll get out for that.” The priest rolls his shoulders. “Sorry you'll have to bless the arsehole's remains twice, not to speak ill of the dead. Let’s talk about the programme for the main one, shall we?”

They are brief, technical, and she apprehends swiftly that this labour that the two of them do, midwiving to the grave, can be rote, just the way she usually spends late Friday afternoons doing inventory and scrubbing her kettles and boilers. His mother wants to do a reading, she apprehends. The priest and his niece are to sing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” and the eulogy will be given by one of his father’s business partners, Sean, who is Ollie’s father and Rachel’s other grandfather.

The priest’s religion, his divine skills that have made him the heart of a London parish, are nowhere to be found, she notices. It's an insult, but one that also makes his mum seem so... meaningless, or rather, so insensible to meaning-making.

“You’ll want some notes for the personalised bits,” the priest says tiredly. “Let me tell you my mum’s favourite one, about walking in on one of my dad’s single-digit number of lifelong sick days to find that he’s re-playing a recording of Fair City, crying over a wedding montage.” He smiles a bit. “Apparently he watched it once a week, before she was up in the mornings. She thinks he was being sentimental about their own romance. About our family. She’s the only person who could have found reason for softness there, that late in the game.”

“But he could be sentimental, your dad. Indeed, I saw him tear up during sermons, more than once.”

“Well, he’s had a keen sense of loss, since Paul… and since I left for London, even more so.”

“Could you email me your brief…” The priest shoves a piece of paper across the table. He catches her looking.

“Biographical brief,” he says. “Helps us to get the main facts right. I actually have one that your godmother wrote about your family, before the wedding.”

“Send it to me sometime, I do love to read biting reviews,” she says. She looks at the paper, upside down from her vantage, covered in bullet points and the priest’s messy, forward-slanting cursive. There are key dates and names that are underlined. She can make out only one line (“loved to be a grandfather”).

She frowns. “So, Reverend, his parents—Nell and Adam—were, er, your regulars, then?”

He raises an eyebrow at the priest, seeming to silently ask how much he should say, and the priest raises his hands: I’m an open book.

“Since I finally talked this one into heading off to seminary, they have been, yes. That was right around when I took over from Reverend Michaelson. Must have been about, what, ten years ago?”

The priest nods behind his oversized mug of café au lait. “Defensive maneuver. A kind of doubling down. They thought I was rejecting their heritage, so they took an interest in it to justify being offended.” He rolls his eyes once again.

“Easier and easier to imagine you as a teenager,” she smiles. This is a leading comment. She is fishing.

The reverend bites. “I don’t have to imagine. Didn’t he say? We were at school together. Well, we were before he left for Dublin at the start of year 10.”

“More like halfway through,” the priest confirms.

“Dublin?” she says faintly. “Do I finally have an explanation for how the Ulster in your voice got worn away, so it only comes out when you drink?”

He winks at her. She thinks she glimpses something painful in it.

“We can clear his South Dublin up right quick tonight at the Lagan Scrape. Unless you’re with family.” The reverend shrugs. “Mara insisted that I ask.” He adds for her benefit, “My wife. Who was his first girlfriend. Now you’re in the thick of our old crew,” the reverend laughs, and she understands that she is seeing what the pastor takes to be water under the bridge.

The priest grits his teeth a long moment, but relents. “You’re not still going to that old dive. Man of the cloth?” He turns to her. “They called it the Lagan Rape twenty years ago.”

“Lovely,” she says. “Perhaps I’ll stay in and play Uno with Rachel and the boys.”

“Nonsense,” says the reverend. “It’s been a long time, so it has. You should know better just by the address. It’s a karaoke bar now. Doesn’t look nearly as posh as all this,” waving his hand around, “but it’s just about as overpriced.”

“Who else has Mara called?” the priests asks quietly.

Reverend Pendergast shoves out his chair and brushes his crumbs straight to the floor. “The guy who snuck me into a David Bowie concert at King’s Hall would’ve rather been surprised.”

“No, I definitely wouldn’t’ve,” the priest protests, “even in 1995.”

“Well, anyway, you’re awash in surprises this week, what’s one more, really? See you tonight.”

Moments later, they are sitting, sipping what’s left of their coffee alone. She senses that they are both vaguely stunned.

“Bowie,” she says finally. “A little on the nose for your brand, isn’t it?”

He smiles. “Maybe you haven’t looked at the CDs yet,” he says, “but I’ll remind you that you get one question about my tastes in childhood.”

“I intend to trick you into answering at least four. Are you really up for doing karaoke with your childhood friends tonight?”

He shrugs and lifts the last of his coffee to his lips. “If you are. ‘You jump, I jump, remember?’”

“You are not going to trick me into wasting my question by asking how many times you have seen Titanic.”

He extends a hand to help her up, now, and she’s pleased to see the light has come back to his eyes. “Come along and help me avoid my family until dinner.”

She also has no idea what to wear to karaoke night with her former lover’s former friends during his father’s funeral weekend. The priest shows up at her door wearing jeans and a grey henley, giving her an odd feeling that they've stepped into another layer of the multiverse. He sits at his old desk and scrolls on his phone, his back to her, while she finishes dressing. “You look beautiful,” he tells her.

He has not looked at her, not really. She knows because she absolutely knows what it feels like when he really looks at her.

The Lagan Scrape looks, outside and in, like a dive bar, with mid-century oak paneling and hodgepodge framed photos and art prints and advertisements and dried flowers pressed under glass. There is a stage at the deep corner of the room, no doubt convenient for live performances, and clearly set up for karaoke tonight.

“You son of a bitch!” they hear, while she’s still taking stock of the place. A man with a shock of curly dark brown hair and a wild beard, who looks like he has wandered out of a mountain climbing expedition and into this bar, leaps straight across a chair to pound the priest on the back. “You said you’d officiate my fucking wedding!”

“Yeah, well, Hadleigh said you were a cheating bastard and dumped you a week beforehand, if I heard correctly?”

“But you weren’t even planning to come back up from London!”

“I had a sort of premonition about it. I’ll be there for the next one. Your condolences on the death of my father are very kind, by the way, you fucking arsehole."

"Oh, fuck me, like you're not glad he's gone."

This man, she learns when he engulfs her in a bear hug that lifts her off her feet, is Cole. He and the priest were not only at school together through year nine, but had reunited at uni and lived together for a short while afterwards. “I know all his bloody secrets, not that they’re any use to me now he’s no doubt confessed everyone a’ them to his boss and the man upstairs. Did you tell the bishop about the weekend in Sligo?”

“I believe I repented for that sufficiently when I was actually in Sligo,” the priest laughs and turns back to her. “Come, now, I’ll introduce you to everyone and get you a drink, you’ll need it.”

She realises when he moves again to place his hand on her lower back, then drops it, that they are playing a very dangerous game, even for them.

So. There’ll be seven of them, tonight. The Reverend Pendergast, also in plain clothes, gives her his first name though she smilingly refuses to use it.

Then there’s his wife, Mara, who looks over her carefully, like she will need to match concealer tone and cup size later. She doesn't focus on it, but Mara's eyes stay on her skin for far too long.

She is well distracted by Cole, who is clearly the ‘fun guy’ and, classically, likely an alcoholic. He flirts with her very intently, giving the impression he is testing the priest more than truly trying it on. She thinks she might have fallen for him hard about, oh, five or eight years ago. She’d been extremely low on wisdom in her late twenties and early thirties, even relative to the years before.

Finally, there’s David, a homely and ebullient man who clearly hasn’t seen any of the others in about a decade and is surprised to have been invited out, and his lovely wife Amanda, whom none of them have met before. David, she learns without ever asking, is a civil engineer for the energy utilities. Amanda teaches chemistry and physics at the school the rest of them used to attend. She tells them that one Mr. Boyle is still alive and enjoys seeing their jaws hit the floor. “Forget the students, he’s the one who gets younger every year,” she sighs.

Evidently, quite a lot of their old gang is missing tonight.

“Everyone is in the wind,” Mara says, sotto voce, to the priest. “Cole and I called around yesterday. Pre-existing tickets, summer hols, or out in the diaspora. Meredith did say to tell you she still hasn’t forgiven you for refusing to dance with her.”

“Given that I was twelve years old at the time, I would have thought the sting might have faded by now.”

That raises her hackles. “I was Meredith. I'm sorry, I know this is insider stuff, but understand. I was Meredith. That happened to me,” she inserts. “I will actually die mad about it.”

The priest just grins at her fondly. “Well, so much for the dream of absolution. Doesn’t Meredith have a son about the age we were when it all happened?”

Cole cuts in. “Yeah, you’ve lost track of time, mate. Henry is seventeen. Off to uni this fall, applied maths, she says. Same as you, then.”

“I guess it is.”

There’s no table or booth open that’s big enough to fit all of them, and most of the floor is open to the karaoke stage. So they’re all sitting on a set of two-tops wedged together near the bar, while ostensible regulars stumble up to croon will.i.am or Marvin Gaye, Oasis or Adele, depending on decade of birth, grade of ambition, and extent of inebriation. Karaoke bars, she knows from travel in younger days, are the same everywhere.

The first hour of this is what she expected. They mix news and olds, reminiscing and updating, seamlessly and with much laughter. As it unfolds, she understands that these are people who had been part of a tight-knit group of a dozen or so, and that the priest had come and gone from it even after he’d left, during summers and hols and even in their early careers.

The history here is long, spanning first sleepovers to first marriages. Names of acquaintances rush over her in a wave. Someone named Michelle, it seemed, now works at an insurance agency “above the old C&A, a block from Craig's dad’s apartment, remember,” and her husband has recently left her for a man. The scandal is that Michelle had seemed unabandonable. “I mean, it sorta makes sense that Michelle could make it this long with a queer bloke,” Cole says. Mara sighs heavily and turns to explain to her and Amanda: “He means, she gave great head. Frequently.” The men all look at each other and make various gestures eschewing braggadocio, picking lint from their sleeves, taking long sips of drinks. The reverend says, “No comment.” Mara keeps looking at her, watching her look at the men of the table, for a bit too long.

She struggles to imagine the priest being willingly fellated by a random associate, as a teenager, whilst he was sober, and her imagination fails her. He gives her one look. She understands it, perhaps. She thinks it means what all of his looks have meant since they got to Belfast: Later.

Then there was Jamie, whom they all considered too cool for them at the time and is finally doing well after significant mental health crises which had already attracted wide comment as they'd initially unfolded. Val, whom she understands was kind of a hanger-on to their crew, now lives in L.A. and produces a popular crime drama (“it’s a grand story and sure but the acting is for shite,” the reverend, who is the only one who watches it, claims). Danny, or maybe it’s Dani, works for a major brewery in Birmingham on the sales side and is gratingly banal on Twitter.

Her ears perk up when David asks after Angie, the priest's co-worker-slash-cougar at the carpentry shop he'd mentioned many Thursdays before. Apparently, Angie had supplied them all with liquor and beer for years before they’d come of age, not that booze was hard to come by in these parts. The priest is the one who updates the rest, now; she’s married for the third time, no wait, the fourth, and owns her dad’s old shops outright now. “Makes custom ornaments and toys, sells ‘em on Etsy and the like. She’ll be at the funeral.”

David tells stories about board game nights, about getting lost on after-school rambles, about sleepovers and boyish brawls and early crushes. He waxes nostalgic more for his wife’s sake than her own, but Amanda has clearly heard it all before and gently urges him to wane instead.

“But what about you?” Amanda asks. “How long have you two been together?”

“Us?” she feigns flabbergastery. “You mean—the two of us? He’s a priest, you know.”

The priest nods at her solemnly.

“Oh, God, I thought that one was the priest. David!” she hits him on the shoulder with the back of her hand. She turns to Cole. “I suppose that makes you the rabbi.”

Cole laughs and shakes his head at the idea. “The three of us walk into a karaoke bar…” He waggles his eyebrows. “Not gonna finish it, something anti-Semitic always happens in those fucking jokes.”

“Which of you joined up first?” Amanda presses the priest and reverend, ignoring Cole. The reverend waves. “And why a minister?”

“Aside from being born the wrong religion,” the reverend says, “the priesthood was too lonely for me, and I had no yen to learn Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, or koine Greek.”

“Luckily for you, this guy’d already left your wife long before becoming a padre,” Cole laughs. “Oh. Didn’t you know? Father Purity over here and Mara were an item first.”

“Aha, scandal!” Amanda cries. “I guess a clergy fetish is a real thing, Mara.”

She thinks: Amanda, you have no idea. But Mara looks like she’s been waiting to say something, perhaps less to Amanda than to herself. “They were both just regular teenage boys when I met them, you know. They liked books and were both a bit sensitive. Particularly about outcomes of games of Smash Brothers on the N64 in Cole’s basement. Jesus was not always among us.”

The reverend looks a bit like he’d like to disagree, but only says, “Not explicitly.”

The priest addresses his next words to Amanda, but these are also for her. “Mara and I dated for two years,” he says evenly, “when we were quite young. That ended in our first year at uni. I was too much of a sad bastard for her, and she dumped me for spending too much of an exam period lying on the floor of my dorm room listening to Radiohead and reading Sartre. Which was a very good decision on her part.”

“My recollection is a little different,” Mara quirks up one side of her mouth, “but yes, I got where I’m supposed to be. Shall we sing about it, then, babe?” she asks her husband, who previously indicated he’d be willing to do Sonny & Cher with her.

Amanda blinks. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a minister do karaoke,” she says to those remaining at the table.

“You have. You just didn’t realise it,” the priest advises her. “Half of us go into the divinity business for the solos.”

“And the other half?” Amanda asks teasingly.

“Salvation,” the priest smiles, and she can see that he both means it, and means, somehow, the opposite.

An hour later, she is wasted. She is very happy. It’s Saturday night and she’s out in the thick of a packed bar in a strange town, and she feels perfect freedom. She’s happy, so happy, because Cole and Amanda are very, very funny. Cole is egging her on to “get up there and sing.”

A self-respected member of her own generation, she does have a standard karaoke number, and usually it wouldn’t take this much liquor to prepare her to sing it, but it’s a bit of a strange circumstance, isn’t it? Though she can’t remember why she thought that, as she feels very much as if she belongs here. Now, she is flying high. So, “My turn!” she yells, when the priest and Cole finish their rendition of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”, Cole waving her up because he's already put her name in, the bastard.

“Here, make a video, I want to send it to my boyfriend,” she tells Amanda, opening her camera up with slow-moving fingers and handing her the phone. She doesn't look at the priest, because she feels too good to dwell on what she knows perfectly well will hurt him.

Her song is, and always has been, Sophie B. Hawkins’ “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover”. For her meager singing talents, this song is perfect; many of the lyrics are halfway between sung and spoken, pitch is irrelevant because the song is so tuneless, and yet it’s effortlessly sexy. And it’s very sexy. She knows all the strange beats of it, down to warning the bartender that she’s going to fade out thirty seconds before the song ends because it’s more impressive to avoid the too-slow fadeout in a karaoke context.

Damn! I wish I was your lover
I'll rock you 'til the daylight comes
Make sure you are smilin' and warm
I am everything, tonight I'll be your mother
I'll do such things to ease your pain
Free your mind and you won't feel ashamed…

She dances, clasping her own wrist over head with her mic-holding hand, and writhing downward to the ending. It kills. This dance always kills; there is something about this song that makes people feel like they’re cosmopolitan for appreciating it. The bar is writhing with her, with her and biblical Eve and the eternal feminine. They scream when she’s finished. It's been years, but she remembers this.

She doesn’t go straight back to the tables; she doesn’t want to find the priest’s eyes on this moment, stripping bare what she is feeling, what she is evidently needing. She is getting what she needs, tonight. So she fends off strangers, some of them baby-faced and some a bit grizzled, offering her drinks all the way to the ladies’, where she has a wee, wets her sweating face, and then sinks onto a little bench at the entryway.

Suddenly, Mara is beside her. “Need a minute?” she says.

“Yeah. I do.”

Mara gives her, perhaps, one. “So you’re in love with him, then?”

She ought to be surprised it’s taken one of them this long to ask. “It’s complicated. I think… we’re in love with each other, actually. And making peace with it.”

“Oh, well. I’m sure.”

At least Mara is polite in her disbelief, unlike, say, Jonah. “Were you in love with him, then?”

“Oh, probably.” Mara pauses a long moment. “He was very lovable. Always had that odd depth in his eyes. What he said about being a sad bastard… he was very burdened. Still carrying around buckets of shame. God, but I wanted to murder Paul in those days. Still do, if I think about it for too long.”

Mara is looking at her closely, still, at every line of her face, her chin, her neck, down her breasts and over her stomach. She is utterly absorbed.

She is used to having lightning flashes of intuition. These days, drunk or sober, she says them aloud. “Are you jealous? Of me? It’s no picnic, you know.”

“Jealous of… you mean because a man I dated fifteen years ago, who is now wedded to the Catholic Church, has some complicated feelings for you? No. I feel bad for him, for how his life's gone. But you're picking me up wrong. It's just, do you know, the way he looks at you? Like he’s avoiding looking away, because he knows it would mean too much if he did. Like he’s putting all his energy into not being seen not looking.”

“Ugh, this again,” she says, or maybe she just thinks it and says it to herself? "I am the master of that trick," she adds, or maybe doesn't. She’s feeling jumbled. She must be, because she would swear that Mara’s body language—

“Are you?” Mara says, and leans toward her. "But it's him I’m jealous of, because he can look all he wants.” Mara presses their lips together. For a second, without thinking it through, just because it’s a bar, and she has made herself horny, but probably also because of what this quiet woman represents to a man she cares far too much about, she is kissing Mara back.

The slip of Mara’s tongue as the door swings open brings her back to reality.

“I guess I said that last thing out loud?” she says. “What the fuck are you doing, also?”

“I feel like being naughty, tonight,” Mara half-whispers, and she senses Mara is trying to be… sultry. Yikes.

“I think you’re in a time machine," she says. “I don’t need to be the latest phase in your old stories.”

Mara stays behind her on the bench. 

The priest is leaning on the bar, by himself, staring into the middle distance over the shoulder of a woman awkwardly swaying in the long intro of the poorly-chosen acoustic version of a song that had been an earworm a decade ago. As she hitches a seat on the barstool beside him, signaling to the bartender for another martini, she feels as lost in time as she's just accused Mara of being. She wonders what she would do if she met him in a time machine, here, fifteen years before.

“Hey, stranger, can I buy you a drink?” she tries.

He is taking long, slow breaths. It gradually dawns on her that he is fighting some battle with himself, before her eyes. Does he win? Does he lose? The veil of eternity that surrounds him is flickering.

“I’m not myself,” he says finally. “I feel like I’m gonna crawl out of my skin. The way I used to feel when I was craving cocaine. Distract me.”

She has rapidly sobered in the last few minutes, so it takes her very little time to decide to actually say: “Something like telling a joke, or calling us a cab, or more like what your old friend Michelle used to do out behind the gymnasium, or…?”

“Fuck if I know,” he sighs. “Maybe we can just do the thing we do where we get a little too much on the same wavelength with each other, and you’ll figure it out?”

She looks down at the blue light of Neon Trees lyrics flashing from the TV screen onto her glass. “You’re grieving. You’re furious, at both of your parents. You’re not ready to spell out for me what the fuck actually happened with Paul. And look around. Your ex-girlfriend just tried to make out with me in the bathroom—”

“She—what?”

“And you’ve taken yourself off to a school reunion with people who love a version of you that you have tucked away. Your whole timeline is collapsing in on itself. Would it help if I said, ‘it’ll pass’? No?”

He takes a long, steadying breath. “We’ve been through that particular ‘no’ already, my dear. Fuck. I’m so sorry for this.” He turns around, seems to think about ordering another drink, then slaps his hands on the bar and hangs his head a long moment. “You wanna get out of here before Cole asks you to come home with him just to see if it’ll get my knickers in a twist?”

“Yeah. Shall we walk a bit?”

“Give me a few minutes to say farewells.” He forces a grin. “You should know I’m not one for proverbial Irish goodbyes.”

“I’ll wait out front. Told Nate I’d ring him tonight.”

He winces, one of those fucking facial expressions, the sustaining kind, that will forever stop this from being normal between them. She doesn’t think he does on purpose, or not exactly. His look is rueful by the time he meets her eyes. “See you in ten.”

It takes him twenty minutes to say goodnight to his friends, but it’s no matter. She bums a cigarette off a half-dressed teenager with her whole life in front of her, chats with Nathan about the dinner he’s had with Reg and his dad. When Reverend Pendergast shows up beside her, she pushes herself away from the brick except for one elbow and looks at him expectantly.

People in her life often eschew preambles, and this clergyman is no different. “You’re gonna have to be the one to leave him. He’ll never do it,” he says.

“Did Mara ask you to break that to me?” She shakes her head. “Fuck, and I was in such a good mood. Never mind. He and I are fine."

The reverend is looking down the street at buses passing each other in opposite directions. "That's fucking ridiculous."

"So what if I’m the lost cause and not him?”

“He thinks that it's him." He's looking at her now. "And nothing’s ever gonna change his mind.”

She lets out a breath, and with it the feeling of freedom, of power, that she’s been cultivating all evening, seems to come out, too. “What did his dad have to do with it?” she asks quietly.

He looks surprised, as if she’s asking for common knowledge. “He took Paul’s side, when the scandal first broke. Or maybe just hoped the whole thing would go away, which was the same thing as taking Paul's side. Adam told him not to come back, when he got the scholarship to go to Dublin. It was a true schism. They didn't speak for a full year. They had a detente when Adam apologised, but, of course, that was only after Paul raped those children.”

“Did he ever forgive him—forgive his dad?”

The reverend thinks about it. “I’ll just say that in our line of work, forgiveness is sometimes something you give but don’t really feel. He left it up to God, and now….”

“Right.”

Paul’s side in what?

She keeps asking the same question, she realises dimly, with a lack of urgency that tells her that deep down, she already knows the answer.

She clears her throat. “Right, well. See you at the service on Tuesday, Reverend.”

“That you will.” He bows slightly to her, odd man, as he heads back inside.

When the priest emerges, moments later, he takes her arm wordlessly. To passerby, she knows, as one block turns into ten on their drunken, mostly wordless amble, they look like an old married couple, lucky people whose pasts are sorted and whose futures are comfortable and who have plenty of both past and future to spare. Funny, really, that they have neither. It must be funny, because she finds herself laughing a bit.

“What would have happened, if I’d found you here fifteen years ago?” she asks him as they make their way down a block of gray stone townhouses lined with elms that shade the streetlights.

“As we are now? We’d have saved each other, I think. But as we were then…”

“Disaster,” she says decisively, imagining herself in ripped skinny jeans and green eyeliner, looking at a man with a vulnerable gaze and an investment portfolio and making abrupt self-deprecating jokes at every pause in conversation.

“Catastrophic,” he affirms, and she knows he’s imagining his own version of their pasts. “Though it would never have happened. You’d never have noticed me back then.”

He thinks he's insulting himself, so she forgives him. She smiles, because even with all the blows she’s been dealt, nothing hurts tonight. “Oh, well, let’s just imagine, tonight, that we saved each other a long time ago, so long ago it seems unremarkable because we were barely even lost.”

He lets out a long breath. “There it is,” he says under his breath, and pulls her closer while she lays her head onto his shoulder and thinks about how strange it is to build these wispy memories of a past that never was and that would have made this night, right now, impossible.

“Hey.” He stops when they eventually turn onto his street. “I’ll tell you everything, just, please. Don’t run your own investigation. Please.”

“I haven’t... I won’t.”

They lay awake beside each other in his childhood bedroom again that night, listening to each other breathe, inches and years apart.

By Tuesday, she understands the Moss household well enough to understand she could never feel at home there. She knows which of the eight burners on the stove has a faulty ignition, walks up the right side of the back staircase to avoid the creaking, has her own wrought iron chair in the back garden.

She avoids: Ollie’s dad Sean, whose eyes follow her arse everywhere; Paul’s room; camaraderie with Aunt Christine, whom she vaguely doesn’t trust; anything on the third floor of the house, where the children sleep (because she is trying to avoid seeming like a try-hard new girlfriend currying favor with the youngsters on a wedding weekend); being alone with the priest’s mother like it’s her job. In that last, she is merely copying him.

She does not run an investigation, as she promised. But she takes in information, ambiently, at the breakfast table, in the florist shop, when Cole pops by for Monday dinner, at the district records office where they get enough copies of his father's death certificate to do business with the banks and the state. She learns:

1. From perusing his CD collection: the priest had tried very hard to get into punk and post-punk, and had continually slipped into wistful lyric-driven alt rock.
2. From a conversation between Rachel and her cousins, about how much the adults in her life think she doesn’t know about her father: Paul is in prison for molestation and rape of several children in his care as a music teacher at a school affiliated with Reverend Pendergast’s church (though she can triangulate now to know that Reverend Michaelson had been the minister at the time). He has been in prison for six years. Because of multiple counts of assault of a child by penetration, he has more than twenty years to go.
3. From a cursory explanation that the priest’s mother makes to the table at large at Sunday lunch: Paul’s appeal failed. He will be released to privately pay his respects Wednesday. She and the priest will be leaving at the crack of dawn.
4. From experience: the priest is truly rubbish at following the plot of mysteries on TV or film. It’s his mother’s favourite genre, and he cannot be arsed to keep track of motivation or minor characters. He also has an absymal sense of time and circumstance, as in, he just does not grasp who was where when and why. “You would be a terrible cop,” Caolan tells him, to which of course the priest says “thanks.”
5. On the other hand, he is about as good at card games as he is bad at scripted theater. From go fish to poker, he does not condescend by giving advantage even to the youngest of the children.

She would have guessed the opposite, a year ago when he was just a festering memory and there were no Thursdays. Strange, that.

Aunt Christine, Uncle Matthew, Nell, Sean, and many of their contemporaries spend ages curating a photo montage to play in the foyer during the wake. They pore over boxes and boxes of old photographs, videos, letters and postcards, and other memorabilia of a life. They cry all over each other while they’re doing it. (This task, which occupies them for many hours of every day, is the main reason why she and Ollie and the priest are left with most of the logistical organising of the funeral.)

They debut the montage for the family on Monday night. In it, she sees, and begins to understand.

The priest's paternal grandparents had that set to their mouths that she associates with the post-war and tells her that they favoured firm discipline over laughter and commiseration. His father had been one of eight children, born to a good deal less money than he’d died with; only six of his siblings appear in the slideshow after childhood. He’d met his wife very young, served in the military sometime not long before the Falklands. Since she knows his birth and death date now, she can say that he’d been about twenty when he married and about twenty-four when Paul was born, and then the priest two years later.

Paul and the-priest-as-a-boy looked like brothers—dark hair and eyes, serious expressions. Their father didn’t appear in any photos with them, but always seemed to be standing near them. Family vacations, birthdays, Christmases posed at the fireplace… It could be the photographer’s bias, or a selection error. Perhaps he was the kind of man who got on the floor with his children and played games.

But she didn’t think so.

Around the time that Paul and the boy-priest were coming into their teens, the photos pivot abruptly to featuring Paul alone, and there are very few chosen from these years—perhaps because they too obviously exclude one son? A photo of Adam’s arm around Paul’s shoulders on a vacation to celebrate his A-levels, another at his graduation… it feels a little bit, in watching, that the priest was the one who had died.

His expression, watching this unfold, shows flickers of interest and sometimes of amusement or even nostalgia—but never surprise.

Later, his eyes tell her.

“What do you want me to do at the funeral tomorrow?” she asks him that night as crawls into bed beside her.

“Do? Like, you want to invent some new tradition, light up some fireworks, lay out the rose petals…?”

“I mean… where should I sit? You’ll be up front with your family. Do you want me to stand next to you in the greeting line, or… no, that’s too weird. Right?”

“Is it weirder than saying you should sit next to my ex-girlfriend, the pastor’s wife who’s hot for you?”

“Fair point.”

“Just stick with me, how about that. Have I said thank you for all this yet, by the way?”

“No, I was expecting a hell of a greeting card in the post upon my return, though.”

“‘Thanks for being my emotional support former affair partner during this difficult time.’”

“I think it’s pronounced ‘friend.’”

“Is it?” he smiles. “I always mess that one up.”

“Yeah. You do.” She takes her chance. “When are you gonna tell me everything, by the way? No pressure, but I like to know which parts of a eulogy are polite fictions and which are blatant lies.”

“Can I give you a post-mortem on that? It will all be very blatantly polite, regardless. Can we do it tomorrow night, once the house is asleep?”

Their last night, then.

“Yeah. I was just joking. You know you don’t owe me anything.”

He turns off the light and turns onto his side before he says, “Actually, yeah. I do.”

The funeral is, well, it's long. She finds it to be shockingly long, and she is someone who has sat through a half dozen Catholic funeral masses in her life. It’s just that Reverend Pendergast loses control of the service, and somehow all of the siblings get to speak. And then, still, his eulogy could be broken down by chapter. Because Rachel and the priest’s rendition of their song is the last word of the service, she lets out an audible breath when the final note (“…upward I fly!”) fades from her hearing.

At the wake, she is glad that Reverend Brian has made it up from London so there’s a familiar face, and gladder that Cole is still gamely flirting with her if only because it helps her steer clear of Mara, who seems composed and utterly unabashed. She meets Angie, who is a good-looking woman in her early 50s with beautiful flower tattoos sleeved up her left arm and a face accustomed to laughter. She understands readily how a teenager could have lost his head over her, a bit.

This many people competing for her attention means, she is not at her best. She spills gin on a caterer, accidentally lights a paper napkin aflame while having a smoke, curses vociferously in the hearing of the full children’s table at an unexpected moment of silence, stumbles repeatedly over the word “cremation” like she’s never heard it before. The literal hundreds of family members and friends who flood through the house and its garden have no idea what to make of her.

“Your cousins think I’m an idiot,” she hisses at the priest, who is in a long conversation with Ollie, Reverend Brian, his old friend Jamie, who appears fully recovered from his last psychotic break, and several people who might, for all she fucking knows, actually be his cousins.

“Just imagine what they think of me,” he whispers back.

She keeps getting pulled into conversations by two sorts of people—the curious, who wonder whether her presence is a sign that their errantly Catholic family member is leaving the priesthood; and by the many people using this wake as a fucking meat market, who are actively hitting on her. She feels she is a soda can floating in a garbage heap in the ocean, here. The priest had said to stick with him, but she keeps getting pulled away.

And anyway, a lot of people want to cry on his shoulder, even more than usual.

The Irish, of course, do not have a monopoly on drinking despite the reputation of their wakes, and it goes about as she has seen before. The people who imbibe, tell stories; the stories are about the priest’s father’s extreme raft of pieties becoming absurd in various situations, or else about him being proven right; those who tell them are not close relatives or necessarily close friends, but they are the people who stay the longest.

Nell listens to every story about her husband with an unfocused gaze, and says only some variation of “He was a good man and a great husband” at intervals that seem almost random. His status as a father is never commented on, by her or anyone. She seems, by the end, to be that rarest of drunks—the quiet and reserved sot. Aunt Christine ushers her up to bed at about ten p.m., and stays with her, and this is their excuse to shoo the remaining stragglers on their way.

When the gate closes behind the last catering van, the priest turns to Ollie and says, “I’m sorry, but we have been putting off a conversation about Paul.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Ollie makes a face. She’s surprised to find herself wrapped in Ollie’s arms, briefly but strongly. “Rachel and I will be up to see you off in the morning, before we head out ourselves.”

Then he simply tilts his head to follow, and leads her up the stairs, and she thinks they are going to his bedroom, like every night. But he passes the lavatory and enters the door on its far side.

Paul’s room.

He doesn’t hesitate at the door, simply walks inside.

The room is ultra-white and very cold and hence makes her think of Christmas. The sheets are white, with a white quilt with ecru embroidery. The walls and the bookcases, which are empty, are white. The rug which covers most of the floor is white, with thin, mint-green slashes cutting through it. 

She can see his mother's hand as the interior decorator, because this, obviously, is a cover-up.

He doesn't turn on the light.

“It’s time,” he says, sitting down gingerly on the edge of his brother’s bed, “for my confession. Will you hear it?”

She has learned how to let heavy words linger in the air until, like helium balloons deflating, they sink slowly out of the brain and into the heart.

Let’s just leave that out there for a moment.

“We don’t have to do it this way,” she says eventually. He smiles, at that, one of his heartbreaking smiles, and presses her left hand between both of his.

“Oh, let’s do, though.” He squints at her awhile, one eyebrow quirked. His expression says this is all a lark. But his eyes say that this is one of the doorways of a life, one of the places you can’t walk back through. The moment drags on long enough that she begins to believe, as she sometimes has in the past, that she might be able to read his mind.

He is willing her to forgive him. She feels a thrill.

I am God.

“Forgive me, my darling,” and her divine heart trips, “for… I have sinned. There are two things I should have told you, a long time ago. Withholding them was always the worst sort of lie.” It’s so still, here, she is sure she hears his heartbeat whenever he pauses. “The first is this. Eighteen months ago, with you, in your bed, was the first time that I was sober during a sexual act, in over a quarter century.”

She holds his eyes, those eyes that give meaning to words like ‘fathomless’. “Since you were… shit. Twelve, thereabouts?”

“Thereabouts. No. I promised myself I would be precise. That I would tell you what actually happened, not spin parables and hints, not use euphemisms or…” His hands, still holding hers, rub them briskly, as if to tell her to stiffen her proverbial upper lip. “Precise. Yes. Simple. Twenty-six years ago this February, Uncle Jack raped Paul, who raped me, for the first time, that summer. It happened right here—to me, and to Paul, I think—the first time.”

“It doesn’t sound… simple.”

“The basic facts are just sand in an oyster, and everything that’s ever happened since is just shiny, protective, irritating, coating. Clusters of pearl that can never be cut out but can be lived with. Have you ever harvested an oyster?”

“What, like, shucking with lemon and dill and a sprinkle of salt? Sure. But what…?”

“I’m sorry. That was the fucking parable talking. I’ll stick to… the actual sand. Yes.” The words begin to spill out, now, and though she’s never actually heard him give a full sermon in his church, she imagines that this is how he warms to a topic there, too. “Uncle Jack, as you may have surmised, was Aunt Christine’s husband, and they came for three weeks to look after us while Mum and Dad were on holiday. I didn’t know, then, what had happened. Just that after that, Paul… changed. Just a bit. Just sometimes. He’d always been very musical, just one of those people who can pick up an instrument and play it, but he started spending hours, like five or six at a time, sitting at the piano. And we’d always played a lot of the kind of games he liked—chase, tag, hide and seek. He liked them because he was one of the oldest and biggest kids in the neighbourhood, and he loved, above all, to win. But then, after what happened, he became sort of relentless and aggressive. So when Mum and Dad went away again at the start of summer, and Aunt Christine came to stay with us, I was already kinda scared when he asked me to come sleep in his room. He was my older brother, and he’d never asked before—in fact, he’d refused to stay with me before. But I somehow knew he really was scared, too. I was scared a lot, too, in this house. So… I believed him.”

Her free hand flutters uselessly for a moment, before landing, a butterfly turned brick, in a pile of hands. “That’s when he raped you.”

“Yes.” He clears his throat, for a moment breaking the eye contact they’ve held this whole time, but for the inconvenient exigency of blinking. “I woke up to him fondling me—jacking me off, I mean, fondling is the language Reverend Michaelson used to dismiss it. He was sodomising—no, that’s the Bible again. He was cramming his dick in my ass, something at the time I didn’t know was… possible? Like how ten-year-olds don’t know about deodorant or mortgage rates. It was a curiosity, almost. But of course… I mean, of course I knew it was wrong. I screamed, and he tried to tell me to shut up, and I screamed again, and again. And Aunt Christine came, and I told her what was happening. But Paul said it was a dream, and I’d been masturbating—humping the mattress, he said—in my sleep. She believed him.”

“But… why? I mean, why would any kid make that up?”

“Why would any kid rape their brother?”

“Did Christine tell your parents?”

“She did. It’s conjecture, but I doubt she was specific. Most people aren’t. They think it’s unseemly, or unnecessarily worrying, or perhaps that describing it makes them out to be the paedophile. In her case, she’d already been dismissing stories her own son, my cousin Will, was telling her about Uncle Jack. It was all a fucking mess of abused boys and abusive men. In the short term… I think the thing with me and Paul actually helped her to dismiss it. Perversely. Literally perversely. Because it came to seem like weird claims about incest and rape was just something that perhaps all boys did at some stage or t’other.”

“Christ.”

“Yeah, he wasn’t much help in the short term, to be honest. Paul was breaking down. He said, years later, that what he did to me—it helped him to feel in control again. Helped him to understand… well. The psychological effects of child rape are many. I should know.”

“It… kept happening?”

The priest lets go of her hands now, and rearranges himself to lie down on the bed, and pats the space beside. “Might as well get comfortable.” She stretches out beside him, and he puts his arms behind his head, for all the world like he’s watching a light show on the ceiling, one that she can’t see. “Yeah. Dad removed the lock I tried to put on my door. Paul would come in at night, and…” He shrugs eloquently. “It was always different. Sometimes he’d just sleep. Once he found me where I’d fallen asleep, hiding from him in my closet. It made him cry. He begged me to just come to bed. Tucked me in and everything. Who knows how long it might have gone on like that, except…”

“Except…” She thinks of the memorial photo montage. “Something happened to your Uncle Jack.”

“Yeah. Oh, sure and you’ve been paying attention. He killed himself. While at work. Used his own sidearm to do it. He was a cop, you see.”

“I forgot the police carry guns up here.”

The look he gives her makes her feel like she’s said that she forgot her own middle name. “Yeah, well, he also left a note. Mentioned Paul and everything. His son, my cousin Will, too. Sent a shockwave through the family.”

“They packed you off to therapy?”

He snorts. “I have no fucking clue if there were competent child trauma specialists in Belfast in the 90s. What I can tell you is that I didn’t see one until I was out on my own, and even then it was initially part of clerical training and I just realised I needed a bigger intervention. My parents had preferred to believe I wasn’t really affected by it. Paul was the victim, you see. Him, they packed off to talk to Reverend Michaelson, who listened gravely and explained at which points after being raped by Uncle Jack he had sinned, mainly by not telling our parents clearly enough, which Dad repeated ad nauseam. The sin of not being believed. I don’t know what Paul thought of it. But he left me alone after that.”

“You were still at home?”

“For a couple of years. Before that—before we were gone, when Paul was home, he started getting into outright brawls. Broke the kitchen wall into the dining room. One night he took a swing at mum, and the next week he was enrolled at a boarding school for gifted musicians in Leeds. When I saw him next at Christmas, he’d gone quiet, in that dreadful way that children have, where you can tell that something in them has been extinguished. Not that I had any language for it, at the time.”

“How did you cope?”

“Oh, I didn’t, of course. There are a lot of consequences, you see, for being raped in childhood. I got a raft of the most common ones. Fuck, if I’d known any of the words I’m about to say to you back then, I would have believed there was a pathway out. So. Anyway, yeah. Hypersexuality. Suicidal ideation. Substance abuse. Avoidance of emotional intimacy. All sorts of cognition issues, in my case a malady of focus—either too much or too little, and that affected homework, board games, relationships... I kept falling in love and then fleeing. That story I told you before, about that first time a fox found me?”

“Yeah.”

“I have others like that, where I made some kind of bid for intimacy and then recoiled as soon as I felt they might be reciprocated. I didn’t understand then, or for years and years, really, that I felt a bit contagious and a bit… transparent, maybe. Like anyone who touched me might see what had happened to me. Like it might somehow happen to them through me, like water passing through a piece of paper. I was always so fucking afraid… Now I think that’s how grace flows, but I also hadn’t had any experience of it, then. Grace.”

“So—sorry if you’re trying to go theological, but getting back to the first thing…”

“I’d expect nothing less.”

“You were always—what, high? Drunk? When you had sex.”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. So what made, well, us—made that night… different?”

He turns to look at her, lets his hand fall onto her cheek in that most intimate of gestures, the one that looks so ordinary when you see it on television but always feels so strange in real life. Someone else, touching your face.

And then he says the words that will haunt her.

“Nothing in me is afraid of you.”

There is perhaps irony here. Shouldn’t those words terrify him? Terrify them both? Isn’t that, perhaps, what has brought them to here and now in the first place? Her hand trembles. To cover it, she reaches over and pulls his hand to her mouth and nips his finger, quick as a lark but much stronger. He laughs. “Nothing,” he repeats.

“Good,” she says. “What’s the other thing?”

“Other…? Oh, right, two confessions.” He sighs. “Here it is, then. If I’m being honest—well, God knows already—I applied for the seminary, nine years ago, mainly because I goddamned well never wanted to have to have sex again.”

“Ah.” She sits with that for a long moment. It somehow reverses all of her assumptions—about his sexuality and struggles, about his fit to his calling, about his… well, his personality. “I think your life might almost make sense, now,” she says finally. “I guess I kinda thought it, the priesthood, I mean, was basically a fuck you to your parents that you did without considering the costs.”

“Yeah, well, some of that, too. Difficult relationships with our fathers… it’s not exactly hard to come by, in the priesthood. And, of course, I wouldn’t have ever found the Church, the Catholic Church, obviously, without a need to say fuck you to my dad. You’ve figured out the rest, now, have you?”

“I think… with Paul gone… and with what you said about being… paper? I think you must have sought out the church to escape this house, yeah?”

“Yeah. You know, it was the early 90s, and this was Belfast. For my family, my school, my friends—nothing could have felt more like transgressing than going into a fucking Catholic Church. I was chasing a girl, obviously—Nora, that same one, again, with the fox, and the bus?” She nods. “I was clever, you know, despite everything, at maths. And so when I met the youth pastor at St. Agnes, and he took an interest in me, after a while—everything came out, about Dad, Paul, Uncle Jack, the booze, the sex, the rape, I mean... all of it. So he gets a look at my transcripts and manages to find me a scholarship, again at a boys’ school, St. Martin’s. Had to move across the border. Got a full scholarship, but wouldn’t you know it, I had to move out of the house and live at school, it was too far to stay home. Mum and Dad were baffled that I somehow had this opportunity. But it’s Ireland, after all, and so Mum dutifully remembered that one of her great-aunts had converted and shook a few more Romanist skeletons out of the family closet to make sense of it, and my father, who was a religious bigot, refused to speak to me about it. And me, I went hundreds of kilometers away and became the first person who has ever gone to a Catholic boys’ school to avoid rapists and their enablers.”

She can tell this is a line he has used at some point before, probably in therapy, and doesn’t bother with the dutiful laugh it wants. She flops over on her stomach, and props her chin on her hand, as if it's girlish confession hour at a sleepover. Had he had those? She should ask Cole.

What she says is, “You didn’t enjoy sex?”

“More like, didn’t enjoy the aftermath. I couldn’t pull apart what was physical and spiritual and psychological… I had some molly-addled, can I say molly-addled?, one-night stand in London on a work trip and I vomited in this ostensibly perfectly nice woman’s shower, while she was also in the shower. And I just started shaking. Not like shivers. Like, full-on, she thought I was having seizure but I was honestly just… in the grip of the worst feeling I’d ever had, except that it was just like the dozens of times I’d had it before. I went back to my hotel, couldn’t shake it off, stumbled across Sussex Gardens into a church like I was a side character in a bad Christmas film. And I felt… clean. No. Like there was something in me that had always been clean, and it was shining brightly there.”

“Fuck.”

“And that was the beginning of the end, for my secular life. And a good thing, because I think it probably would’ve killed me by now if I hadn’t left it behind.”

She lays there for a long time, laying on Paul’s white sheets and staring at his white ceiling and thinks about the missing boy who caused this, about what was done to him and what he’d done. “If I thought you had a soul,” she says finally, “I’d say it was shining darkly. But not because of some bullshit idea about being clean or the idea that sex you didn’t choose could make you dirty. That’s idiotic, and you know people in your line of work keep kids thinking the same fucking thing.”

“Yeah. I’m trying to do a bit better than that, though.”

“I know. You’re up against all of Western history, though.”

“I’ve never been particularly good at picking my battles.”

“Were you and your dad fighting? The last time you spoke to him?”

“Oh, no more than usual. He wanted me to come up to the coast for Rachel’s birthday—which is on Thursday, by the way—”

“Oh, believe me, I’ve heard all about it. The last person in her class to turn twelve! The infamy.”

“—and stay for the weekend. And I said, I’d come up early in the week but…”

“Ah.” He had obligations on Thursday and Sunday.

“I want you to understand, my father never yelled. He lived and died without me ever hearing him raise his voice. And he never raised a hand to us. I have no idea if whatever happened to Uncle Jack in their unfathomable childhood that they never spoke of, also happened to him, although I’ve long suspected it did. I think he needed to believe it didn’t matter—didn’t really touch him. And that’s why he…”

“Under-reacted.”

“Yeah. But I’ll say this, too, he didn’t shed a tear at Uncle Jack’s funeral. Not one. I don’t know if he could have told me himself, whether he was furious or relieved or guilty or something else. But he sure as fuck wasn’t sad."

This makes her think of Claire, who didn’t cry at their mother’s funeral, whom she had never seen cry over their mother’s death… but who had lost her mind one night a few weeks later when she dropped her toothbrush in dirty sink water backed up by a slow drain. She had broken the sink pedestal with a hammer.

She can easily imagine what might have been terrifying about his father.

“Are you sad? Now that he’s gone?”

He throws an arm over his eyes, maybe trying to access his memory more clearly. “We went to view him this morning, you know, just me and Mum, before he was sent to be cremated. And something about seeing his face…” He opens his eyes. “You see a lot of death in my business, but…”

“Your own dad is obviously… different.”

“Or maybe it just wasn’t different enough.”

There’s not much she can say to that. The silence drapes back around them. She thinks he is listening to something else, something inside, when he doesn’t react to the far-off shriek of a fox in the night, probably screaming for a mate. It might be a feral cat; but lying beside him, she doubts it.

“Hey,” she says, “let’s get out of this room, yeah?”

“So I’m… forgiven, am I?”

“That’s not how this works for us Muggles.”

“Right.”

When they get back to his room, she moves through the darkness to his bedside lamp with surety. “You know there’s nothing to forgive.”

He just shakes his head, slowly, and watches her. “If you don’t ask me any questions about all this stuff,” he gestures toward the remnants of music, books, and figurines, “I’m going to think you aren’t paying attention.”

She grins, and knows he’s not up for any more revelations—that he’d rather dwell on inspiration than on all the various edifices of despair. So she reaches down onto the lowest shelf of boyhood novels, and hands one to him at random. “Will you read me this?” she asks.

“That’s it?”

“I can get answers out of you anytime,” she says. “Your rules don’t seem to apply to me.”

“They don’t, do they?” He sets the book under the lamp, and starts unbuttoning the white button-down he’d worn to his father’s funeral this morning. “Good choice. Let’s make it a bedtime story, then.”

Twenty minutes later, her teeth are brushed and she’s back in her lavender funeral-weekend pajamas. She curls up toward him, her knees tucked at his thigh. He leans up against the oaken headboard and begins to read:

“In time to come, when I am long gone to my rest, you will think back to this day and bless my memory, for then you will be a true member of Redwall. Come now, my young friend, cheer up; it is the Summer of the Late Rose. There are many, many days of warm sun ahead of us….”

That morning, he puts on the coffee and toast while she crawls around, looking for stray earrings and the brand-new lipstick she’d asked Ollie if she could gift Rachel for her birthday, assiduously avoiding the closet she now knows used to be his hiding place. When she gets to the kitchen, and sees his face, she has another lightning flash.

“Oh, Christ, you’re staying,” she says.

He looks a bit hunted, like she might chase him down and force him back to London, and she takes a half-step back. You're safe here. “Well... just through Rachel’s birthday. And I realised last night, I should see Paul. Offer him at least what I give people who come to my church.”

“But he hasn’t come to your church. And you owe him exactly nothing.”

“No,” he says. “But… someone does. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it, of a church?”

“Maybe.”

"The truth," he says, as if he's just now found what he's been trying to say. "Everyone is owed at least the truth."

That lands in her sternum and lodges there, near the place in her chest that is screaming without words that that is precisely what he has never given to her.

Rachel, fresh out of bed, has pre-teen body odor but a childish enthusiasm for teenaged gifts. Whatever the priest says to Ollie about Paul, she misses; but Ollie doesn’t change her plans to take Rachel away this morning, ahead of Paul’s arrival. She leaves Rachel the café’s mailing address so she can write a postcard to Hilary, who will be pleased to chew on it.

The priest runs her to the airport. When they get close, they both fall silent, and at the curb, she just says, “Don’t get out. I’ll walk away, this time, yeah?” It’s a salve. She’s still not the one walking away.

He looks at her closely. “I’ll see you next Thursday?” he says, and she hears the question that he doesn’t.

She leans over, kisses his cheek, and says, “OK. It’s OK.”

He waits while she retrieves her leather weekender bag from the boot. She smiles and taps the back of the car twice, feels proud of herself for her jauntiness. He waits, she thinks, while she walks into the terminal. But she doesn’t look back.

She doesn’t see him the next Thursday, of course, nor the one after that, nor any of the rest that year.

Chapter Text

Reverend Michael Pendergast is late for the graveside service—whether because he’s finally noticed his wife’s disaffection, is working on beating his own record for the world’s longest fucking sermon, or his elaborate workout routine got away from him, the priest cannot guess, but is privately maundering about exactly how far his friend has his head up his arse. That’s mainly because, for a very long thirty-five minutes, he has been stuck with his mum and brother on a shallow hillside by a plot of earth too newly turned for grass even to have been planted, let alone broken through. Paul has wept, and stopped weeping, six separate times, stopping only to call himself a ‘fucking twat’ and then resuming.

He can face this alone; he’d rather face this alone. But he keeps looking over his shoulder and being surprised she’s not there. Not that he wants her within a hundred miles of his brother.

“Did he know?” Paul is asking their mum. Paul has asked a number of questions that the priest sees now he also ought, naturally, to have raised, but there’s too much unnatural in his family feelings to have uttered them. “That he was dying,” Paul clarifies, though Mum has already understood and seems merely to be struck by the question.

“Do you know, I think he didn’t,” she says slowly. “I think he understood it was a heart attack and that it was severe, but the last thing he said before he asked for an ambulance was, ‘did you leave out the cherry jam?’”

The priest chokes on a laugh at that. It is so perfect an encapsulation of his father’s life. “Let’s get that carved on the headstone, we won’t do better,” he says, and Paul quirks a grin. “When do you think you’ll go back to work?” the priest looks away from his brother quickly to ask his mum.

His mother has been semi-retired for a few years, something his father never will achieve. Even though he’s long sensed that she continued working only out of some sense of obligation to keep up with her husband or fear of how he’d react if she stopped, she still surprises him by saying, “Never, I think.”

“Good for you, Mum,” Paul says. The priest nods reluctant agreement, though he suspects that Paul’s opinion is shaded rather more with contempt for white-collar worldviews than his own is.

“Your father would probably want me to wrap up a few cases, particularly the Greyhall one, you know, with the tennis courts?”

Fuck Dad, the priest thinks.

“Eh, fuck him,” Paul says aloud.

The priest grimaces. He never has enjoyed moments of agreement with his own rapist. “Sean or one of the several dozen other lawyers you employ can probably figure it out,” he says.

“You wouldn’t want to come back and look at the books?” she asks. “Sean doesn’t have your father’s… attention to detail.”

This raises all kinds of issues. For one, no person on the goddamn earth has his father’s level of attention to detail, least of all Sean, whose principal value to their sprawling pan-Irish corporate litigation empire had always come instead in the form of gladhanding and conspiratorial boozing. For another, he himself hasn’t practiced corporate accounting in a decade, and back when he had made an egregiously lucrative living that way, his father hadn’t remotely trusted him with those same books. And finally, he knows his professional 180-degree turn was difficult for his parents, and virtually everyone else in his life, to fathom. But his mother hadn’t even wanted him to say a prayer over his father’s body, when they’d gone together to see it a last time before the casket was closed.

But now he’s supposed to make sure his parents’ money is well-counted? This is not who he is or has ever been.

I am used to being invisible here, he reminds himself. “I don’t believe I’d be the best choice,” he offers aloud. Diplomacy can be another performance, perhaps. “Ah, Reverend, there you are, glad to see you.”

Judging by the fact that Michael’s hair is still damp despite the commuting distance to get out here to this sea-scented cemetery past Holywood, he diagnoses that he lost track of time either at the gym or the pool. “Father,” Reverend Pendergast nods back with a smile that contains no apologies. “Nell, Paul. Good to see you. Let us pray...."

They just miss Aunt Christine and the boys at the house; they’re pulling out as the priest, his mum, and Paul pull in. Trust Aunt Christine to take evasive action for children only at the last possible minute, he thinks cynically. Since Rachel and Ollie have fled in advance of Paul, that just leaves Uncle Matthew in a house where all ten bedrooms, less Paul’s, had been occupied only this morning. This, of course, is Paul’s effect on the family.

As they walk in through the kitchen, the priest pulls out his wallet reflexively, to throw it on the tray in the hallway. But he slows his hand motions when he remembers Paul is behind him. It’s been twenty years since Paul has stolen cash from him while he was sleeping, but…

While his wallet is in his hand and cash on his mind, he opens it to count what’s there, in case they walk down to the shops for food. Tucked behind the notes is a receipt, folded so he can see the handwritten text at a glance. “Speak, now, or…” it says at the top. Her note, half-stolen and half-borrowed, has become a sort of talisman for him since he picked it up from the floor of his church in the spring.

He takes a deep, steadying breath, tucks his wallet back into his pocket, and turns to his mother and brother. “Shall I order in something to eat?” he asks.

“Let me do it,” Paul says.

The priest tilts his head in confusion.

“Yeah, on your phone, with your fucking money, obviously. Just a cheap thrill. Don’t get a lot of phone time behind bars.”

The priest thinks for only a split second, and what he thinks about is the possibility that he’ll get a text from the woman whose old receipt he’s just glimpsed, saying she’s touched back down at Heathrow and offering some cheeky reassurance. He absolutely and categorically does not want his brother to see her or to know her name.

“No,” he says. Speak, now. “I’ll do it. Come back to the garden to eat with me, though?”

“I’ll leave you boys to it,” his mum says, likely imagining a happy reunion between the two of them because on this one subject she’s an idiot, says. To be fair, she probably also hasn’t eaten a full meal in a week. She heads for the stairs.

The priest doesn’t ask what his brother wants; it occurs to him to wonder, but he would never allow himself to ask. It’s for the same reason he held onto his wallet, the same reason there’s a trickle of ice up his spine as his brother follows him up the stairs to change out of their summer funeral attire.

Even—no, especially—when it feels normal between them, that feeling spooks the priest, badly.

He puts a pack of cigarettes between them on the wrought iron table on the patio, while they watch through the side yard for food to arrive. His brother accepts it wordlessly, and has his own lighter in his pocket; he thinks that they’re allowed to smoke in NI prisons but not in English or Welsh ones, had read some article about the public health questions about it in some idle moment years ago and enjoyed pettily resenting his brother having access to this small pleasure.

Speak. Now.

“You really fucked me up, you know.”

Paul huffs a laugh. “Oh, yeah, you were the victim.”

“A victim. I was a victim. Of you.”

Paul doesn’t say anything for a long while, just taps his cigarette once on the rim of the table. “Yeah,” he says after awhile. “Well, how bad can it be. Mum says you brought home a girlfriend. Finally.” He shoots a daring look across the table at the priest.

The priest laughs. He can’t help it, although he doesn’t know if it’s the seeming non sequitur or the frequency with which he keeps dodging this particular pass. “Ezra,” this is their dad’s stodgy bachelor cousin, “was kind enough to pull me aside at the wake and tell me that he’d always assumed I was queer, ‘more a Mary o’ God than a man, I said to your da, and a bit gammy wit’ it,’” he affects Ezra’s rural mid-century accent. “I clarified by repeating the actual language of the fucking vows of celibacy, not that I think it took.”

“So you’re not fucking her. Only Mum said you shared a room.”

He has no idea what passes across his face that Paul sees, but his brother guffaws. “OK. Well, you’ve always been a fucking hypocrite.”

He doesn’t know if it’s justice or injustice of this that says to him, again: Speak.

“Says a man who is in prison for raping six children—it would be seven if the state had accounted for me, and God fucking knows what else you’ve done—and who once told a jury that his ‘only crime’ was ‘not seeking help soon enough.’ And who then went on to refuse help from the prison shrinks.”

His brother shakes his head at that, as if it’s the dumbest fucking narrative he’s ever heard; no shock, because Paul has had a great deal of practice being unaccountable for his actions, much of it within twenty meters of where they’re sitting. But he doesn’t argue, the priest notices. Maybe because he hasn’t been outside the walls of a prison in several years. Maybe because at least one of them has remained conscious that their dad is dead, and their mother’s bedroom window is open above them.

They smoke, and to the kids who bike by on an August afternoon, it probably looks idle and companionable.

The food arrives. They get it, lay out their trays and plastic forks. There is hot chicken and falafel on pita, wilted lettuced, summer tomatoes, creamy tzatziki and soggy chips. He is beginning, again, to enjoy both the novelty and absurdity of the whole thing, when Paul finally responds:

“No. You’re not a hypocrite. You just don’t think the rest of us are as real as the person sitting in the back of your head, keeping score.”

“My… I think that’s called a conscience?”

“I mean this sincerely: fuck you.” Paul crams a chip in his mouth and keeps talking, just like old times. “Do you remember that you used to tally up scores, when we would have fights? You were like six years old and already a fucking accountant—or maybe already a priest, it’s the same fucking thing. Which is better, chocolate cake or chocolate ice cream, or whatever the hell it was. I’d get a point for saying you could eat chocolate cake in any weather, you’d get a point for saying ice cream took more effort to make and keep. You were trying to commend ice cream to heaven and send cake straight to hell and using a balance sheet to do it.”

He actually faintly does remember that summer’s experiment, now, carefully buried away under so much else. “I was trying for objectivity.”

“You were playing God.” Paul smiles to himself, and he remembers with extreme reluctance how fucking smart his extreme arsehole of a brother actually is. “It was so strange to me. I used to think you’d be an engineer and I’d be a poet. You were born with no tolerance for ambiguity and I… Well. And we made that model ship, remember, and it took loads of dad’s help and like four fucking months—”

“OK, but it wasn’t a ship.”

“Exactly. That’s exactly what you fucking said at the time. ‘By definition, ships float.’ I loved that thing and I almost punched you. And obviously, Dad wasn’t going to yell at you….”

“I’m sure he wanted to that day, yeah.” The priest will think about this later, and then over and over, for months, but he doesn’t care to let his brother know that. “Why won’t you see a fucking prison shrink?”

Paul tosses his emptied takeout tray down on the table. “That’s the best meal I’ve had in…” He thinks about it, and then obviously finds the truth too unpleasant to say. “There’s a lot of, what do you business types say, disincentives.”

He thinks that he really should start wearing his collar around the house. Business types. For the love of…  “Disincentives. Like that your buddies in your more-than-vaguely-white-supremacist gang might think you’re a pussy because you have feelings, or…? But surely the fact that you fucking raped children doesn’t sit well with some of them already. Sorry to be blunt. Or actually, no, I’m not.”

“It’s complicated.” Paul reaches for the cigarettes again. “Plenty of guys are mandated into care. But to seek it out, eh. It’s not like my accent and vocabulary… I mean, do you know my nickname? It’s ‘Posh Pete,’ P.P. for short. Fucking humiliating.”

“Pete?” The Priest thinks a moment. “Oh, right for paedophile. So you get a lot of…”

“Everything you can imagine is probably true. If you’ve hoped that I am suffering…”

He has met the parents of the children who were raped by his brother—not the children themselves, who were protected by courtroom protocols, but he has a strong idea. And, after all, he has his own aftermaths. He has hoped his brother was suffering. He has, in fact, wished his brother were dead. He has hated himself for it. And then he has wished for it again and again.

“It can help,” he says, “to have one place in your life, somewhere, where you tell the truth. Say what happened to you. Say what you did. Say how it felt. Reality has to be real, somewhere, or you’re just going to be a fucking mess forever. And it can’t be with me, for all sorts of reasons.”

“Yeah. I’m not Catholic,” his brother attempts a joke.

“Oh, fuck, that, too.” The priest feels suddenly hungry; truth-telling really is therapeutic. “What you did to me,” he says, “it ruined my childhood, changed my personality. It altered the whole course of my life.”

“So all this is about, what, you want a fucking condolence card? What do you think Uncle Jack did to my goddamn life?”

The priest thinks, a victim, Paul. Wrap your head around it. “I’m sorry that it happened to you,” he says. “I’m sorry that we didn’t have language for it, and that they didn’t believe us, either of us, when we tried to find one. I’m really fucking sorry I didn’t try harder to stop you, although I don’t want you to think for a second that that means you’re not to blame. I’m sorry that you have confused the idea that’s it’s not all your fault for the idea that it’s not your fault, at all. And I’m sorriest of all that you’re about to turn forty years old and find it impossible to express remorse, not least because I honest to God hate to think what that means for the rage bottling up inside you… How’s that for handling the ambiguities of this world?”

The priest stands up, brushes off his trousers—more to visually demonstrate his lack of fear than because of crumbs—and heads into the house. “And yeah, I actually do want a fucking apology sometime before we both die. And I probably will reject it when it comes. And there’s nothing you can do to actually make things right between us. Go complain to a fucking shrink about it.”

He spends most of the rest of the day in his room. He’s very glad to be leaving for Ballycastle in the morning, to celebrate Rachel’s birthday, maybe meet Ollie’s boyfriend even though “it’s still so new!” and basically get out from under this roof. His brother has four full days of compassionate leave.

He loathes himself for the cowardice he shows when he locks his own bedroom door on his way to sleep that night.

There’s at least one ghost inside the bedroom, though. He knows he could have removed all the traces she’s left behind, her usual whirlwind having made up in speed for what it lacked in accuracy, but it’s all too comforting:  her mug on his bedside table, her phone charger beside his desk, her olive oil, gardenia and sweat scent on his pillow. He assumes she has left the pair of lace-trimmed blue knickers on the floor, less than half-under the bed, deliberately to torment him, though he supposes that could just be wishful thinking. He leaves them right there, as if she’s coming for them.

This room has his oldest books, the music he loved as a teenager, a bedside lamp he’s had since before he said his first words. Those knickers are the most comforting thing here. He obviously can’t be the kind of man who puts women’s undergarments under his pillow—that would be true even if he weren’t a priest—but he sees the appeal, tonight.

He is so very, extremely lost in the plot of his life.

As he falls asleep, he imagines making a list, like the ice cream comparison one that Paul taunted him with. It boils down to:

Point for, looks like I’ll love her until I die.

Point against, she’s likely to be the reason I burn in hell thereafter.

When he wakes up, it’s Thursday again, just as it had been when his dad had died a thousand years before.

In the first weeks after her return from Belfast, she expects him to return to her with a difference. She knows something irrevocable has changed. She breaks up with Nathan. She frigs herself near-blind to History’s Mysteries: The Bible. On one ridiculous occasion, she prays, on her knees even, at her own coffee table, her mother’s bare-breasted bust glaring to the extent it could, in what feels like loving revulsion.

Reverend Brian shows up at her café most Thursdays, right from the beginning. He not-so-casually leaves the parish newsletter, in which the priest’s “Dispatches from the North” column contains travelogues, reflections on mother-son relationships in the Old Testament, his usual restaurant reviews except that these cheerfully acknowledged that his parishioners could scarcely book into suburban Belfast for dinner. He gives an occasional reading recommendation.

At three weeks of no replies to her texts, she calls and realises that he's blocked her number. At six weeks, she is still—and this will humiliate her, in the months that follow—trying to ‘understand his perspective’. He is grieving, she reasons. He’d exposed an old wound in order to assuage her curiosity, hadn’t he? His dysfunctional family might have decided to listen to him. He has come to a crossroads, or perhaps has come to see that he should not have built his life at a crossroads. Perhaps this was where he realised that there was a road beyond his waystation.

One Quiet Tuesday afternoon in November, Reverend Brian comes in looking grave-faced. A trickle of mercury drips through her heart valves and burns. “Is he…?” she says, as soon as she sees his face.

Dead? In crisis? Available?

Dead?

“He’s back in town,” he says quietly. “He said I should tell you…” Reverend Brian sighs and shoves his hand in his trousers, his usual signal that he’s doing business he doesn’t fully agree with. “He needs to focus on the congregation.”

“I see,” she says faintly. It has somehow never occurred to her, before this moment, that she might actually just, never… see him again. That he had the power to withhold something she’d thought of as a bare minimum, a basic right. Like her utilities have been suddenly shut off in a blizzard. Perhaps this metaphor springs to mind because winter is coming and she feels, not that she would ever say it this way aloud to a living soul, that her heart is freezing.

She gets back together with Nathan and dumps him again the next week.

Reverend Brian returns now and then, though Thursdays stop being his pattern. He mentions the priest only when she asks after him, which she makes a point to do infrequently. She runs off to Finland at Christmas and strongly considers not coming back, but Nathan follows her in a grand gesture, declares himself at Klare’s family’s company Christmas do. She welcomes it as the substance of a normal life, something she thinks she may have the will to, finally, approximate.

Hilary dies in early February. The morning she finds her, solid, cold and still in a corner a short distance from where Stephanie is asleep on a mesclun green, she closes the café and calls all her friends and some of her family for a send-off. She goes back to the silent retreat her dad had condemned her to, with Claire, two years before. This time, she stays. She moves through a silent house teeming with women like a ghost at home in the midst of other ghosts. With no guardian angel in sight, she imagines what the world would be like if she were actually dead.

When she gets home, she has a postcard from Rachel—addressed to Hilary, so she hasn’t gotten the news, but then again, how could she have. It announces that her uncle is starting a charitable non-profit called SPEAK and mentions a UNICEF affiliation.

She grabs Tim the next time he’s in. “Yeah, I’m working with your priest on behalf of childhood victims of sexual assault,” he said. “I would’ve thought you knew. The two of you, yikes. This long silence thing is only so hot, you know. It’s mostly dull. Very Pride & Prejudice between the botched proposal at Hunsford and the chance encounter at Pemberley, if you know what I mean.”

She doesn’t, quite. “Anyway,” he adds, “he’s putting all his money—the money he inherited from his dad, you know—into it. Ask Regina about it, she’s consulting with him about turning it into even more money. Fundraising,” he says succinctly.

It turns out that if she’d seen Regina sooner, she would already have known; Nathan’s sister is bubbling over with this news, to a degree that forces her to realise that Regina is, really and truly, the one who’s in love with the priest now, the one who is torturing herself with proximity to this man whom no woman can have. “Phase one is just the beginning!” she enthuses. “That man could sell crucifixes to Catholics, couldn’t he, and after all, this is for the children.”

She is fairly sure that Catholics are in fact the only ones who buy crucifixes. But obviously, she knows what Regina means, in some ways better than Regina herself does.

She takes a meditation class. She goes to the Quaker Meeting House, about once a week. She tries three consecutive sessions of mindfulness-based yoga before she quits. In a fit of, well, of rage, she signs up for a reading group at a local-ish Catholic parish. It’s for young adults, and she barely qualifies. There’s wine. The people who go are nice, and surprisingly funny, and it’s good to read something that asks the bigger questions she seldom forces herself to articulate. She keeps going. She is finding something, but it is definitely not peace.

By and by, something happens. What had been a love story, transforms.

It becomes a saga of vengeance.

“…anyway, that’s just the initial finding, the implications are obviously huge,” Tim concludes. “And I think it tells us what we have to do.”

There are nods from the group around the table, who range in age from 17 to 79, who represent an interfaith coalition with skin in all the shades melanin has made possible. “Thus ends phase one?” the priest asks them.

It’s the weekly meeting of SPEAK, which is his father’s unlikely legacy, one the priest has built with his rusty accountancy skills using complex maneuvering that adheres both to his father’s prohibition on the money going to ‘fecking Taigs’ and the priest’s vows to eschew worldly things. With eight million pounds in play, he’s sought advice. Much of it came from people he met on what he thinks of as the last Thursday that had been a Thursday, seven months ago.

From Jonah’s partner Tim, the advice to invest in research toward implementing survivor-led therapeutic practice on a mass scale—“in other words, find out what the research says to do and why we’re not doing it”—and given this research area overlaps with his own, Tim's taken the lead. From Regina, the advice to use the initial funds to court individual and corporate donation. She has already doubled the size of the fledgling organisation’s endowment. Phase one, which they called the “R&D” phase, has been sped along by the headwinds of this collaboration, with a bit of help from the press’s coverage of his parish’s previous efforts. “Papist Against Paedophilia: Can This Priest Change Public Sentiment?” ran one rag’s offensively effective take.

The next stage is a retreat to develop a mission and plan for stage two, the “pilot” phase, and he has no idea how he’s going to fit several days away into his jam-packed schedule. He has very clear direction from the bishop that this work needs to complement, not subsume, his fundamental mission of serving the parish, and it has been hard advice to follow on top of the time his personal crisis has taken.

Still: SPEAK did get dispensation from the diocese to meet here in the church’s adult study room, at least for now while they have no permanent staff. Because this room is also where grooms dress and prepare for weddings, the room smells faintly of cigars.

He loves this space. He hopes that soon, he will miss it.

Now, he leads their board in a round of applause for one another. It’s late, but as long as no parishioners call from the hospital tonight, he has only one appointment left. It’s his semimonthly massage, which he gets from a young woman named Kasia who has a daunting list of certifications on her business card, and an agreeably impersonable demeanor; no need for chitchat. Since his father died, he’s realised he needs a way of staving off the various psychological maladies that attend touch-deprivation.

“Off for your massage, Father?” Regina asks him as he’s packing up. A bit nerve-wracking, that; she asks every time. She’s obviously titillated by the idea of him being fondled, and he deeply wishes he’d never mentioned it. 

“Soon enough,” he says, holding up a short stack of manila folders that he’s carried with him. “I’ve a bit of parish paperwork to see to. I aim to finish it now, so I can leave from here instead of hiking all the way back to my office in the annex.”

Regina takes the hint, something at which she does not excel. He’s grateful. He hasn’t cleared his desk since before he went into a brief seclusion at Garner Abbey over much of January. He feels he’s spent a full half of a year standing at a crossroads. This morning, Reverend Brian had handed him a folder lettered “TODAY”. Brian will be here soon for the parish’s young adult reading group—Brian’s good idea to read more widely than the Bible study group that he himself leads. How Brian, who is 58, qualifies to lead a young adult reading group, he has no idea, but a fucking lot of things happen when you leave your parish for five months to lose your mind over your father, your vocation, and A Woman.

Anyway, it’s fine. This way, he can hand off this paperwork directly.

In between officially recording baptisms, approving the church newsletter (did this really need his hand?), and co-signing a thick stack of mold remediation contract papers sent to him by the diocese’s financial officer, he thinks he hears… her. Speaking in that tone of hers that’s so thick with laughter, her tongue so deep in her cheek, it’s shocking words can emerge from it at all. But of course, it can’t be.

Brian himself appears in the doorway a moment later. “Er, begging your pardon, Father, but it’s time for the book group.”

“Ah, so it is,” he says. “You’ll need the room, of course. And what are we reading tonight?”

And then the woman he’d thought he was imagining slips in, and he takes an involuntary step toward her. “Hello, Father.” She waves her copy of a book, and he sees the title: Magic and Mystery in a Secular Moment. “It’s about the fit of the Catholic faith into the modern world. No owl dropping an envelope at your door, like I expected, but it’s a good read. And scarcely a whiff of transphobia.”

“You’re… what are you doing… here?” His voice is faint. If he’s honest, he feels a bit faint. He had expected to see her, ideally, tomorrow, at her cafe. The universe feels suddenly askew.

Brian clears his throat. “I believe if you were to get all the way to the bottom of that stack of folders in your hands, as I asked you to a week ago, you’d find one of them is labeled ‘new member forms’ and that they’re waiting for your signature, Father.”

His eyes dart back and forth between Brian and… his parish’s newest member? So assiduous is he that he barely registers the interested looks of the coterie of the twenty-somethings filing in behind her and arraying around the table. “Hi, hello,” he manages to nod in their general direction. “I banned you from this church,” he tells her.

One of the other women in the room, an impressionable recent convert who’s blonde, and definitely has a name, and why can’t he think of it right now, audibly gasps, at that. “What do you have to do to get banned?”

Before he can give his version of the truth, she smiles and shocks him by volunteering her own. “I fell in love with him,” she says unhesitatingly. He understands in that moment that he has made a grave mistake in leaving her alone all this time. “It was a long time ago.” And then she turns back to him, and the smile isn’t in her eyes, and something about it makes his heart beat falsely. “You don’t have the power to ban me from this church. We did a whole reading on excommunication. There’s a canonical process. It involves the bishop. And canon law doesn’t cover… our situation.”

He feels besieged, unanchored, panicked… free? He starts rifling through the papers to give his hands a job.

“There’s a bit more paperwork with her membership form,” Brian says, “but you may want to wait until you're…”

He quirks an eyebrow, then flips the pages. “Delegation of priestly authority to perform the sacrament of marriage, on behalf of…”

Fuck me. It is a punch in the stomach. He feels it through his intestines to his spine and right down to his pelvic floor.

The oak and slag pendant light in the center of the ceiling chooses that moment to crash to the floor, taking some of the ceiling plaster with it.

Or rather, as he instantly apprehends, God chooses the moment. He throws his head back and laughs.

Brian, and one of the more competent-looking twenty-four-year-olds, moves quickly, the former dispatching the latter to find a broom and the fuse box. “I’ll get the electrician in,” Brian says, and, given that there are exposed wires protruding, belatedly switches off the light, so the weak rays of the late evening are all that remains to light this moment.

The priest shakes his head. “I’ll call the electrician myself. You all should move into fellowship hall in the annex.” He turns to the woman he has very definitely left alone far too long. “You’re getting married.”

“Yeah.” She looks a little terrified, whether at the sign from God, his insane reaction, or something else. “Nathan proposed at Christmas.”

“And you want to get married at my—at St. Ethelred’s.”

“I want Reverend Brian,” she says, “the man who comes to my café every week, and never stopped, and who chats with me about the news and what music he’s been listening to and what the core idea underlying the concept of ‘transgression’ is and whether the entire universe’s inevitable eventual collapse has anything to do with God, to perform my wedding. Hence the piece of paper in your hand, requesting that you delegate the marriage power to him. Pretend you’re busy that day.”

“And the day is…?”

“We really need to get started with our reading group,” Brian cuts in, “so you two will have to catch up later… which I strongly urge you to do. For now, we’ll move into the high school classroom and channel our teenage rebellious vibes.” He claps the priest on the shoulder. “Give my best to Kasia.”

“Kasia?” the bride-to-be asks him.

“Oh, fuck, Kasia!” He grabs his messenger bag and shoves the folders in. “I’ll be in touch,” he tells her, “count on it.”

“I wouldn’t dream of counting on that, Father.”

“And I haven’t forgotten about the electrician,” he assures Brian, shoving his abandoned paperwork into the man’s hands.

He can’t say that he feels calm. He feels, well, he feels a bit like he’s been electrocuted.

But now that he also knows God is watching, a deep calm is descending over him.

He reminds himself that this was never going to go according to plan.

At a quarter to six on the next Monday evening, when her phone lets out the peal of tower bells she associated with his number shortly before she carved it with a pocketknife into the bus stop where he first abandoned her, she is oddly unsurprised.

Still, she feints. “Oh, hullo, who’s this?”

“Hi, are you free tonight?” he says abruptly.

The sarcasm layers itself on; she doesn’t choose it. “Oh, well, how’ve you been this last, what’s it been—”

He’s not having it. “Listen, I’m barely out of my last meeting, I have evening mass in a few minutes and I’m not dressed for it. Afterwards, I’ll be very hungry. Are you free for dinner?”

She weighs readiness, priorities, obligations. Might this be what she has wanted? “Fine,” she says slowly. Still, she’s not inviting him to her flat. “There’s a place near me called Al & Gracie’s…”

“I’ll find it.” They arrange a time. She doesn’t ask any other questions. “Can’t wait,” he says.

“It’s been the better part of a year,” she says reflexively, not sure whether he’s hung up, wanting only to point that he obviously could and did wait.

It’s been less than a week since they saw each other at church.

But, “Yeah. I know,” he says.

He gets there first; she makes sure of it. She clocks his collar from the doorway. It gleams in the low orange light of the pub. The sight snags on something thorny within her.

He watches her cross the room, and he keeps his eyes on her as she sets down her purse and slides into a chair. He is, she thinks, drinking her in.

How does he dare, she thinks.

“How are you?” he asks.

Her eyebrows respond on her behalf.

“Right. Well, it probably is better if I do most of the talking,” he says, and sounds… amused? “It’s taken a long time, contrary to the idiomatic sense of the word, but, I’ve had a revelation. Thanks to you."

“Wonderful,” she says. “Glad to help.” She takes a sip of her water. “Can’t wait,” she adds.

“Before that, obviously, a lot of apologies from me, you’ll want to bespeak some of your totally rightful fury, and I’ll start brainstorming some alternate ideas of how you can punish me, because I’m not altogether fond of your current strategy, with the white dress and the rings and so on.”

This, of course, is when the waitress arrives.

“Could I get the ahi tuna sandwich, seared rare, extra mayonnaise?” she hears him say, at which point something hardens in her chest, like a pool of water into a marble of ice. Nothing in me is afraid of you. “Just a decaf coffee,” she says.

You fucking arsehole, she thinks.

He looks her over and makes another judgment. “Add a cheeseboard, would you please, the one with the plums?” he smiles at the waitress, who looks as if she has never before smiled but smiles back, because this is how he moves through the world. “And two glasses of the house white.”

She opens her mouth to object, but he just holds up his hand and says, “Eh. You can throw it in my face, if you want.”

The waitress takes her flat-eyed stare as agreement and backs away. “So you’ve had a revelation. Let’s hear it.”

“Wonderful. I’d like to leave the priesthood to be with you. To be clear, my intentions are honourable, and also very, very dishonourable.”

She blinks.

Looks down, as decaf coffee and a white wine slide into place in front of her.

Looks up.

Blinks again.

She feels like she can’t quite breathe.

“You told me your superpower origin story, read me a bedtime story, and sent me across the water. Seven months ago.”

“I had a number of things to work through,” he says gently.

“You came back. To London. In fucking November! And you didn’t come to see me. Reverend Brian came to the café with a look on his face so dire that I asked him if you were fucking dead. After he explained that you weren’t, I got the picture. Pretty shit thing to do even to an acquaintance, and I thought we were…”

They both understand that the end of that sentence, if uttered, would have been a confession. When she won’t finish it, he nods slowly.

“I’m very sorry. I spent the weeks after Dad died in prayer and contemplation, but honestly I was just… numb. Something about seeing the ashes… they gave them to us in this container that was sort of like Pyrex, and we transferred it to the cemetery after the headstone was unveiled, and I…” he sighs. “I couldn’t believe that that was someone’s life.”

“I thought believing in a ‘something wonderful’ afterlife was your sure cure for existential terror. Anyway, I’m guessing your sunny outlook eventually won the day.”

“No. It didn’t. I checked into an addiction recovery center for clergy. And spent a long time meditating on my… longing. For you.” He clears his throat, not allowing the words time to hover in her ears. “And did you hear about SPEAK?”

“From many, many sources. You were very present in your absence, Father.”

“As were you. In here, anyway,” he touches his temple. “I decided, and I know what a fucking bastard this makes me, to let you go. Not that you were mine to… well. I crawled into bed beside you in Belfast, again and again, and I knew what I was doing, what I was asking both of us to bear. Like standing in the doorway of a life and staring in but not stepping through. I was sure I was fucking you up after you worked so hard to get unfucked-up. And on the other hand afraid I was going to go to hell, you know… literal hell. I started drinking about it, and that fucked me up more. Hence, rehab. After all that… I thought I’d resigned myself to life after you. It’s just that this winter, I kept thinking about something. One of my econ courses at uni a million years ago, there was a day on negotiation tactics. And the thing that really stuck with me is, did you know that statistically the majority of people leave negotiations without ever saying what they actually want? They make a guess about what they can get or should get, and they ask for that. Or they take or leave the other person’s offer.”

“Women more than men, no doubt.”

“No doubt. But honestly I think we’ve both been guilty of it, partly because we started out with no fucking idea what we wanted. Actually, me much more than you. And then, I heard you’d lost Hilary. Tim told me, said you were cut up and pretending you were fine. And I felt like all the work I put in getting over my, er, ‘existential terror' and figuring out what I wanted and how to deal with dad’s legacy and where the solid ground of my life was…” He swallows. “I went to the bishop, told him that I was going to pursue a chance with a woman. He asked if I wanted a penance just for the thought. I politely refused and said that I intended to tow the line on the behavioural part of my vows but my conscience had resolved itself. I told him Plan A was to get a chance with you, and Plan B was… to stay where I am. It felt very above-board, like I was asking my own father for my hand in…” He clearly does not want to say the word ‘marriage’ as he glances at the gleam on her own left hand. “And then I saw you about eighteen hours later at the book group. And… look. I want us to each have our best lives. And I think our best bet is together. If you think otherwise, I’m prepared to settle for service to an omnipotent power. Though I didn’t say it in quite those words to Bishop Hughes. And he emphasised that I’m very lucky there’s a global shortage of priests.”

She drains her wine and gestures for a refill. “You know, I told my therapist about you a few months ago.”

“You hadn’t… told your therapist about me?” His tone makes it clear that he’s confused, now, about what her therapy could possibly have been about, and this infuriates her all over again.

“And then, I fucking got on with it. I paid off the rest of the mortgage on the café and hired another person, full-time. I have time for hobbies. Jonah and Tim got me a new guinea pig last week, by the way, his name is Lorrie and he and Stephanie are fast friends, meaning indifferent cohabitants. I am… I am…” She sighs, wiggles the diamond on her left hand that’s still new enough to feel conspicuous even to her. “You know the rest, it’s why we’re here. I’m making a life. You have no right to interfere.”

“No.”

“How did you come to the conclusion that you want to leave the priesthood for me, without seeing me for…” She gestures, as if the time is spread out all around the heaping plates and glasses the waitress has slid between them.

“Why do you think I’ve stayed away? I took very serious vows, vows of obedience, and I took them—take them—very seriously. And given all that, it’s been hard to trust that any of this between us was totally… real. Surely you’ve noticed that my vocation has tended to sort of electrify every moment between us? So I thought, she’s just very much in need of belonging, and very much afraid of death, it’s not about me, it’s the fucking Church. The inherent sexiness of immortality sort of creeps up on you. So I sent you back to your boyfriend last summer. I told myself that if I took this collar off and showed up at your café that I’d just be a thirsty do-gooder with an awkward sense of humour, a boatload of sexual hang-ups, whom you wished was a bit taller and you’d be horrified to find out, actually believes in God.”

“Wow.” She is cut, perhaps—yes. To the bone. “Wow. You think I’m… I mean, who would’ve thought one woman could be so thick and so shallow at the same time. It really ought to defy physics.”

“It’s what I thought of myself. It just sort of spilled onto you.”

She reaches, not totally consciously, for the cheese plate, and signals for him to go on.

“It meant a lot to me—no, it meant everything to me, that you came back to me last year, that you dropped everything and came home with me. It fucking killed me to see you texting your boyfriend at the margins of all of it. And I thought about what it all meant to you. You were getting tangled up in all my contradictions, and, frankly, my sins. You could feel how wrong it all was, surely?”

“So you sent Reverend Brian to tell me we were never talking again, like we were thirteen. It was fucking cruel. Crueler than the previous time, when by the way you did very close to the same fucking thing, leaving me to board a number 9 eastward with mascara down my cheeks.”

“It was horrible. But I had a hope that clean breaks would heal… No.” He looks down at his still-untouched sandwich. “The truth is, I was a coward. I didn’t know which way I would break, and I didn’t want you to see me broken.”

His eyes stray again, as they have occasionally all along, to the ring on her left hand, which she slides now, back and forth, across the wooden surface of the table. “You knew we were engaged, surely? Regina, or Tim—they would have told you?”

“No. No one… told me. Tim told me I fucked up six months ago and has scarcely said your name to me since. Regina, well, that’s a whole other kettle of fish, isn’t it. I think she, er, she senses the live wire between us and would rather not trip over it.”

“Perhaps they both simply understand that I’ve moved on.”

“No.” The clap and finality in that word calls to her mind the same baritonic voice commanding, Kneel. “Moving on would have been getting married at the registry office, like Reverend Brian tells me you originally intended to do.”

"Regina talked their dad into the Coburg Conservatory. Something about the photographic opportunities. And then they had a flood,” she protests. “Those storms last month, you know. Blew a whole wall of windows off. We lost our deposit, and--"

“But approaching my deacon, asking him to get dispensation from me to marry you, in my church, is not moving on. It’s a shot across the bow. It’s a blinking neon sign that you haven’t moved on. And it tells me, vividly, that I don’t have to, either. Prayers are answered in all kinds of ways. You think I don’t know an answer when I fucking see one? You and God are collaborating, as He and humans often do. I have been saying my hosannas.”

She shakes her head, as if to clear it. “I asked Reverend Brian to do it. Marry us, I mean. Not you. I assumed you wouldn’t be there. I haven’t seen you in a long fucking time,” she insists.

“You want,” he enunciates clearly, “to steal my sanctuary. Literally. So that after your wedding, every time I rise for the breviary, every mass, baptism, sacrament, every time I aid a volunteer group in dusting the pews, I’ll think of you, being married, to another man, right there. You want to punish me.”

She squints, annoyed to hear intentions she hasn’t even articulated to herself expressed in a way that makes her sound like such a calculating bitch. “Oh, but I thought you were leaving the priesthood for me.”

“I want to be perfectly clear, so listen up, my beloved. I will leave the priesthood—for you, and only for you. Not because I hate my work, not for a cause, not because my friends, not for the abstract hope of the love of some woman or a ‘family life’. For you, if you tell me you want the same. That’s all we get in life, usually. Definite choices, A or B, in or out, stay or go.”

“But you’ll keep ‘B’ as your safety net.”

“Well. Remember that I’m also quite good at maths. And it seems to me that you’ve created a situation in which my collar suddenly has extreme and definite benefits in a high-stakes negotiation between the two of us, doesn’t it? Apparently you want me to have the power to stop your wedding, and you’ve given it to me, so yes, I believe I’ll be… investigating that. All this, by the way,” he pops another roasted plum onto a cracker and into his mouth and lets her watch while he chews and swallows, “is the tip of the iceberg of what I have desperately wanted to say to you. What about you? Aren’t you sick of leaving so much unsaid?”

“I don’t do that anymore.”

“Sure, you don’t…” His eyes are dancing, and is he honestly laughing at them both, now? What he says is, “Do you want half of my sandwich?”

“…Yes.” She takes his plate and chews it a bit balefully. “I have you sorted,” she says, her mouth mostly but not entirely empty of food. She dabs her mouth with a napkin. “You were a transition, a way in which I made a change in my life. You were a symbol of… something. You were a means to an end.”

“Sorry to return as a fully real person who happens to understand you, and love you, and want to spend my life with you,” he says, and he truly does sound sorry, damn him. “And truly sorry that I needed a sign from you to know how to answer my own prayers. And sorriest of all, truly, that I stayed away so long. I had to wade through a very deep darkness, and I believed I’d be missing you all my life nearly the whole time I was doing it. Please say that you can understand some of that.”

“I don’t think I…” She doesn’t know how her own sentence ends. Does she not believe him, or does she not feel the way he does? Is her heart racing because the idea of him wanting her is thrilling, or because she’s climbing something steeper than a thrill?

“Say the quiet part. Please,” he says softly. “You keep going away again, like in the old days. Where are you, now?”

“I need to think,” she says finally. He looks disappointed, but nods.

“OK, then. You should know that I’ve refused to delegate my authority to Brian, meaning that if you’re going to get married at my church, you’ll have to go through, well, me.” He lets a half smile come to his mouth, improbably, at that, which she understands when he says, “Which means, well. It means I’ll marry you one way or the other.”

It’s a sign of how disenchanted she is that she doesn’t let her gasp clear her throat, at that.

“In the meantime—unless you’re calling off this farce of a wedding sooner rather than later, which would be sensible…?”

She shakes her head with an emphatic no.

“You’ll want to bring your fiance and your wedding planner in for a tour, most couples do. And you need to schedule the Pre-Cana. Only six months in our parish.”

“The…?”

“Did you not ask any fucking questions when you came up with this terrible scheme? You are required to get marital counseling from the parish priest to get married in a Catholic church. An hour a week, in my office. I can’t wait to hear all about your and Nathan’s division of household chores.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“He will come up rather a lot, not least in the ceremony itself.” He gives her a long, searching look. “I wish you’d decided to try to get married at my church a few months sooner,” he tells her. “It really is quite clarifying, albeit utterly mad. Has all the hallmarks of the woman whose terrible idea it was. May I walk you home? Say yes, and I’ll tell you what the archbishop of Westminster has had to say about this crossroads, where you choose how my life forks. Spoiler, it’s virtually Chaucerian.”

“I have to pass,” she says. “I’m meeting Nathan at his place. Our place,” she corrects herself.

He regards her steadily. “I’ll see you for the tour, then,” he says.

She mentally reviews her calendar. “I do want to punish you,” she says slowly.

He almost beams, at that, and she wonders why he thinks she’s the mad one. “You could just trust me, instead.”

“Oh, God, no,” she replies.

He three-quarters expects that, now that they’ve broken the wall of ice—that is, now that she knows how badly she can hurt him—she’ll call off the plan to marry at St. Ethelred’s, even if she isn’t ready yet to call off the wedding itself.

She does not. Instead, she arranges with Pam to take a tour of the premises with Nathan and mentions that they’ll be bringing their wedding coordinator and some friends who are temporarily in town, some but not all of the members of their wedding party. Normally, a walk-through of this sort would be Pam’s responsibility, but he slides it into his own schedule and explains the bride is an old friend, at which Pam had given him her trademark doubtful grimace.

The priest decides to sit on the front steps of the church to wait for the would-be bride and groom. He has always imagined the soul as a coloured gem in the core; he imagines his is pulsing with wild energy, with lightning bolts of life. He’s seen the woman he loves looking with interest at his forearms as recently as a week before, so he smiles to himself and unbuttons his clerical shirt at the cuffs and shoves up the sleeves.

He hadn’t known what fighting for her would look like, and he's a bit shocked at how ready he is.

They are exactly, precisely on time, and that is how he knows she is not the one in charge. He’s never yet seen her show up more than ten or fewer than five minutes late.

“Full house, I see,” he says, eying the assembled crew. He smiles through introductions—there’s Regina, of course, who will serve as 'best man'. Two of Nathan’s college buddies who will be ushers, functionally interchangeable finance guys with the same close haircut and casual polos. One is Nathan and Reg’s brother Gregory, whom he would mistake for the finance guys if not for the family resemblance. The wedding planner, Elvie, who is oddly ethereal as she walks about making continual smiling definite judgments about the cottage-core quaintness of the baptismal font and the masculine evocations of the exposed beams in the nave, somehow reminds him of some of his least favorite brothers at seminary, the ones with a bit too much contempt for earthly things.

“Elvie practically grew up at our house,” Regina explains, adding with neither irony nor shame, “as her mum was our beloved nanny. She’s a programming officer for BBC2, so we’re really lucky she’s moonlighting to help these two with their wedding, small potatoes for her. Oh, and I consider her my best friend in the world.” Elvie seems to know them all from before—the finance guys flank her on either side, and her tinkerbell laughter rings between them as they walk through the narthex.

The summer light is doing its work through the stained glass, today. The mood of the party is serious with a tinge of joy. Glory to God in the highest, he thinks.

“Let me walk you through the other buildings,” he says, and he hears the fondness in his own tone. Should he modulate it, for her? She’s not in doubt that this is a life he likes, a place he admires. Should he remind her of what he’ll gladly give up when she says the proverbial word? “I’ll start in the annex, shall I? The bride and groom use classrooms there to dress and get ready….”

They walk across the west portico to the annex, where together they’d baked a set of cookies a long year before, on a night when he’d seen a “Sexy Schoolteacher” pop up on her phone. Nathan hangs back with his friends, who are brushing off secondary school Latin to read the writing carved on the walls. “I take it that told your therapist about me,” he says to her quietly, “but not your fiance?”

“When you didn’t come back… I told him that I was just getting out of a relationship with a married man,” she said. “It was… true enough.”

“So it was,” he says, finding no difficulty either in generosity with the truth nor with this woman’s idea of it.

The annex is simple—rooms with child-sized chairs and drawings of arks; the kitchen and its catering entrance, the reception hall and its homey charms, or, as Elvie puts it, “Father, would your parish be willing to allow us to coordinate and pay for repainting the walls in a more modern shade of white?” and “Is there anywhere where the parish’s chairs and tables could be hidden, since we’ll certainly be bringing in our own?”

The bride doesn't blink when he shows them the taped-off exposed attic over the ceiling of the adult study room, waiting on a contractor to finish restoring the pendant light. 

Nathan whistles. "What happened here?"

"Act of God," he smiles.

When they return to the church, the priest walks with Nathan up the aisle, just a little tightness in his chest as he’s doing it. God willing, this event they are planning will never come to pass, and he repeats that little prayer a half dozen times. He has a jealous nature and a vivid imagination that does not need to be excited by prefiguring an impossibility. “Are you baptised?” he asks him, in a voice just a little too low to be professional. “Only, it, er, has consequences for the particular form of the ceremony. There are rules for when a Catholic such as your fiancee,” here he looks away and up at the ceiling to try to hide his eye roll in brief communion with God, “marries different sorts of non-Catholics.”

He turns to his sister. “Reg, were we baptised?”

“Yes,” she smiles wistfully, “C of E, of course. Mum loved a photo op.”

“That she did,” Nathan agrees.

“Father, I’ve done some reading about how you’ve modernised your ministry within traditional constraints here,” Elvie begins, “and I have a set of questions about the ceremony itself. The traditional order has certain redundancies—”

“Wait just a moment.” The bride puts her hand on her fiance’s arm. “Elvie, we haven’t yet discussed this. Nathan and I. We haven’t talked about our preferences. For our wedding.”

Of course they haven’t. She would be avoiding that at all costs. Sometimes it feels like God is giving him a high-five.

“Surely it would help to know whether or not you’ll have to have a full wedding mass?” Elvie says innocently.

“It’s just information-gathering,” Regina chimes in.

Nathan just smiles at his fiancee encouragingly and looks at the priest.

“We’ll discuss it at your first counseling session,” he says, “among the three of us.”

Elvie smiles as though this is exactly to her liking, and moves to run a finger along the base of a painting on the wall near the confessional. “Best leave those be,” he says. She looks at him as if he’s saying something very funny and continues exactly as before.

He’s very glad that his relationship with Pam is already a bit strained, and hopefully has very little time left ahead in it, when he gives Elvie the parish’s administrative number to begin working on paint colors and what she describes as “a little light artisan masonry, but it’ll make such a difference.”

He goes to Hilary’s that Thursday, though he truly doesn’t have time for it. She ignores him, down to refusing to take his order. He sits in a corner on his phone, answering SPEAK email and texting with a parishioner recovering from knee replacement surgery.

She doesn’t tell him to leave.

The first marriage counseling session in the priest’s office sets the tone, she thinks. He is obnoxiously warm, and how does Nathan not notice that he’s virtually doing a pantomime of being unthreatened? Oh, right; Nathan has no reason to imagine that the parish priest could be threatened by their relationship.

The priest offers them whiskey on ice and explains the origins of “Pre-Cana” counseling in the biblical story of Jesus turning water to wine at a wedding in Galilee, something he’d apparently done to pacify his irritated mother, and he frowns at her with laughter in his eyes when she jokes that at least she and Nathan don’t have to worry about that, because both of their mothers are dead.

“How’s rehab going?” she asks pointedly, when he pulls block ice out of a freezer in the corner of his office and clinks it into tumblers.

“Oh, it turned out my problems were in my heart and not my liver.”

Still, she notices he only sips about half his glass as he and Nathan regale each other with their best anecdotes, mainly stories about things kids have said to them in the course of their jobs; and their mutual poor relationships with wealthy parents whose expectations they’d thwarted; and when it turns out that they both occasionally dabble in racquetball at the same gym, she cuts them off.

“Is this why we had to review confidentiality and clergy-penitent privilege, Father? So that we knew you wouldn’t repeat the story of the time little Ian told Nathan he didn’t have to take the spelling test because he wasn’t 'licensed to teach witchcraft'?”

“I didn’t tell that one yet!” Nathan protests.

“No,” the priest says, “of course not. But I find it does help to have a solid basis for conversation, since we’ll be talking about rather serious topics. For instance, what does marriage mean to you? Why get married at all, in the twenty-first century?”

The clink of ice on the wall of Nathan’s glass is suddenly hugely audible.

“I think it means…” Nathan frowns. He has a Boy Scout soul, and she can see that he’s going to approach this assignment with fucking honesty and diligence. And so who exactly is she punishing, here? “It means continuity, the ability to plan a life. It means people around you have to respect the relationship no matter what they—no matter what. It means…” he looks at her, then his eyes dart away. “It means you’re in it, in the relationship, and it’s fucking hard to get out. And it’s good that it’s hard.”

“Same,” she echoes quickly. She takes a slow sip of her drink and meets the priest’s eyes squarely while Nathan squeezes her hand and brushes a finger over the diamond he put there.

The priest takes her dare. “I asked each of you, in the inventory you filled out, to express how you hoped to help the other grow within marriage. I will never share with either of you the other’s answers, but I wonder if either of you feels comfortable answering the question now.”

She winces. She believes she answered that question rather… carnally. Something like, he could shrink and still be a big enough man for me. Poetry, perhaps not; her pen had been a blunt weapon.

“I hope to help you grow into a healthier relationship with your family,” she says now.

Nathan frowns. “What does that mean?”

Fuck, she had thought this was safe territory. “Well, just, you know, you’re always saying that you wished Regina were a little less dependent on you, and that you weren’t so…” She quickly sees she’ll lose points in her game with the priest if she finishes the sentence by saying ‘obsessed with your shit dad’s approval’ so she pivots. “Weren’t, er, hearing so many opinions from your dad.”

He ignores the second part, as avoiding talking or even thinking about his dad is Nathan’s longstanding habit. “I know what you think about Reg,” he says instead. “Father, you and Regina are good friends. Tell her Regina means well.”

The priest raises one eyebrow. “Do you think Regina means… harm?” he asks her.

She does not want to rehash this particular grievance in front of him. “I think she sees me as representing a threat to their, um, twin bond,” is all she says. She actually thinks that Regina might start gradually poisoning her morning coffee, which she pops by to Nathan’s for unannounced far too often, if she ever repeats her suggestion of replacing Nathan’s flatware with something more colourful.

“Reg is loyal,” he says, “and sure, she’s always going to be on my side. But isn’t Claire on yours? Isn’t that natural?”

She has too many competing goals to excel at strategy. So, like an idiot, she simply says what she actually believes. “Claire is on my side, sure. Regina is more… in your side. Constantly.”

“You said that our closeness was a bonus,” he says. Fuck. Nathan actually looks hurt. “You said that my devotion to someone who can be, er, a little difficult, told me you could trust me.”

“It does,” she says, glad for an opportunity to speak to both of them. “I admire that you make her a priority, and you know that I admire your constancy. Your, um, well, your… good character. I’m not sure I’ve met a man more capable of showing up, again and again. I’ve certainly known a lot who found it very easy to run away.”

Nathan squeezes her hand again, gratefully. She deliberately doesn’t look at the priest, because checking on his reaction would undermine her point. “But,” she adds, “I do wish Regina wouldn’t treat me as if I’m sort of… perennially caught nodding off during the corporate luncheon where she gives her daily rundown on teams and milestones?” This is borrowing some language from the way the Clares talk to each other. She thinks.

He just laughs. “That’s Regina, alright. Is she like that with SPEAK, Father?”

The priest is scribbling onto the paper in front of him on his desk, and looks up ruefully. “With Regina, everyone is an hour late to a half hour performance and also forgot to RSVP when she reminded us, and then she’s a little sad and nervous to have to explain how we’ve failed her. Again.”

Nathan laughs harder. He really does love his sister unconditionally, she thinks, and she feels a streak of deep fondness for him, roughly commensurate to the opposite feeling she harbours for Regina.

“Nathan, do you have any reservations about joining into another family than your own?” the priest asks.

“Particularly one where your in-laws are fonder of you than they are of their blood relation,” she adds, trying for a fond laugh of her own and possibly almost succeeding.

“Your parents are very sweet,” he says easily. The priest notices her wince at this way of framing her godmother, because of course he does, and Nathan obviously does not. She tries to remind herself that this sunny obliviousness is the widest part of her fiance’s charm, even if it’s not terribly deep. “If I’m honest,” he continues, “it’s Klare’s family that bothers me a bit. Obviously, I don’t mind that you’ve had a sexual history—begging your pardon, Father.” The priest leans back in his chair, now, fascination in the tilt of his head. He waves a hand for Nathan to continue. “There was a while when I was positively tripping over her ex-lovers. Your attorney, fine. Your upstairs neighbor, well, at least he eventually moved out. The grocery delivery guy?”

The priest taps his pen on the page in front of him. “Really, what—James?” he says, and how does Nathan not hear his tone?

“James has dropoffs at the café four days a week, more of a friend, really,” she protests, to both of them.

“But Rami is a bit of a problem.” He turns to the priest. “Rami is Klare’s—”

“Oh, I know Rami.”

“Wow. The two of you really were thick as thieves, eh? So then what’s your take, Father? Whilst we’re on the subject of what the kids are calling boundaries. With our families.”

“No, I think we’re on two subjects at once.” The priest contemplates for a long moment spent looking at the space between the two of them, weighing his next words. When he looks up, it’s at her. “We’re talking simultaneously about intimacy and about sex, as we often do." She has a brief flashback to a thunderstruck moment on her therapist's couch a year before. "We all know they’re not the same and sometimes have nothing to do with each other, but the body’s knowledges confuse us. And when we say that the marriage sacrament joins two people as one flesh, we mean both at once—a carnal and an emotional union that achieves transcendence through giving us higher purposes than we have alone—to care for each other’s needs and wants, to know what it means to do that over time, and maybe to make new life, together. But. You two are talking about situations where you have, or have had, one or the other—fucking, or caring, basically—beyond the marriage.”

Nathan is literally leaning forward with his chin on his hand, and why does everything about him have to be so appreciative, and earnest, and reputable. “Father, you really have a way with words.”

“It’s… a calling,” he says, reluctantly. “A vocation,” he corrects himself, darting a glance at her. She grits her teeth.

“Anyway,” the priest continues, “the marital union brings you into relation with all of your partner’s intimate, social, and sexual relationships, like bringing together two solar systems into one galaxy. One of the things that pre-marital counseling does is ask you to think beyond your own stars. Do you have planets on collision courses? Where are the black holes?” He shakes his head. “So you asked what I think about Rami. I will tell you frankly, I… don’t. He’s not a planet, not even a moon. If I were a… sun, I’d think he were about as consequential as an astronaut on a doomed mission to the outer reaches.”

She has no idea why she has to wipe something out of the corner of her fucking eye, at that. It does, at least, feed her fury.

“But it matters, I suppose, what you think, Nathan,” the priest says softly.

“I think…” Nathan sighs. “I’ll think about it.”

She knows what Nathan thinks, which is that she would have fucked Rami again in Finland three months ago if he hadn’t raced after her, after that latest breakup, and had arrived at Klare’s family’s Christmas party ninety minutes later. He might even be right. She has bad habits. It’s just that Rami is somewhat incidental to them.

“Before we meet next week,” the priest stands and sweeps away their glasses onto a small tray on an occasional table, “to talk about the far easier and less fraught subject of home finances—so, money, and every fucking thing that goes with it—you might take this first conversation as a reason to start dwelling a bit on how you understand the balance of power in your coming marriage. What do you want to control in your partner’s life? In what ways would you rather… be controlled? Why?” He shrugs, almost negligently, as if the answers to those questions are a matter of indifference to him.

Or, as if he suspects he already knows their answers. She feels suddenly as if the priest is putting on a play about her life, and she’s merely a costumed character in it. She has no idea how she avoids shuddering.

“And I’ll see you before that, on Thursday!” he calls after her, and she wants to say, “I’ll see you in hell!” but settles for, “We’ll see!”

“Oh, are you two doing Thursdays again? That’s nice.” Nathan slings one arm around her while he calls up Uber with the other. “I’m glad he’s got himself sorted enough that he found time for socialising again. And I’m glad we’re doing this,” he adds, tilting his head back in the direction of the church. “I think it’ll be good for our marriage.”

“Me, too,” she says, resentment surging up inside her like magma. “Definitely.”

This Thursday, she decides that she’s going to stay in the back and “do the books.” Her employee, Edith, who is her ex-bank managers’s ex-wife and current lover, knows this to be a lie; Oliver is the one who actually does it. Edith obviously understands this is a ruse, but the magic of Edith—the one that got Oliver into so much trouble—is that she doesn’t ask any questions, at all, ever.

From her tiny back office, she hears him come in. She listens despite herself, though she can’t catch any words, only tones. He speaks, amiably, to Edith, to Slender Permanent. Jonah says something monosyllabic and unwelcoming—dear Jonah, she would have loved to have him officiate her wedding.

And then he… monologues? Is he giving a sermon? There seem to be lulls, but lulls that no one fills. Is he actually pausing for emphasis?

When she stomps out to call curtains on his one-man show, she finds something else altogether. He is standing around the corner of her dining area, leaning against the wall, using her phone. When he sees her, his face brightens, and he holds up one finger to ask for a moment. She has a difficult time not gesturing back with two.

“…so glad to hear it, Shelley. Yes, Monday for tea. OK, see you then.” He hangs up. “Hi. I was worried you forgot about our date.”

“Funny, I thought the same thing last September, October, November, and December. And it’s not a fucking date. What are you doing on my phone?”

“Just making some calls. I have a bit of a hectic schedule at the moment, between my backlog, SPEAK, parish business. And lots to wrap up, before, you know.”

“Before the Catholic church has a going out of business sale and you’re evicted?”

“Before you’re ready for me to come to you, as a man, without this,” he gestures at his work uniform, “which I suppose will be on or before September 30th. Clock’s ticking.”

Her wedding day is October 1st. It is circled on the calendar on the wall beside him, and she has drawn a heart there. She flips to October now, to show him, and finds that he has written, in tiny letters, “Please Don’t Wait Until Now To Make A Decision Day” inside the heart. She scowls.

“So what do you really think of Regina?” she says.

He keeps up, because he fucking always keeps up.

“Hmm. Let’s see. Like you, she’s a volatile mixture of moxy and raw terror. But I think you probably don’t like her because she doesn’t have much practice breaking rules, and because you are a little ashamed of how you can’t stop breaking them.” He shakes his head and plays the game. “What does your dad think of Nathan?”

“Oh, he’s happy, very happy, downright thrilled, I’d say, that someone so rich and competent is going to be worrying about me.”

“And Claire?”

This is a question she doesn’t let herself ask. “No idea,” she says briefly. “The same, I imagine.”

“So you haven’t asked her.”

“She says he seems almost as nice as Klare, which is quite a compliment. Consider how fond the source is of Klare.”

“You should ask her,” he says evenly.

She squints her eyes at him for a moment, and then decides the game is still on. Nathan is handsome, rich, generous, and funny. And if Claire had a problem other than his 'absurd lack of ambition', she would have said so a long, long time ago. “Sure,” she says. She takes the phone off the wall and taps in a string of numbers, one of the only such she actually has memorised.

“Why are you calling me at work, from work?” Claire asks in lieu of a greeting.

“Hello. What do you think of Nathan?”

“Are you calling it off? I knew it. OK, don’t fucking do anything before I get there. Do not refund or return a single wedding gift, absolutely do not book a haircut, do not so much as set foot in a shoe store. Above all, let me be the one to talk to the caterer. I can be there in about six hours if I manage to catch the the late afternoon Helsinki to Heathrow. I’ll bring the wine. Stay put in your shop. Am I understood?”

The priest, who can obviously hear every word, leans negligently against the wall across from her, watching her face.

“I… Yes, but I’m… Nathan, not… Fuck, you’ve made me talk like Dad. The wedding is on, Claire. It’s just, I’m realising I never asked you what you think about Nathan.”

“Oh. Right.” Claire takes a breath, and she can almost hear Claire’s assistant close a tab to where she was halfway to buying obscenely expensive last-minute airline tickets. “Well, your running off to Belfast with your hot priest the morning after I met Nathan did put a damper on our girlish post-mortem, didn’t it. And then you broke up with him when you came back. Twice, actually.”

“Yeah, and?”

“And I figured you were, you know, you were sick of it. But then he came to our Christmas party and made that big speech about the rest of your lives, and… I guess I saw the appeal?”

“Sick of… what?”

“The, you know, the experiment you were running? Where you cosplay being, er, functional? And also sort of… what are the kids saying, normalcore? chewy?”

She is aware that Claire means normcore and cheugy, but is absolutely not willing to help her with it, aside from having truly no idea how to pronounce the latter. “You don’t think I’m maybe, in a normal relationship, and it’s good, and I like it, and it’s exactly what most people build their lives around?”

“OK, first of all, it absolutely is not. I can say that with good authority, thanks to the Cumberbatch of it all.” This is one of their various ways of never saying her ex-husband’s name, this one referring obliquely to Martin Freeman. “You know how I used to book a hotel room when I got sick.”

“Room service was more reliable. And kind. And, usually, more fit.”

“Yeah. Look, Nathan’s not Baker Street material. He would attempt to take care of you. As long as he wasn’t off on a biking trip and his sister didn’t need anything. But then, would you… let him? Or would you pretend you were feeling fifty percent better than you actually were, so that his job was fifty percent easier and you didn’t have to feel guilty about him helping you, or spooked about needing help, or whatever fucked-up neurosis that our nature-nurture paradigm has specifically endowed you with?”

The priest is frowning at her, now, and she sees that he is learning something. She turns away, wishing that she were talking to pre-Klare Claire, who never used to name a feeling if it could be avoided. “It doesn’t matter. I’m never sick.”

“Neither was Mum, until she had stage three breast cancer. Plus, there’s the whole thing with his mother.”

“OK, as I said before, that’s not as pronounced as Tim thinks. And you agreed!”

Claire’s silent, now, and she suspects that her past agreement was perhaps more sororal solidarity than honesty. “I still can’t believe he sent it to you.”

“We play online Scrabble together, you know that.”

“It’s fucked up that you can send images over Scrabble chat.”

“Tim might work for the U.N., but his most fluent language is gifs.”

“That’s true.”

“I’m at work.”

“Me, too.”

“So the wedding is on. Are you still punishing the priest?”

“Yeah. He’s here now, actually.”

“He’s… there? With you? At the café? Is he listening to you right now? And it’s… of course it’s fucking Thursday. You are an idiot.”

“Hello, Claire,” the priest calls. “How’s Lucy?”

“Christ,” Claire mutters. “This is what I’m talking about. Cosplay. Don’t say anything. I’ll see you at the weekend.” Then she hangs up.

The priest peels himself off the wall to take the phone out of her hands and replace it on the receiver for her. “She’ll grow to be fond of me, eventually. Probably.”

“I really am an idiot, aren’t I.”

“You’re really not. You could probably use more love with fewer conditions. God is really helpful for me, in that way.”

“I should run off to a convent.”

“Selfishly, I can’t agree. It would be an even bigger setback, for me. What’s the thing about Nathan’s mother?”

“None of your business. How’s your mother, by the way?”

“She’s in the grips of self-knowledge. Sent me a thirty-page letter in January, apologising for her passivity in the face of what Paul did to me. Had a lot of stuff in it I don’t remember. Including a pineapple scone recipe, apparently I used to love them. She’s presently on a spiritual retreat in Mexico… You can read it sometime if you like.”

She tilts her head at him. Sometimes, he seems so immediate and ineffable, and sometimes he’s like an old painting that hung in her house for decades and then disappeared, and which she can only attempt to fully envision. “I’ll take the scone recipe.”

“It’s yours,” he agrees instantly. He moves to her coffee urn and grabs a mug from the top of her commercial dishwasher. “Want to sit and talk for a while?”

“No,” she says. It’s a lie, and she proves it when she sits in the chair across from where he’s scribbling in a notebook—probably sermon notes—twenty minutes later. “OK, one thing. Here’s what strikes me about Rachel’s friend Cassie…”

She keeps it to ten minutes, and leaves first. Still, she knows he sees it as an opening.

She’s afraid that she does, too.

There are twenty-four weeks of pre-marital counseling in the priest’s diocese. Eight sessions together, eight separately, and then eight together again. When she comes in for her first solo session, she says, “Can’t we just do this on Thursdays?”

The priest comes every Thursday again, now. He comes earlier than he used to, at around noon, has lunch, works if his work demands it. He’s acted as a proofreader of Jonah’s book manuscript—“if you want someone who is better at arithmetic than spelling”—and that discussion has filled hours. She can admit it to herself: she very much likes the feeling that he’s watching her as she moves around the café. He stays until Jonah leaves. Sometimes it’s dinner time, or later, before she shoos them out.

“Nah,” he responds to her question.

“Why not?”

“Because at the café on Thursdays, I’m courting you,” he says as if she’s slow. “Pre-marital counseling there would be a conflict of interest.”

“You’re a madman.”

“Come, now. We made it convoluted together. I want to talk about the sin list today.”

“The… sin list.”

“Oh, we call it something less fucking diabolical on the inventory. I didn’t write the damn thing, by the way, obviously the bishop did, and it’s all fucked up. You should see the research behind this stuff, Tim would lose his mind. Anyway. It’s a list of traits and behaviours, all negative. Remember? You had to say whether you thought you, or Nathan, struggled with each of them. On your list, he struggled with none, which was just your way of attempting to convince me that you think he's the peak of masculine perfection, which, sure, was a very small knife in the chest on my first read-through, congratulations.” This feels how all of the jealousy he lets her see so readily feels, which is six things at once, all of which enhance her libido. “You, on the other hand, checked boxes for yourself with, let’s see… ‘apathetic’, ‘argumentative’, ‘deceptive’, ‘drunken’, ‘envious’, ‘guilty’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘lazy’, ‘lustful’, ‘moody’, ‘perfectionist’, ‘rebellious’, ‘vengeful’—that one’s a bit obvious, ‘worried’. Oddly, you did not check the boxes for ‘indecisive’ or ‘judgmental’ which seems an oversight.”

“I’m guessing you have a point of some kind.”

“Yeah. A big one. Are you OK?”

“Am I…? Like, right now? I’m a little hungry.”

He reaches into his desk drawer, pulls out a jar of almond butter and what appears to be a clean spoon. Her eyebrows shoot up. He shrugs. “Ran out of almonds, sometimes get hungry here…. Feel free to lick the spoon if you’re still committed to punishing me.”

“I thought you were courting me Thursdays, counseling me today.”

“Oh, but my heart beats the same every day of the week.”

“And evidently your,” she gestures to the robes he’s wearing underneath the desk in front of him, and becomes a bit shy as she sees the massive crucifix above him and it strikes her that perhaps his God is listening, so she half-whispers, “cock.”

“Oh, yeah. That, too. Definitely that." And why does it hit her so hard that he blushes, saying it? "But what I meant just now was actually, does your therapist have any concern that you’re depressed? I can’t fucking phone in this counseling session or sneakily use it to reveal all the ways Nathan doesn’t see you or want to see you, if you have actual fucking problems. You’ve created an ethical quagmire.”

“Poor you.”

“Listen. This is,” he comes around the desk now and sinks into the chair beside her, the one where Nathan has been sitting each week, “literally the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I hate the lying, and the pretense, and all the layered meanings, the looking, the not looking, trying to catch what’s chasing over your face and guess what horrible stories you’re telling yourself. I hate seeing him touch you, and I really fucking hate that he thinks he’ll be your husband. I hate the dread… you know. That you’ll go through with it. To punish me. Or to attempt to 'cosplay' your way into a happy life. And since I decided to leave all this for you, increasingly this office feels like the set of a play, you know, one where you and I are the only people who knows it’s a theater and not real life. And all the ways I was hiding from myself here, making the church a sex-free harbour, are becoming more obvious. So finally, frankly, yeah, I’m really horny. Your body aside, I also miss you terribly and I have no idea how I used to get by on one day a week when two now seems so fucking grim. And mainly, truly mainly, I just need you to be well, and I’m very, very afraid that the way we’re working this thing out between us is hurting your heart.”

“OK,” she says. “Well, let’s see. I’m working with my therapist about whether I’m really going to marry him. I have to tell you… she thinks I should.”

“She’s misinformed,” he says unhesitatingly. “Possibly a quack. I’m kidding. Probably. Let me come to a session with you.”

She just shakes her head. “Show me the list.”

“The… oh, the inventory. Yeah, OK.”

“So, no, I’m not depressed. I’ll prove it. ‘Apathetic’, I just meant politically. I know I’m supposed to have incisive political positions at our age—Elvie and Regina have made that very fucking clear—but I just am never going to fucking care about tax policy and I honestly really struggle to remember when transit strikes are happening.”

“I think God will forgive you,” he says solemnly.

“Then, let’s see, ‘argumentative’. That’s actually not a negative trait. Next. ‘Deceptive’. Come on, now, that’s surely pretty plausible?”

“OK, maybe. I’ll just say there’s a big difference between your winks and your silences, like comparing fibs and fireworks. The silences….”

“Yeah. Well. So I was honest about deceptions. What’s next? Oh, Drunkenness. Let’s talk about that one over your whiskey, shall we….”

So they pass an afternoon of sin, none cardinal, in his priestly chamber. She restores the indignity of his imagining that she might be a secret wreck and salvages her pride. She makes him check off the list for himself and they get stuck on their very different notions of laziness.

When she leaves him in his stageplay-set of a church, she sees she has missed three calls from Elvie, four from Regina and one from Nathan. She is meant to meet all of them for dinner, and when none reply to her group text she assumes it’s still on. At the farm-to-table bistro where they’re waiting for her, she sees the three of them touching champagne glasses together from the doorway.

“Oh, you’re finally here!” Regina exclaims. She doesn’t need to check her watch; she is seven minutes late, not forty. “We—Elvie and I—found your wedding rings today!”

“Wonderful?” she says, thinking to herself, when did we assign them that task? “May I… see them?”

Nathan grins and hands her the fourth flute of champagne. “They were thinking we might like to be surprised by them. I kind of like that idea, don’t you?”

"At the altar?" She imagines the ring Regina would choose for her, imagines how ugly it might be. She imagines the pleasure of replacing it during her honeymoon and then saying something airy and dismissive about the swap. She weighs it against Regina’s creepy face, watching a ring she’d chosen slide onto her brother’s finger, and tries hard not to let out an ‘oof’.

Then, helplessly, her mind imagines the priest there, watching that same ring slide onto her hand, looking like he’s been struck across the face.

Will he stop her? What if he doesn’t?

Well, that would tell her everything… wouldn’t it?

I think I just want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I think I've been getting it wrong.

She pushes the memory away resolutely. There are two kinds of shame in it, she hazily perceives, though she’s never been able to pull them apart.

Nathan has never, not once, made her feel ashamed, except when she meditates on how she is treating him. That night, as usual, he insists on walking both Elvie and Regina to their doors before taking her home and shagging her doggedly, meaning, with enthusiasm, loyalty, and a certain style of repetition. She has no idea why a man as nice as he is has chosen to hitch his so-called wagon to her star, but her therapist tells her that it’s no crime to sometimes be lucky in love. That she has no experience of that particular kind of luck is why it feels like this, she thinks, like something that’s perhaps just slightly cursed by her own presence in it.

When she stumbles into the kitchen the next morning, Nathan rubs lips against hers and holds her against his body, damp because he's already out and back from his morning jogs. Thanks to the triathlons, he’s obscenely fit and it’s honestly unfair. He pulls away to pour her a hot mug of freshly brewed coffee, which he presses into her hands. “I’m buttering you up,” he says, “because Regina will be here in ten minutes to look at the wedding invitations.”

“Of fucking course. The last four approvals didn’t take.”

“It’s not approval until Regina approves it herself, you know that.”

“Elvie, too?”

“What? Oh, yeah. Probably.”

“I’ll be in the shower. For as long as possible. Try to get her to say what’s wrong with them this time, other than possibly my name.”

“She loves you! You know that.”

“Of course she does. Come hide with me in the shower?”

He laughs. “It’s not hiding if you scream,” he murmurs into her ear.

Why all men, or indeed any men, cannot be as easy as this one, she has no idea.

If you would have told the priest six months before that he would arrive at her wedding week not only with plans still full-steam ahead, but with Regina and Elvie’s indefatigable insistence that he participate in celebratory planning events, he might have gone ahead and just quit the fucking priesthood.

Is this a game of chicken? If he quits his bullshit job, will she quit her bullshit wedding?

But what if the job is still his only refuge? What if a marriage to another man—a fucking affable and totally unneurotic, probably sober, largely untraumatised as much as anyone in their mid-thirties ever has been—is hers? There is so much more tenderness between us than there is safety, he thinks. What if the great symbolic moment of both of their lives, the jewel in the crown that they will endlessly cherish and which will torment them all their days, comes when he says, “I now pronounce you…” and so sanctifies the basic nature of their eternal divide?

Surely God will burn down the building first.

But, no. The priest will not exempt himself. Everyone is a potential agent of miracles. He’ll do his part.

And he does have a plan, has had more than enough time to devise several. One of them, the last-ditch one, he has to pray he doesn’t need.

These are the things he’s thinking as he walks into a pre-wedding brunch at Regina’s on the Wednesday before the wedding, which is scheduled for Saturday morning. The brunch was put onto his calendar by Elvie via Pam, who has unsmilingly refused anymore contact with what they both—he privately, she publicly—call the Wedding From Hell. "Wedding from Hell - Brunch" says the calendar event, and Pam has coded it red.

Regina’s living room has always given the impression of a corporate retreat—comfortable, sumptuous, meticulously neat and not a single unseemly relic of too-personal taste to be seen—but now the far wall is covered with a screen, connected to Regina’s tablet, showing an actual Powerpoint. Its title is, FOUR DAYS TO WIN THE WEDDING.

“Morning, Reg,” he says. He can hear how tired his own voice sounds, and vows he’ll do better.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” Regina says, glancing up from her tablet only briefly and smiling. She waves a hand. “Kitchen. Placecards. Five minutes.” He thinks, not for the first time, how thrilled his own mother would be if he’d fallen in love with Regina. They'd have so much in common.

Regina has catered a buffet for twelve and has two serving staff standing around uselessly in her flat’s kitchen. His own placecard puts him squarely between Regina and Elvie, so he consciencelessly scoops it up and swaps himself with one of Nathan’s interchangeable ushers. He fills a plate with eggs and heaps strawberries beside them. Filling two mugs with coffee, he dumps cream into his own and sets the other down, black, at the bride’s place.

(She prefers it lukewarm, probably because of undiagnosed gum sensitivity, but she’s been avoiding the dentist for four years so that’s only a hypothesis for now.)

He rubs his hands briskly over his face and downs the first third of his coffee.

“Father,” Claire says in greeting. Trust Claire to enter early, and silently. She’s so wonderfully terrifying. “Hard night?” Claire asks, no sympathy whatsoever in her tone.

“They’re all hard at the moment,” he says flatly.

She shakes her head without emphasis like she’s surveying an idiot getting just desserts, which may be a perfectly accurate assessment. He’s amused to see her also swap her own placecard with whomever is on the bride’s other side, probably the groom. “You shouldn’t have agreed to this,” Claire says, obviously meaning his officiating the wedding. “It’s sort of not totally really about you.”

He nods at the event list helpfully printed on a card beneath his place setting. “Shall we suggest that to Regina as the theme for the out-of-towner farewell luncheon, or…?”

“I’m sure that that detail is long since managed.”

He is, too. He was probably copied on a fucking memo about it. The Vatican’s internal correspondence around choosing the last pope had had less pomp, and far less verbiage, than this wedding.

The wedding party trickles in slowly. On the bride’s side, Mandy, Tim, and Jonah join Claire. They groom's friends come in one giant pack—perhaps Elvie is hosting the out-of-towners? They’ve probably already gotten in a morning round of bocce ball and are headed to a sauna after this.

How could she even consider marrying into this fucking throng of jackasses?

These are the sorts of judgments he didn’t allow himself when he was fully ensconced in the thick wool of the priesthood, but his temperament’s protective lambs have well and truly grown up and left home, these last months. He is shepherding only himself, and this travesty of a sacrament. Just before she and Nathan walk in, hand-in-hand, it occurs to him that perhaps all that this means is that she has won.

She ignores the kitchen entirely and slides into the seat between the two of them, exchanging a cheerful word with folks around the table. She grabs her mug and shoots Claire a grateful glance, and when Claire cocks her head at the priest, she winces and sets down the mug back down.

This is about what it’s been like, lately. He has been very fucking angry at her friend Boo for killing herself over infidelity, because Boo has left her old best friend in a prison of her own making. If she cheats... She hasn't said it, but he speaks the language of her silences as well as Tim does the language of gifs.

When they have all sat through Regina and Elvie’s wedding weekend brief and successfully answered the pop quiz questions about who will arrive at which meals at which times, he stands to leave.

“Going so soon, Father?” she asks. She is bleeding. She is radiant. She wants him to bleed. He is so fucking confused.

And yes, obviously. He is bleeding, and bleeding, and bleeding.

“I’ll be where I need to be on time,” he says quietly. “I think you know that.”

Regina is frowning. “Father, I was hoping we could grab a conversation this morning about the report I sent you on Monday.”

“It’ll have to be at the weekly meeting, or just after,” he says. “I’m a bit out of time, this week. Lots to wrap up.” Please let it be his last fucking week on this job. “Speaking of which, I can’t make it to the café tomorrow," he tells the bride. They haven't spoken enough lately for him to even know whether the cafe is open for business during the lead-up to her wedding.

“You… wait, but it’s Thursday tomorrow.”

“Yeah.” He almost drops a hand on her shoulder and stops himself, wondering if she's noticed how long it's been since he's let himself touch her. He is trying, he is truly trying, to protect her misplaced post-Boo superstitions and his own, well, he supposes his vow of chastity has superstitious elements, too. “I’m really sorry. Really. I’m slammed. Let’s talk on Friday? Please?”

Regina looks like she wants to object to this—her wedding week schedule did not leave the bride with a great deal of spare minutes on Friday, but at least now he knows where and when he can find her. But Nathan, that fucking congenial fucking bastard, is the one to send him off. “I’ll see you at the altar on Saturday morning, Father!” he says cheerfully.

He waves back, hoping his animosity shines through only a little, and hopes to Christ that Nathan is wrong.

She stares at herself in the mirror for a long time at her final fitting. An embellished tea-length flapper-style gown with a deep vee at her chest, sheer gloves that button at her wrist, a mini-veil pinned into her hair. There is glamour, and daring, and a hint of tradition. And so she sees herself, truly, as a bride, through the photographs of her mother and grandmother and greatgrandmother that once lined the hallway outside her parents’ bedroom and which her godmother long since placed on the kerb. She thinks she has succeeded, in this one area, in maintaining her own vision for her wedding.

The rest of it belongs to Reggie and Elvie, although she doesn’t really fucking care.

She turns around to see Claire not finishing dabbing the tear from her eye fast enough, but does her the service of pretending she doesn’t notice. “That’s done,” she says. “What’s next?”

Claire is probably the only person who has downloaded the wedding app that Elvie created, and certainly the only one who has enabled push notifications. In the already-unending stream of notifications through her phone, they’re, she says, “a pleasant break.”

“Alright, review. Lunch with all ‘the parents’, ugh,” Claire exchanges a long-suffering glance with her, “and then couple’s massage, ‘misc. spa’ whatever that means? Do we get our nails done eventually? How is there so much and so little information here? Anyway. Nathan’s wedding party is off for the stag right after.” Claire rolls her eyes at this. She had booked out an entire bed and breakfast in the Lakes a month before for the hen do, and invited most of the FCC. They’d had such a marvelous time it had almost convinced her she was doing the right thing—this was what normal life was supposed to feel like, wasn’t it?

“Both Peters couldn’t make any weekend between April and this one,” she shrugs. Nathan comes and goes from his family’s various houses on the continent so often that she’s come to understand he teaches eight-year-olds so he doesn’t have to grade homework and hence can travel more easily; his leisure schedule hadn't suffered by not having a full stag weekend. “Obviously, they’re toning it down quite a bit.”

“But they’re not both named Peter.”

“No, they are. The one with the cheekbones is Peter Albright, and the one with the shoulders is Peter… something.” She gives her sister what she hopes is a charming smile to cover up their shared realisation that she is marrying a man whose non-twin best friends she privately calls Cheekbones and Shoulders.

It’s inevitable, she reasons. It’s not about their relationship. It’s just her own bad personality.

“One more time—should we take you out tonight? Some tasteful place to get smashed and remember the good old days? Something…” Claire lowers her voice. “Is there somewhere Boo would have taken you?”

Her stomach sinks to the floor.

“The wedding is at ten a.m.,” she laughs to cover her own reaction. “The kind of dive bar-slash-alleyway-slash-house-party hangover that Boo would have given me is unsurviveable.”

The absences, of both Boo and her own mother, have been so palpable this week that it’s a shock that this is the first time she’s giving voice to one of them. She feels her hands shaking, a bit, and smooths them on her skirt. “Help me out of this thing,” she says, “so you can help me into it tomorrow?”

“Right.” Claire takes a deep breath, obviously steeling herself, as she begins methodically twisting through the buttons on the back of the dress and waves away the shop assistant hovering nearby. “You’re not going to run off with your friendly local cleric, then?”

She’d known this was coming. “No.” She works on pulling the pins out of her hair, to give herself a task. She’s glad she’d told Claire what happened to Boo, her own role in it, last winter. “No one else can walk into traffic because of me. Lifelong rule.”

“Think pretty highly of yourself, hmm.” Claire is unhooking the strapless bra from the dress itself, now. “But I’d say your priest is more likely to off himself for you than your fiance, surely.”

The shop assistant is now mildly interested by their conversation.

“Suicide is a mortal sin.”

“OK.” Claire lowers the dress and grabs her hand so she can step out of it, nude but for her knickers. “But that wouldn’t be what stopped him.”

That night, settling into her armchair with a glass of wine and a trashy magazine, she's glad about the stag. Though spending this night with her fiance might have staved off the worst of what she’s decided to write off as pre-wedding jitters, it’s nice to have this last night in her own flat. Sure, Nathan had suggested she empty it and put it on the market shortly after they’d become engaged, and sure, she generally only spends nights here when he’s out of town.

But the place feels centrifugal, like she can see her life, Janus-faced, in two directions, past and future.

It’s only when she hears the knock at her door that she realises she has been expecting him.

Liar, she mocks herself.

“Hi.” She takes in the priest on her doorstep, sees that he’s dressed as the man and not the minister—jeans and a notched-neckline white linen shirt probably a bit too cool for a summer evening in London, a bit like he’s doing California Christ.

He puts a hand up in her doorframe and peers behind her. Looking for Nathan, she figures. “You wanna come inside?” she says.

He shakes his head, slowly. “Lead me not into temptation,” he says softly. “I can’t touch you again unless—until you’re mine to touch. Neither of us could handle it.” He is dizzyingly potent, tonight, his eyes smiling into hers. She feels a tiny bit drunk just listening to him.

“So you want to stand here and talk across the threshold?”

“Walk with me?”

“…Let me get my shoes.”

Fucking idiot liar.

He stands in the doorway and watches, that half-smile fixed on his mouth, the sad fondness fixed in his eyes. When she moves to join him, he takes a step to the side and holds out a hand with a flourish. He seems to be going out of his way not to touch her.

“I am,” he says aloud. “Trying not to touch you. If that’s what you’re thinking.”

She doesn’t respond to that. “There’s a park down the way,” she says.

“OK.”

They walk in silence, for awhile, a couple of inches between their upper arms. “I’m going to marry him,” she says abruptly.

He lets out an aggrieved breath, one that calls to her mind the image of the last gurgle of water rushing out of gutter and spilling on the lawn. “I hope you change your mind,” he says.

“It’s too late for that.”

“No,” he says. “I promise you—I promise you it’s not.” His hands are shoved in his pockets now, no doubt reminding him of the boundaries he’s imposing. “Let’s just sit here, shall we.”

‘Here’ is a halfwall that lowers into a bench at the edge of a cemetery, which should be closed for the night but has a busted lock. He pats the cement beside him, and she defers with a little sigh. She wants to lean on his shoulder, but feels him tense and stops herself.

“What happened when my dad died,” he says, “and I didn’t come back. It’s—I told you some of it already. But what really happened is that I went to the fucking cemetery for the headstone unveiling. Grass was still new on the dirt covering him. And I saw that headstone, I saw my own goddamn name on it, and all of the sudden the clearest fucking thing in the world, in the whole of my life, was that I wanted you there. In the ground, I mean."

“Jesus! Thanks for that.”

“Shut up. Just—shut up. You already know what I mean, you know why I’m here, you know… you fucking know almost everything, but you’re going to listen to me anyway." He is speaking rapidly, more intensely than she has ever seen. "I want you there, in the ground beside me, when we are dead. Next to me. Anything else—anything else isn’t going to make any sense of the story of my life or yours. And that’s where we’re all headed, and it has to make sense, in the end, or anyway you have to try for your life to make sense. So why was I pretending that I was doing something other than going through the motions of it, through life, with you, that I was more than about eighty percent alive from fucking Friday—I hate Friday now—to Wednesday. That we weren’t already in this together.”

She takes a deep breath. “You really are, despite everything, my dearest fr—”

“Seriously. Shut up. You’ll have your chance. So there I am, and it’s clear as day to me. You, me, we’re dead. The cemetery is St. Ethelred’s, unless our kids, if we have kids, move far away and we follow them in our old age to be near the grandchildren, if we have grandchildren. Tombstones that rise up from the ground, if you please, and two separate ones, I think, but with the word beloved on them somewhere. We went double-barrelled on the names, even though it’s a lot of fucking syllables thanks to you, for the same reason as the raised tombstones.”

She knows already, in her heart, but says, “…which is?”

“Because we’re allowed to take up space on this planet.”

“Right.”

“But I imagined a lot of life, before all that. In prayer, in retreat, in rehab, in confession, while I was taking the fucking bus and chopping goddamned tomatoes and in the shower and looking at the stars—!” He cuts himself off. “I thought you were well. But I was suffering, because of my damn imagination. I imagined. I imagined, for instance, waking up in the middle of the night and kissing the back of your neck, and going back to sleep—that one really has haunted me, I think because I wanted to do it so badly while you were lying beside me every night in Belfast. I imagined heading downstairs in the morning while you were in the shower and pouring your coffee for you so it was as revoltingly lukewarm as you like it by the time you made it to the kitchen, and then doing it again, doing it every day. I imagined being able to actually tell you how much of a fucking turn-on it is, seeing you ensorcle every third wanker who walks into your café, without even trying, without ever noticing. I fantasised about listening to you explain the plot of Gosford Park to me, again, and, at some point, could you, please? I almost have it.”

“I honestly feel like you’re actively trying not to understand the factory and orphanage bit.”

“I imagined letting your godmother corner me in a conversation at Easter breakfast to give you and your dad a proper chance to fawn over Lucy. I’m skipping over all the usual things, of course—quiet evenings with the TV, weekend trips to the seaside, that sort of thing, but I… I imagined trying to talk you into coordinating Halloween costumes—Eeyore and Piglet, or chess pieces—”

“Black bishop, white knight,” she says, despite herself. "We'd be the only ones who thought it was funny."

“Exactly. Yes. Yes! And I imagined the patient looks you’d feign when I asked you to give me time for prayer. I imagined taking long walks together at night, like this but far less fucking monologuing. Getting drunk by ourselves at the end of the week. And obviously I imagined making love—having sex—fucking—”

“Are those synonyms here or…?”

“Three very separate concepts. I imagined each of them in every room either of us has seen the other live in, in every place, in every kind of place.” His voice is heated, now, thick like the words themselves. “I imagined you lying on top of me during the king’s speech, I imagined sliding my hands between your legs in a back pew while someone else gave a sermon. And… I imagined names for our children, seven of them—”

“Seven children, fuck, I thought—”

“No, no, seven names ideally for two children, but covering the full range of gender and multiple birth possibilities, plus in consideration of our basic temperamental differences and with a nod to my Irish heritage."

“Right. Well, I guess that’s just sensible, given how sexually active we are.”

“Imaginary you was very lucky about how practical I am, actually.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I’m a terrible cook, but I’m quite good with finances and not afraid of small house repairs.”

“It’s safe to say that I’ve figured that out.”

“And it has to be said. You have to understand, this is also the point. I imagined, over and over again, it all falling apart. That the pressure on you because I left the Church for you would tank the relationship. That you would get bored, or I’d get resentful, or we’d both get volatile and a little too drunk. That you’d cheat on me, or that I’d defect back to the Vatican which amounts to cheating on you. That I was left, ultimately, without you and without my calling. That you… well, that you married… someone else. I was trying to cut my losses, to give you a chance to find someone less fucked up than me. And on my end, well, the Church is a sure thing. It’s one of the surest fucking things there’s ever been in the history of mankind. And here I am, and I'm telling you, I'd much rather have you."

Her brain is spinning, and she hardly has taken in everything she’s heard. She’s stuck on one point: “So what happened to the children? When I left you? Did you keep them as a single father, or did we share custody, or…?”

“Shared custody. A kind of torture. Worse than Thursdays.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. Christ in heaven. I can feel your body humming next to me right now. Do you think it’s an error, some kind of flaw in the algorithm of the universe, that we want each other like this?” He inches away from her, just slightly, his fists clenched on his knees. “So here’s my closing argument. Don’t marry him. He’s a one-size-fits-all blanket and he might keep you warm but… you and I, we…” He swallows. “You know the end of this metaphor.”

“We actually fit,” she says. Instantly. Easily.

“We solve each other.”

She leans back on the stone wall behind her, hoping it will be cold and discomfitting. And it is. “Do you know how many people have left me? Failed me? I mean, I’ve been in therapy for a long fucking time. But listen for a minute. My own father doesn’t even like me,” she stretches out a hand to appeal to him and lets it drop as he recoils. “And I was such a fuck-up for so long. I can't be a person who leaves someone, that way. I’d never forgive myself.”

“Never is a long time, and you’re dancing on its knife edge, anyway,” he says. But he shakes his head. “OK. Final answer. I hear you.” When he gets up, he startles an animal from the bushes—two animals, a pair of foxes. “Fuck me,” he says. “It’s been a while.” He grits his teeth and moves as if to back away.

And then both of them watch as the foxes run straight for the wall she’s sitting on.

“Jesus Christ!” She scrambles to stand up on the wall, while the foxes stretch onto their hind legs at her. “What the actual…”

He has ripped a branch from the underside of a black elder and is waving it at the foxes, who make their oddly whining growls at him before trotting off into the night.

He is rubbing a hand over his jaw, and he suddenly looks like he’s half-baffled, half-delighted. “The moment seems to have chosen you,” he says. “Time to decide again how to read symbols, I guess. I’ll see you in the morning. Shall I wear the burgundy with the gold sash? I find myself in sudden solidarity with the foxes.”

“You haven’t picked an outfit yet?”

“You haven’t been listening,” he says, “if you don’t understand just how much I hoped this fucking day would never come.” He squeezes his eyes shut, just for a moment, before slipping out of the cemetery gates. “I’ll be what you need me to be, tomorrow.”

It’s the first wedding vow she hears.

Her wedding day dawns perfectly, with yellow-clear light like glass and cirrus clouds that erase the weight of worldly duties. She has no doubt that the photographers Elvie has borrowed from the staff of professional public media will make it appear even more so, because unearthly magic is somehow Elvie’s brand. The woman herself has floated in a short-sleeved copper sheath dress from room to room, very slightly rearranging flowers, bodices, bangs, and, in Claire’s case, facial expressions.

She gets a surprise visitor early on, in the form of the priest’s niece, who hurtles across the church courtyard shouting “Chef! CHEF!”

“Rachel! What are you doing here?” She wraps her arms around her instinctively, looking up to see Ollie is behind her.

“My uncle asked us to come to church today. He said he could really use some support.” Ollie is explaining the logistics of their trip when the priest’s oldest friend, Cole, is ambling up behind them.

“Same story,” he grins. “You look smashing,” and he presses a kiss on the side of her mouth, “for luck,” he says.

“So glad you’re here. I’ll have to introduce you to Nathan, my fiance—that is, after the wedding, when he’s my…” She shakes her head. “I’m glad you’re here,” she tries again.

Ollie leans in to hug her. “I promise he didn’t tell me to say this,” she whispers. “But seriously, don’t do it. Let him leave the church for you. You’ll never regret it.”

She pulls away quickly. “OK, er, thank you,” she says.

There’s a kind of buzzing in her brain, today, the kind that could best be cured by a long sprint, or a nap, or a few hours polishing her café’s kitchen equipment. None of which is on, today, obviously. Do all wedding days feel like this? Like time is passing oddly rapidly, in a heightened way?

“Eat something,” Claire hisses, pressing a sleeve of biscuits into her hand and pulling her arm back into the annex and toward her changing room. “You look like you’re about to faint,” she says more quietly.

“Just what every bride wants to hear.”

Claire scowls. “You’re unutterably beautiful, angels wept, immortality is yours, I’m seething with jealousy, et cetera. Good hairstyle, by the way.”

“Thanks.” She wraps her arms around Claire and bites her lip. “I’m not going to regret this… right?”

Claire shrugs. “I’m worried you’ll regret it, either way, now. So just focus on not doing that. You’re in love. You’re loved, by a decent person. That’s it. That’s all there is.”

Jonah, who has been sitting in the corner of her changing room since shortly after she first got the dress on, leafing through the diocese’s news magazine, Voices, says into the article he’s reading, “Tim and I borrowed his uncle’s Kia Picanto, so… if needed, I’ll drive the getaway car. Tim'll be too drunk in about,” he checks his watch, “twenty minutes.”

Tim has, indeed, been deeply enjoying the complimentary mimosas that the caterers are circulating out on the lawn. Soon, she knows, everyone will be called into the church. And it will all begin to… end.

Her father and godmother appear, her father making half-intelligible noises about her beauty, and her godmother exclaiming, “Poor dear, that dress must have been very hard to get into, but never mind that, now, I don’t doubt the fastenings will hold,” in a tone that makes it obvious that she does doubt it, she doubts it very much.

Blessedly, Elvie comes to gesture her godmother toward her seat at the front of the church, with one of Nathan’s cousins as a handsome usher-ly inducement.

And just like that: it’s time.

The music is Gershwin, not Lohengrin. The doors are already open, so nothing thunderous occurs. She has no train, and no attendants trail behind her. It’s just her, on her father’s arm, and the whistle of a flute, and the faces of two men who love her, waiting for her at the end of a long aisle, one in a dark gray tuxedo, one in fox-toned hooded priestly robes, a gold sash hanging around his neck, white sleeves billowing around his hands.

This is where she realises she has fucked up, hugely and irrevocably. When tears begin to stream down her cheeks, Nathan smiles. He believes that she is overwhelmed with love for him. He seems to be trying to beam his love back to her.

Holy fucking God, what has she done?

This is when she feels her father’s hand, patting her arm over and over, like a drum, all the way down the aisle.

The faces along the aisle are like spectres peering out of the River Styx. At the back of the church, Ollie looks sympathetic, and Rachel is smiling and mouthing “you’re so beautiful!” while Cole winks at her some more and Elvie nods at her unsmilingly, the light catching her eyes and dress beautifully. In the middle, there’s Mandy's husband Gavin, the FCC, the men’s auxiliary, Jack and Edith, her therapist, twenty to forty of her and Nathan’s cousins, aunts, uncles, and all their wealthiest and-or most local shirtsleeve relations, beaming at her. At the front, Nathan’s ruggedly handsome father, leaning down to listen to whatever her godmother is saying while neither are paying her any attention at all. Reverend Brian, who is watching her gravely from the cantor's box.

And Benny. How had she forgotten that Boo's brother Benny would be here? He's brusquely brushing tears out of his own eyes and he thumps both hands on his heart when he sees her, a gesture she saw his sister make so many hundreds of times that she would certainly have started crying now if she hadn't already.

In the wedding party on Nathan’s side, a trio of generically handsome men stare respectfully, except one of the Peters is staring at her chest and biting his lip, and Regina is a Grecian statue, her face set like she knows she’s in a photograph. On hers, there is Jonah, whose eyes flicker meaningfully to the various egresses; Tim, who is tearing up because she is crying and he is drunk; Mandy, who is body-conscious and holding in her stomach; and Claire, who has one hand on the top of the purple satin in her small daughter's hair, and who is keeping steady eyes on her that say, You will not humiliate yourself today, not on my watch.

Her eyes flicker, finally, to the priest, whose hands are extended outward at his sides, whether in entreaty to her or to God, she cannot tell. His jaw is set. He looks, she thinks, powerful and fearless.

Nothing in me is afraid of you.

Apparently, he meant it.

She mostly keeps her eyes on Claire as her father hands her off to the man she is about to marry.

“In the name,” the priest says, “of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

She looks up at him when he lowers his arms, and from the sounds around her, she knows that everyone in the church is sitting back down. He is staring down at her, his eyes at their most unfathomable. “Kneel,” he says to her, and stares into her eyes. It is only when she moves instinctively to obey—such is the power of this place—that she notices he's had to tell her because Nathan has already knelt.

The priest and Brian sing back and forth to each other. There are glorias and hosannas. She catches a snippet of the first reading, as if she is wearing headphones underwater, when the priest says, “Now, Lord, you know that I take this wife of mine not because of lust, but for a noble purpose. Call down your mercy on me and on her, and allow us to live together to a happy old age. They said together,” and suddenly everyone around her is saying “Amen, Amen,” and she almost jumps out of her skin.

She knows that Elvie worked to make the service “streamlined” but it seems to her that nothing has ever moved more slowly. She has time to take in every detail. Nathan’s aftershave, warm and familiar. Mandy has taken off her shoes because she didn’t bother to break them in. Jonah’s singing voice, sonorous and tuneful. The Peters, elbowing each other when a hymn number has a sixty-nine in it. Her father’s face, solemn with just a bit of wobble at the edges, and so unfailingly attentive, like he's memorising this day.

She has tried, at rare moments of confidence about this wedding, to imagine the priest's homily; she remembers too well what it meant to her at her dad’s wedding. She assumes he’ll say something generous, something that will make her cry a bit, some bad day in the future when she is lost in imagining all her other possible lives. Perhaps he’ll say something capacious about how there are a lot of different kinds of love. One of the ones he describes will be theirs. They’ll watch each other for a long moment, a moment some part of her will always treasure.

It is safe to say that it does not go as she expects. He moves from the lectern to the pulpit, and she sees that, unlike at her father’s wedding, he has notes. Couldn’t bother to rehearse prepared remarks? He smiles out at everyone for a long moment, finding comfort in holding silence with them, before he begins to speak.

“I want to say a word about what marriage is, or rather, has been. Because the history of marriage in Europe is a history of women as property,” he says. What. Her mouth falls open as she hears her godmother—her stepmother, who is married—call “Amen, Father!”

“There used to be so many customs—so many—that made that bloody obvious. From the costume choices, down to the veil conveying virginal purity....” She adjusts her own mini-veil self-consciously and hears a slight cough, and looks over to see it is Claire, wincing in her direction. “To the family drama, like the negotiation of a dowry and giving away of the bride by her father. And all the other baked-in stuff you’re sick of reading about in Guardian op-eds, about women losing their family names and the grim realities of legalised rape.”

Nathan leans toward her. “I love this guy,” he whispers in her ear. “So refreshing.”

I shouldn't ignore him.

She ignores him.

“There’s another old patriarchal custom that’s fallen by the wayside, except in Hollywood films, I guess, and that’s the objection period. Men standing where I’m standing used to say, ‘Hello, everyone, do any of you have secret dirty gossip about either of these people up front? Just of the kind that would particularly make one of them regret the marriage. Or would make the marriage polygamous, you know, that kind of thing, let’s talk about it, here in public in front of the whole village. And that would let people who hated the bride or the groom, or who wanted to marry the bride or the groom themselves, make an attempt at disrupting the ceremony. You won’t hear me ask for objections today. We don’t do it anymore because, obviously, we think of marriage a little differently.”

She finds her eyes straying over to Tim, somehow, as though he’s the moral center of the universe. Tim, she realises later, has already cracked the base code of this homily. “I object,” he mouths at her, and she thinks the next word is, “obviously.”

The priest carries on. “Marriage is not primarily a matter of honour. It’s no longer a family business model. It’s not, or at least not primarily, a community concern. Instead, it’s a matter of individual choice. Here in England, in my church or in a registry office, the law does not actually give officials like me the power to marry people. I am a recognised witness, and they have to have another, who could be just about anyone of legal age.” He nods at Regina, who has long since claimed this duty, and she beams. “That’s it. I don't marry people. They marry each other. Those who would marry each other, have to consent. Consent! Consent is everything. Legally and morally, everyone performs and sacralises their own marriage.”

Nathan is smiling down at her, now, and reaches for her other hand, by which she takes it he means to visually perform their ‘consent’ for all.

She lets him hold one hand. She grabs the other back to rub it, hopefully not ostentatiously, on the skirt of her gown. Her hands are unaccountably itching.

“Consent is, as the billboards and t-shirts remind us, sexy. It’s the basis of justice. Of a decent life. It is not subject to other’s approval. In my own life, the things that have happened that I didn’t choose, which happened to me against my will, have been the hardest to get over. I think that if you regret a choice, it affects how you see your own character. But if having a choice is taken from you altogether… it affects the nature of your personhood itself, not just who you are, but what you are, for yourself, for others. I’ll say again, consent is sexy and just.”

She feels cold, now. Ice up and down her spine. Understanding has moved from her bones, through her blood, and has, at last, reached her brain.

If I want the wedding stopped, I have to do it myself. It’s my consent… my consent… my….

"I just want someone to tell me what to do?" No. I just wanted someone to fucking agree with me so I could believe myself.

How can her legs be so brittle when her knees have turned to water? Has time slowed back down? Is it happening for her alone at a slower rate than anyone else?

The priest is watching her. She knows he loves her, will always love her. She knows, deeply, that he doesn’t want to be in charge of her life, just perhaps of an occasional sexual romp. Why did I ever decide to bring us to this moment, here and now? What fucking insane madness was it?

She keeps opening her mouth, and closing it. The priest’s speech is slowing down. He’s giving her time.

“So,” he says slowly, “If I were to ask whether anyone here knows any reason why these two should not be wed in holy matrimony, I would actually be transgressing—”

Then, suddenly, a high wail: “I object!”

For a second, she think she is the one who has, finally, spoken the objection pounding in her brain. Perhaps she has thrown her voice—didn’t she read somewhere that crickets can?—or perhaps it is herself, from the future, coming to do the work that needs doing, now.

The priest blinks. It’s when he turns his own attention down the aisle to the back of the room that she begins to realise that someone else, as in nightmares, is objecting to her wedding. “I’m sorry, I very explicitly was not actually opening an objection period, as it’s no longer relevant whether or not you—”

“I object!” It is Elvie, and she is, torchlike, alight with the flame of speaking her truth. Air catches in her throat, to see that. “I object. Nathan. You can’t marry her. You’re in love with me.”

What blood there was, anywhere in her body, drains out of her extremities and into her core. Is she still opening and closing her mouth?

“What is happening?” she says, and Nathan thinks she is talking to him, naturally enough, but the priest tells her later that he understood that she was, in fact, talking to God.

“Elvie,” Nathan’s tone is one of pleading. He clutches her arm to hold his bride in place as Elvie walks, like a zombie bridesmaid, right up the aisle toward them, her coppery dress catching the red light of the stained glass mesmerisingly. “Please. It’s too late for this.” He gestures, apparently to one or both of the Peters, standing to his right. “As you know perfectly well.”

Now Claire, the only one of the wedding party unfrozen in this crisis, drops Lucy’s hand and wades into the picture to litigate. “Elvie. Stop this now. I’m afraid that you’ve left it too late, and you’re making a bit of a fool—” She’s cut off by Lucy’s scream at her mother's abandonment. Claire's eyes dart in panic to Klare. “Shh, hush, darling, Daddy will come to see—”

“Perhaps we’d better hear her out,” her godmother calls, just as Jonah steps around Lucy to murmur in her ear, “Do you want us to bounce your stepmom, Elvie, or you?”

But then Cheekbones Peter grabs Nathan by the shoulder and spins him around. “You fucking bastard. You were screwing around with Elvie? Why did you tell me I could give it a go?”

And then he punches Nathan directly in the mouth.

Lucy is shrieking even louder, and she hears Klare say, “It is OK, toukka, your mother is just angry at a bad man.” Her stepmother lets out one crack of laughter, and then claps a hand over her mouth, and her father stands up as if to intervene, says, “We ought… I… needs. Yes.” And then sits down again. Elvie falls to her knees beside where Nathan is sprawled out on the floor, clutching his jaw. There is blood on his hands.

She looks at the priest, and then at Nathan, and turns back to the priest. “I wouldn’t have thought Peter had it in him,” she manages.

“Who?” the priest says.

“The…” She gestures at Nathan’s wedding party, who are fighting among themselves. Gregory is holding Cheekbone Peter back from diving on Nathan again. “Peter. You know--punchy, cheekbones... Peter.”

“His name is Jonathan.”

Her eyes go wide, and the familiarity of that name lodges in her skull. “Fuck, you’re right.”

He is shaking his head now, evidently trying to hide a laugh. Then he looks up at the ceiling a long moment, which extends longer when he reaches his arms upwards as if to entreat God to intervene personally.

“Let’s not have it out in His house, then,” he says. “Tim, Jonah, Gregory, Peter, could you…” He nods in the direction of the Nathan and Jonathan, and waves in the direction of the door.

Nathan, when pulled to his feet by Tim and his brother, tries to turn back to her. “I’m so sorry,” he says. His eyes dart to Elvie. “I didn’t think she’d ever want me back. You have to understand.”

“Come on, mate,” Jonah says. “You’ve fucked things up enough for today.”

“Dodged a bullet, more like,” mutters Actual Peter. He turns back to her, sees all her white bridal finery, then winces. “My apologies.”

“I can’t believe you were going to marry one of these fucking arseholes,” calls Dori, who’s probably the most voluble member of the FCC, and she assumes this is intended to be sympathy.

Now the floor seems to open up.

“I wonder if we can get a refund on the liquor bill,” she hears her godmother say to her father, whose reply is inaudible.

“Honestly, she was like this even as a teenager, terrible taste in men,” one of her aunts says confidingly to Dori, and then various members of the FCC start to pick apart bad signs they'd previously ignored in Nathan’s character.

Her eyes fall on her therapist, who has pulled out her phone and appears to be jotting notes into it. “You seem to have left rather a lot out of the picture, dearie,” she says gently when she makes eye contact. “I imagine with the honeymoon off, that I’ll be seeing you on Tuesday as usual?”

Regina, who is evidently unsurprised by this mess between her twin and her best friend, is gushingly complimenting the incisiveness and authenticity of the priest’s homily, and he’s hushing her. Several of her cousins are discussing whether the wedding luncheon will still be on or whether they should go out for brunch at a new biergarten one of them read about in Time Out. Gavin has darted out of the chapel conspicuously, looking for a restroom, probably because of the issue with his prostate that Mandy has recently overshared about. Lucy’s wailing dying down, she hears Claire say firmly say to her, “OK. Focus. We need to leave now, and then make some decisions.”

Claire grabs her by the shoulder and attempts to steer her back down the aisle, and it’s then that she recovers her senses. “Stop it,” she says to her sister. “Stop. I fucking object.”

She turns back to the priest, who has stepped down from the pulpit to hover nearer to her, and who is taking her in squarely. “I object,” she repeats more clearly. “I was going to object,” she says. “Really.”

He lets out a long breath, like she’s just told him that his surgery went well and the cancer is gone. “And I was going to give you more chances to.” And now he’s smiling at her, and all at once she’s smiling back. “Well, come here, then, please.” And he tugs her up on the altar beside him.

And then she is… well, she’s really beside him. His arm is around her waist, nudging her hip to turn her to face him. He looks into her eyes for a long time. Forget about everyone else for a fucking minute. Stay with me.

She does. She laughs as she does it.

“What are you doing?” she hears Regina demand. “What are they doing?” She sees Nathan's father holding her physically in place out of the corner of her eye and couldn’t care less.

“That all honestly could have been worse,” the priest tells her finally.

“I didn’t really want to be told what to do,” she tells him conversationally.

“Yeah, no fucking kidding. That picture of your mother in the annex is beautiful, by the way. I can't believe how much you resemble her."

She bites her lip. "That's actually... Nathan's mother."

"Oh, my fucking God." He throws his head back and laughs as hard as she's ever seen him. "Sorry, sorry. Christ. You really should have gotten a better pre-marital counselor. I missed about a billion red flags." Then, as though the question is casual, as though they aren’t surrounded by crucifixes on a literal altar with a cup by which he believes he has the power to convert wine to blood, he adds, with slow intensity: “May I kiss you now?”

She laughs, too, laughs again. She slides her hands up and around the shoulders of his robes, and tugs at his stole, pulls it off and throws it over her arm like a trophy, to show she understands exactly what he is asking. “Yeah,” she says. “You may.”

“Thank God,” he says, and crashes his mouth to hers like a magnet seeking its opposite pole.

“Can a person literally die of residual romance?” Tim sighs, while Jonah, coming back from wherever he's left Nathan and Elvie and not-Peter, says, “Finally.” From Regina, “That’s supposed to be me!” And her godmother splutters, “I don't understand what's happening. Does she… need CPR?” Rachel yells from the back pew, “Yeah! That’s my uncle!”

She doesn’t hear any of it, but the wedding photographers do, and they catch it all, and she does sense the flash of high-end cameras through her eyelids. The photographs that both circulate on Twitter and grace The Sun will show a man of God bending a bride at the waist--showing her cleavage to its absolute maximum advantage--with one hand in her hair, kissing her like she is light and he's been in a sewer for a half millennium. Later, the videographer will also provide them the evidence that Klare is lying when he claims that he’s the one who started the round of applause. (It was, very clearly, her therapist.)

Like their kiss, it goes on and on. In days ahead, watching that video for the first time, nothing in the world will make her laugh harder than the sound of her godmother’s voice breaking through cheers and wolfwhistles: “I mean, is she dying?”

Late that night, she wakes up in her bed alone and goes to find him. She’s unafraid; she knows he's near. She finds him sitting, clad only from the waist down in a pair of trousers, legs crossed at the ankle, on her settee, a glass of water in his hand. He smiles and extends his arm to pat the space beside him when he sees her. “It’s important to stay hydrated.”

“Oh, indeed,” she smiles. They’ve recently showered off a layer of sweat. But it’s a hot August day, their bodies crave each other, and water was low on their list of priorities.

He hands her a sheaf of papers. “Just so you know I was telling the truth.”

They’re neatly labeled as the Order of Wedding Ceremony with today’s date. She skims through the homily—turns out he was at its end when Elvie interrupted—to see that he had been about to ask them to state their consent. “‘Do you come here, without coercion, to enter into Marriage freely and wholeheartedly? But do you affirm it faithfully? Wholeheartedly is defined as...?’” She laughs. “This second follow-up that’s implicitly on your suspicion of my inability to 'forsake all others' is even better than the homily. I’m a little sorry I didn’t get to hear it.”

“Guess you’ll have to settle for living it.”

“Guess so.”

“Had the failsafe in my backpocket of botching the paperwork, of course, which could have bought me a little more time. And well, there’s this.” There’s a notebook in his lap, and a pen rests on it. She leans on his shoulder and almost sighs from the pleasure of this contact alone. How long will it take to get over these last miserable years? She hopes she never does, not totally.

She lets her tongue trace over his shoulder for just a moment before she reads his slashing handwriting. “Wedding Vows,” she says slowly. “Jumping the gun a bit?”

“While managing the business of marriage is fresh in my mind,” he says, “I thought I’d give them a quick rewrite so they’re ready when we are. The traditional vows are lovely and serviceable, but imperfect.”

“I really didn’t think you could shock me any more today. OK, here goes. ‘I, Tom, take you, Felicity—’”

“Strange how infrequently you’ve ever said my name, it gave me a little thrill just there,” he says.

“—'to be my wife. I promise to cherish you at all moments’—well that’s a big promise, what if you have to go out of town?”

“I’ll find a way.”

“…‘to love you in sickness, health, and in-between, broken or whole, and to belong with you all the days of my life, including but definitely not limited to Thursdays.’ If I’m being honest… that last bit probably needs a second draft.”

“Yeah, well. We’ve got time.”

That night, when she slips back into bed after a quick trip to the loo—because hydration, while crucial, is inconvenient—she feels his lips brush over the nape of her neck and tries to melt backward into him. She is absurdly grateful to be here, and finds herself thinking she’s lucky to have lived this long, into a peace beyond their long standoff at a crossroads, a peace that she knows is a moment and not a destination, and which she tucks as deep down inside herself as she can manage and wills it to become a reservoir they can drink from on the trek ahead.

“Hey, where’d you go just now?” he mumbles into her hair when he feels her spine stiffen.

“Just trying to stay, right here,” she avows, and turns into his body, and sets about uniting their flesh once more into one.

Chapter Text

It takes about forty-eight heady hours for the mundane problems of their public debacle to begin to sink in. It’s Tom’s fault: he starts apartment-hunting.

“The Church has been more effective as a landlord than an employer for a full millennium,” he tells her cynically. He’s sprawled on the settee and doesn’t look up from his phone to catch the expression on her face. “Meaning, it’ll take time to defrock me, but no time at all to evict me. I need to clear out my room at the rectory before they clear it out for me. Ergo,” he gestures to the screen of rental listings in front of him which is the source of her ire, “the fucking London rental market.”

“Just stay here,” she says. He hears the edge on the middle word, now, with its implicit accusation.

“I’ll look for a month-to-month,” he says placatingly. “We need an easing-in period. You were walking down the aisle to marry another man forty-eight hours ago. I was, mostly, adhering to a vow of celibacy for the majority of the last decade. Let’s take a beat. Six months, say.”

“Zero months,” she parries. “You’re just afraid of what people will think. But we don’t have to do anything for the sake of appearances. It’s pointless; everyone already fucking knows. Did you see we’re trending? Hashtag-beauty-and-the-priest?”

They’d been texted by friends and frenemies about the altar-snoggery shot floating around the internet the previous day. Overnight, it’s absolutely exploded across worldwide Catholicism, with significant aid from the Church’s many discontents.

She’s relieved, mainly, that an early effort to tag them as #fatherandthebride had not caught on, and she certainly doesn’t mind that Elvie has only a very marginal place in the public story about why her wedding was cancelled. Hence she’s not dwelling on the plain fact that hundreds of thousands of people have now seen the edge of her nipple, which is obviously visible in the viral photo. (When he’d mentioned it haltingly, she’d laughed and said, “At least I’m not the one who was caught kissing with my eyes open, like a lunatic.”)

But cutting closer to the heart of it all: everything about that viral photo is outrageously sexy, and it makes each of them feel absurdly powerful, unreprentant, utterly visible. He keeps opening his phone and looking at it, expecting a wave of guilt, or dread of blowback, and feeling just the opposite. He intends to have it blown up and framed… after some more sober consultation about the nipple issue.

Now, he leans down to lie on her lap, so he can scroll rental listings while maximising physical contact. “This is not a negotiation, my darling. Two flats. Six months. We date.”

“How many nights a week do we have to spend apart to satisfy your propriety?”

He thinks about it, and doesn’t like the question. Doing things by formula, for the sake of form alone—it’s not how he sees himself. And being apart… “I don’t know,” he says. “Some.”

“I object,” she says. It’s a phrase she has decided she will wear out. Since he still smiles broadly to hear it, she knows she hasn’t, yet. “Like you said, people should say what they want. So, cards on the table. I want what you promised me, the other night, in the cemetery. We’ll buy a two-bedroom, closer to the café. Put both our names on the paperwork. It can have a guest bedroom so you have somewhere to stomp off to yell at God when you need to.”

He looks at her for a long time, still in love with the feeling that he is entitled, now, to stare lovingly into her coffee-dark-but-somehow-still-limpid eyes. “Let’s talk about it with some… neutral third parties,” he says finally. “Have you decided whether you’re going to your therapy appointment tomorrow?”

She shudders. “This week? Ugh. Not by myself, I’m not. Did you hear what she said at the church? I’ve been caught in rather a lot of lies. Some of them are your fault.”

Now he objects; but still, he comes to face the music with her.

Her therapist sorts them out swiftly, now that she has almost all of the facts. Turns out Felicity opposes separate dwellings because she sees it as a stepping stone to his leaving her, either for the church or another woman. Tom favours separation because he wants her to have a buffer from the odd grief and volatile self-remaking that he expects will accompany this life transition he’s now in. “It’s probably going to be pretty fucking ugly,” he tells her.

“That’s literally the whole point, of any of this,” she says.

She has the right of it, he realises, of course she does. He discards the “separate flats” idea twenty-five minutes into their fifty-minute hour and they spend the rest of the time talking about ways trust is built and strengthened.

He is leaving the priesthood, but it’s clear to him, now: there are still so many revelations, all around him. For example, he had anointed himself as the faithful one, even though she is the one who has, on average, been more honest, brave, available, and generous. His last six months of waiting for her, and his initiation of a Great Spectacle of leaving the church—these have only somewhat moved the scales.

She tells him she doesn’t yet believe he means it. “I expect you’ll regret it, at least a little bit, no matter what.”

“Even if I do, I’ll also always regret ever having taken the vows, at least a little bit, no matter what. Living free of regrets is impossible, it’s no life at all. And I’m going to earn your trust,” he tells her, though it takes him days to unpack all of what he means. In the moment, she bites her lip and looks away to hide the strength of her reaction. So he adds, gently: “Would you please help me pack up my things and move them to your flat?”

Her therapist presses a card in his hand on the way out the door, by way of a referral to a sex therapist. He takes it ruefully.

“That woman must be eighty,” he says to her later, when they’ve hauled several dozen cardboard boxes up into his bedroom at the rectory, and shooed away Pam, who has shocked him to his core by being nearly happy for him for the first time in their strained flatsharing arrangement. “And she’s so fucking hot.”

“I know!"Felicity looks up from where she’s emptying his dresser into the depths of a wardrobe box. “Hey, speaking of which, you found my knickers.” She smirks, holding up a souvenir from Belfast he’d buried deep in a drawer and tried half-heartedly mostly to forget about.

Seeing them dangle on her finger, he can’t help it—he’d intended to avoid outright flouting his divestment from this life—but he advances on her slowly, a slumbrous gleam in his eyes. He wants her so badly. She wants, just as badly, to languish in being wanted so goddamn much.

Still, “Here in the rectory? Are you sure?” she whispers against his lips. “’Cause I’m ninety percent certain that the thing you said the other day about the back pew of a church was just naughty ta—”

When he lifts his teeth from her clavicle a few moments later, he says into her ear, “Here. Now. Nothing, nothing, nothing in my life is more sacred than you.” That’s when she hazily apprehends this is likely to be the best orgasm of her life, and so urges him to keep talking about the fantasies that he had of her here, in this room, in this bed, on and under his body.

He’d intended to keep them quiet, given that Pam is probably just downstairs, but he has no will left to maintain his old cages.

And he figures, his paintings are all coming off the walls today, anyway.

In the first months, they drive each other sane, mostly, though there are exceptions in the other direction. He has a habit of stopping en route to the sink and leaving dirty dishes on their dining table. She compulsively discards things that appear, to her, to be garbage. Neither of them is gifted at waiting for the punchline of an anecdote, even when the other has been polishing it up to share all day.

And, “When I imagined you getting sick of the priesthood for me, I didn’t know there would be so much fucking bureaucracy,” she grumbles.

Anything to do with finances, religion, or the government, early on, is a faultline, and there are so fucking many earthquakes. He is dealing with treacherous feelings about family money that had been walled away from the church-and-hence-him by his parents, now flowing his way freely, a process which dramatically hastens after Sean follows his mother into early retirement and liquidates the business. After the board of SPEAK votes unanimously to start a process of hiring staff and paying him a salary as CEO, he is scarcely any more solvent than before—they pay him a reasonable wage, but then again he has inherited an offensive amount of money. Anyway, being gainfully employed means he’s less angry about it.

Meanwhile, she has been trained by her family to interpret even mild interest in her purchases or property as a form of latent rebuke. He can’t deny that the bean-counting part of his brain does not hold her financial portfolio in anything like esteem, but the larger part of him that’s terminally attracted to a madwoman in stripes and dark lipstick finds her quixotic quantity of low-balance savings accounts a source of real delight. (She has seven, and has saved very slightly less money than he did while adhering to a vow of poverty.) His fondness for the finding does not disarm her defensiveness about it all.

These disputes are their backdrop to the divine comedy of engaging with the London real estate market, which is so laughably harrowing that they are forced to sort all of their pieties out at her preferred pace: very, very rapidly. They end up in a three-bedroom corner townhouse, with a few square meters of green space and a tiny terrace, one neighborhood over from her old place, which she rents out to twenty-somethings of whom she is, briefly, wildly envious. When they get past the blood, sweat, capitalistic lies, and million-and-a-half pounds part of the move, they find that the place stirs latent domestic creativity that they had each previously channeled into their workplaces.

She experiments with light, colour, art, and mirrors. He makes their kitchen table from wood reclaimed from the rubble of a recently-razed late 19th century church, “a Protestant one, fit to feast on.” Once she finds a model she likes, he embraces the spirit of her leitmotif and attempts to carve a fox into the stair bannister. Above all, they help each other.

Meanwhile, the twins are kind to them. “And well they fucking should be,” she says, having decided that Nathan and Elvie’s cheating was an order of magnitude worse than theirs, an impression he definitely doesn’t share but is glad gives her the peace that comes with righteousness.

After attending two weekly board meetings and no-showing the next three, Regina sends him her resignation from SPEAK over email. Though it is about eight paragraphs longer than the perhaps-two that are warranted, he’s glad simply to draw a line under it.

Meanwhile, Felicity meets with Nathan to return his ring after Tom says, very mildly, that the Thames can do without any more blood diamonds in it.

The news that wrecked their wedding: Elvie, Nathan tells her over pinot grigio in a bar they’ve never frequented before nor will again, has refused to see him, indefinitely. But he is confident she merely wants him to show he won’t give up. “She wants to punish me,” Nathan shrugs in a way that acknowledges that part of him is enjoying it, and she wishes Elvie as much oblivious good luck in this as she now knows a woman needs.

Felicity asks, pruriently, for how much of their engagement he and Elvie were fucking, and he looks her in the eye and says, “only the first half.” Her hurt pride is healed that night when she repeats it to Tom and he says, “So way less than half the time I was fucking you in my dreams,” and it’s so corny that she run-walks into the bathroom and cringes into the mirror, looking for the bubble of warmth in her stomach behind the fact that literally all of her skin is wincing. When she returns to their bedroom, it’s to crawl up alongside him so close that their skin feels connected.

Over the first months in their new home, they are aggressively, one might even say anxiously, attentive to each other’s well-being, and it stems not only from abiding love but from deep, deep dread of fucking it all up.

She: is compulsive, pointedly, about stocking his preferred beverages; replaces over a third of her underwear with man-pleasing bum-itching alternatives, which he scarcely notices; and volunteers so assiduously at St. Ethelred’s that she finds herself an executive member of both the parish Wellness Committee and the Hospitality Committee. She ignores his warning that ‘no one person should be so powerful’ because she erroneously takes it to be a joke, perhaps referencing The Office which she has never seen but obviously has caught in the Zeitgeist.

She comes to regret it when her personal beef with the Respect Life committee erupts into a full-scale brawl over coffee urns and pastry trays in the annex one Sunday morning. He can’t deny it’s effective—all the committees end up disbanded and slated for re-org, an effect he’d been trying as parish priest to achieve, with special respect to the anti-abortion league, for a good long while.

It obviously does not lessen their notoriety at the parish, but, as he points out while pressing a pack of frozen peas to her bruised cheekbone, “that was probably never a reasonable goal, for us.”

On the other hand, he: leaves flowers at her mum’s grave, and Boo’s, every other week; calls (no mere text will suffice) whenever he is running more than ten minutes late coming home; hides most of the accoutrement of his Catholic life, lest any of it spook her; spends every Thursday afternoon, without fail, at a corner table in her café; initiates sex, to pleasure her, even when he’s not quite in the mood, with far too much frequency not to seem suspicious.

After some gentle prodding from her—“Hey, I’ve got a good thing going, but…”—he reluctantly starts to broach sex and sexuality with his own new therapist. He has, it seems, three demons: playfulness in the bedroom makes him terribly anxious; he is very afraid he can’t keep pace with her libido as he imagines it, a feeling that sometimes crests into scarcely manageable sexual jealousies; and he cannot bring himself to touch her on a night when he’s had more than one drink, as if so doing will open a Narnia-esque portal that will drag him back to the worst days of his pre-priestly excesses. All of it emanates from a part of him he deeply fears, despite what he counsels others for a living, will always be at least a little broken.

They talk about it as it arises and falls. So she’s not altogether shocked when he comes home one day and asks her to set aside the whole weekend to dealing with all of it, all at once. “I honestly think I’ll have no peace in this life until I’ve made you come nine times in a day.”

She knows he means an array of things other than what he’s said, but means what he’s said, too. Men. “OK, but I was younger then,” she protests, in the mild tones of one not actually protesting.

“That’s what will make my nine greater than his nine,” he says.

“And I’d been in a bit of a sexual frenzy, because I was obsessed with this hot priest I couldn’t have.”

“That’s what makes this goal achievable,” he affirms.

“And his cock is sort of shaped oddl—”

“I will cheat,” he says.

She waits.

He leans a hip on back of their sofa. “You wanted to see me after class… Professor?” He bats lamb-like eyes at her.

She shrieks with delight, to see him play this game, then claps a hand over her mouth and slides into the chair beside their library desk. “Come in and close the door, Mr. Moss,” she says.

The orgasm-quantity bit of it actually takes most of the weekend, but then again, he loses count and she isn’t one for keeping honest tallies, either with the lawyer back in the day or now. They end the weekend with sore shoulders and chafing in virtually all their sensitive spots. He reflects that the lawyer’s greatest advantage was a form of wickedness; he hadn’t cared whether he made her suffer. She is a bit chiding when she tells him that she’d been with other men who cared a bit too much, who tried to do her caring for her.

“You make me feel so fucking glad to have lived this long,” she tells him that Sunday night. He doesn’t hear it in the tone, but he looks up in time to catch an openly vulnerable expression and wraps her up as close to him as he can. He can’t believe how nice the people that they are each building around the other, are; he can’t believe how much he likes this version of himself whom he feels she has loved into existence. He is not surprised by how much he likes to listen to her talk about ex-boyfriends with names like “Gerald” and “Henry” and “Ethan”; really, he just likes to listen to her talk, at all, loves watching her learn what it feels like to be heard.

Anyway. He will always have problems that stem from triangulating among wanting, fear of being wanted, and jealousy of others who want her. That last, no longer chafing against priestly celibacy, had felt especially threatening. But the jealousy storms are never so bad again, after that weekend.

And yet: out of terror of disappointing one another, they inevitably begin lying to each other.

Deep down, she fears he’ll miss the mystique of his former life and come to find theirs either banal or profane, or both. Perhaps he’ll stay with her out of efficiency, because he’ll have calculated it’s marginally better than his next-best sin.

Deep down, he worries that the luster of his non-priestly just-another-fucking-man presence will fade and she’ll stay out of obligation, imagining she owes him because of what he gave up freely. (And, because surely she knows how much he loves her, she’ll stay because of Boo. Because she’s afraid of what he might do without her.)

Their lies have good intentions and do, as with hell in proverb, pave the road to their futures.

His is a lie of glaring omission. He stops coming by the café on Thursdays. He says, simply and only, “I have a new appointment schedule for the spring, do you think Jonah will be terribly disappointed if we switch our café day to Fridays?” and she says that Jonah’s new teaching schedule has required him to make a switch, too, and they attempt repartee around Friday as “the new Thursday” that falls flat in multiple regards. She hadn’t realised what his maintaining that rhythm meant to her. It meant he was keeping faith.

Now, it seems, he is gone again. But… where?

In the first New Thursday, she asks him, “How was your day?” She means it to sound innocent; it is innocent, isn’t it? She’s just curious about what specific presumably work-related activity he has prioritised above the weekly crucible of their relationship, is all. What’s his orientation to it? Is their love so strong, in his view, that it can take a foundation stone being chipped away in its southeast corner? Does he, against every insight she’s ever gleaned about him, lack a sense of continuity, of reverence for tradition?

He tells her about a tour of the new SPEAK office space he and Tim had done that morning. He does an impression of the head contractor, a Swedish immigrant, and she mocks him for reusing his impression of Klare. He pivots to describing a perverted set of ads that he saw on the tube, with respect to what the fourteen-year-olds seated in his area said about them, and she doesn’t know whether he’s concerned for or admiring of them. She asks. The conversations drifts away from her.

Weeks later, she will rue her failure to simply say, “Where the fuck are you going on Thursday afternoons?” because the longer she doesn’t say it, the more impossible it seems to say. She glimpses his calendar over his shoulder at the café one Friday, and sees only that he has blocked out Thursdays 12.-17:30 with a heading that appears to say, “Pathways” and which he has coded pale orange.

It eats at her. And she reverts to old habits. While there’s one thing she can’t say, she says less and less, altogether.

Around the same time he sees her drifting into her unfathomable silences, it also comes to feel like every time he walks into a room, she turns off her phone and sets it down hastily, and then tries to look casual about it. At first, he thinks nothing of it; this woman has hidden from him six different types of porn ranging from horrifyingly basic to shockingly kinky, regularly has hidden ignorance of current events… and he has repeatedly come across her watching a livestream of an elderly woman knitting, over the course of about six hours, with no sign that Felicity was attempting to learn the skill, or do anything with her hands at all.

But he soon notices she’s not only silencing herself; she’s also silencing her text message notifications.

Well, “notices”. He is a sinful man. He tests her by sending her a text while she’s run down to the shop around the corner for deodorant, as soon as he notices she’s left her phone behind. Nothing pops up on her screen.

It sends a chill of dread straight through him, and he abhors, to his soul, keeping his dread silent.

He, sort of mostly jokingly, asks her for a performance review and she laughs and orders him to strip, which he takes in the moment as positive feedback but frets over later.

He tells her about a member of the SPEAK board getting a divorce after forty years of marriage, and winces internally to see her face freeze for a long moment before she responds aloud. Is she thinking of leaving him?

He tries to get her help in planning a weekend getaway for later in the spring; but when she says she’d rather go see Rachel and Ollie, they leave that same Friday and their shared calendar stays blank for everything more than three weeks out.

They are happy. Compulsively, like each is a flame and a moth at once, they’re drawn to each other. Mandy tells her that she didn’t know Felicity could be this happy, “like your name was sort of a dark joke about your nature.” Jonah tells Tom that Tim has proposed in part because the two of them have convinced him that soulmates are real.

They are terrified. There is a part of each of them, dark and distrustful, fearful and defensive, waiting to be dragged into the light.

One afternoon in May, around the time that six-month separation period he’d initially proposed would have been up, his standing Thursday afternoon obligation is unexpectedly cancelled. He decides to do the obvious and pop into the café.

“She’s not here,” Mandy says once they establish he doesn’t want to cadge a ginger scone or a coffee. She looks at him strangely, maybe a little worried. On his behalf? Or Felicity’s?

“She’s never here on Thursdays,” Jocelyn, a woman he believes his beloved calls ‘Slender Permanent,’ advises him kindly.

“I’ll just wait for her at home, then,” he smiles, trying to hide the thread of… something, uncurling in his stomach.

“No, wait,” Mandy says. “Let me just… do you want to stop for a cuppa first?”

She’s stalling, he understands. If he weren’t standing there and staring at her, she’d already have her phone out and be texting Felicity a… yes. A warning.

What has uncurled in his stomach is a snake. He is furious and frightened. He has no idea whether it will strike his own throat or someone else’s.

“I already know she’s not alone,” he manages, quiet as a blade on a cutting board. Mandy’s eyes shoot up at that, and she huffs a sigh, blowing her hair up out of her face.

“Well, you’d better talk to her about it finally, then,” she says. “I told her the secrecy was no good.”

“Thanks for that,” he grimaces, because is she trying to say that she had more loyalty to him than Felicity had? Surely to qualify even as cold comfort, a statement has to be true.

He has three blocks to contemplate what the ever-loving fuck he’s going to find when he walks into his own house. Her lover, he guesses, but… who will it be? Someone he knows, like James the delivery man, or fucking Nathan, or—he’d better stop this river before it’s a waterfall. But one pulsating thought leads to another: will they be in the middle of the act itself, or sitting for a civilized meal at the table he’d built or will it be more intimate, will she be sprawled across the floor, reading aloud a magazine quiz about what her wardrobe says about her personality and making him play along, like she’d done with him that morning?

He stops to vomit on the way, but nothing comes up. Just the burn of his own stomach acid backing up along his esophagus, venom of the snake.

It’s an overcast day. She has the overhead light on in the parlour, he notices dimly. He has the strangest impulse, standing there and trying to make himself cross this monstrous fucking threshold of his own familiar front door, to knock. And somehow that gives him the fury he needs to power his way into… calamity.

In his defense, he had had one banner of doubt blazing through the jealous rage the whole time.

Also in his defense, he knows this is not a spicy affair in the millisecond he opens the door to the sound of surely at least seventy-five children screaming.

Two of them, one blonde with a sprinkle of freckles and the other dark-skinned and wearing a deep purple hair scarf, are both running full tilt straight for the door, but they skid to a stop on their heels when they see him. “AAAAAAHHHH!” the blonde one screams.

He tilts his head at them. He is sure his jaw is slack. He is utterly befuddled. He is clawing for clarity. They seem to be, what the fuck does he know, maybe about four years old. Part of him is still looking for a man between the ages of 18 and 70 to… fuck knows, he has no stomach for violence, although the snake inside of him spent all three blocks craving it.

“FELICITY!” the second girl bellows, her braids tilting back out of her scarf. He grips the lowest hook on the coat rack he also built, that lives beside the door, convulsively. “SOMEONE’S HERE!”

“Dear Kara, I write on behalf of the local council to impore you at least to consider using indoor—” Felicity stops short. “Oh. Um. Hi.”

“Hi,” he says. “Are we… running some kind of crèche…?”

She closes her eyes. When she opens them, she is looking up at the ceiling. She looks, he apprehends slowly, fighting with the chemicals still pounding in his bloodstream to notice anything at all, a little… embarrassed? “Sort of,” she says. “I can, umm, I can explain obviously. But at the moment, we’re…” She gestures around at the chaos.

“We’re on a scavenger hunt,” the blonde girl says helpfully, over-pronouncing the difficult word in the sentence with an air of pride. “We’re looking for a paperclip. Can he help us?”

“Can you?” Felicity asks. “Only I’m trying to get afternoon snack set out for everyone.”

“Just exactly how many is everyone?” he asks, and goddamn it if he isn’t smiling. This woman. She is so… she is so… His heart rate is slowing.

It’ll come to him.

“Just, er, five—well, six if you count Daisy, but she’s napping.”

“OK, then.” There are obviously about a billion questions he might ask, even just to get a one-sentence understanding of who these children belong to and what their parents are presently doing, but instead he turns back to the girls. “Where have you looked for paperclips so far?”

Soon there are children rummaging through his desk drawers, and has this happened in previous weeks? Because it would explain his dim notion that Felicity’s perhaps been shaking down his possessions for potential loose change. The children, all but one of them girls, turn out to have names, though he struggles to associate each with the correct child given that they’re all constantly shouting them at each other, seemingly at random.

“Snacktime!” Felicity calls, and whether because of her voice or by sheer happenstance, this wakes up the baby, who has been sleeping in a little set-up tucked into a corner of their bedroom, off-limits to the other children. “I’ll just go get Daisy,” she says, “can you handle snacks? Reina’s is gluten-free, it’ll be obvious which is hers. Oh, and Isaac doesn’t like to eat in the afternoon so he’ll just sit on the couch with his, you know, his handheld…”

The baby is shrieking now, and the children are swarming past him down the stairs, and he waves a hand at her and says, “Got it.”

The children, he already knows from the scavenger hunt, have terrible spatial intelligence, mediocre vocabularies, and are wildly impractical in their aspirations; but they are great at snacking, which he supposes stands to reason. Reina has no trouble finding her place. Isaac throws himself on the couch where his video game waits, and evades efforts at being drawn into the table conversation by occasionally waving happily and shouting his score. Tom is aware, from having a niece as well as being a priest as well as living on the planet, that as an adult, he is expected to ask them questions (“So what’s your favourite colour?”) that they are empowered to either greet with enthusiasm or disdain at will. He is game. He can do this.

“What’s the worst snack you’ve ever had?” he asks them.

They are gagging and describing fantastic nightmares of foods and flavours when she comes down the stairs holding a perhaps-eight-months-old baby with a geometrically-patterned headband slightly akimbo on her skull, where there is far too little hair to actually require such a thing. “Hi, Daisy,” he says. Felicity sits down with her, grabbing a bottle out of a device on their countertop—has that… always been there? no, right?—and handing it to the baby, who grasps it eagerly if awkwardly, and who of course ignores him.

“Daisy is my sister,” Kara informs him. An outpouring of confidances about familial relationships ensues between bites of peanut butter snack, and through context clues he gradually apprehends that all of these children belong to, or are closely related to, members of the FCC. He makes the connection scarcely before the first such member, Anne-Marie, arrives to pick up her children.

Anne-Marie blinks rapidly when she sees him. “So you’ve made up your mind, then?” she says to Felicity.

“We, uh, we’re working on it,” she says.

Only Isaac is left by the time he heads upstairs to change into soft pants and a long-sleeve t-shirt. When he comes back down, Isaac’s father, who turns out to be Mandy’s husband Gavin, is shooing Isaac out the front door with promises of playing some hover-tech-related version of indoor football when they get home. “See you next week, mate!” Gavin calls to Tom, obviously unaware of whatever subtext that the ladies of the arrangement were privy to. Typical; so much so, that it’s reassuring, in a way.

He goes to the fridge. He finds a bottle of rosé, opens it. Pours two glasses. Hands her one. Sits down on the armchair that they never use because they’re tactile creatures who’d rather be touching one another. Takes a deep breath, lets it out, takes a sip.

“OK. This is a little harrowing,” she tells him. “I know it’s fucked up that I didn’t tell you, but my intentions were….”

“Can’t bring yourself to say ‘good’, hmm,” he says, already knowing in his soul that there is only innocence in whatever this endeavour is. “Were they neutral?”

She sighs. “They weren’t—probably—bad.”

“How long has this been going on?” he asks.

“You’re making it sound like I was having an—oh, fuck, you thought you were walking in on a clandestine, what’s the word, tryst?” Her mouth opens. “Oh, my fucking God, you did! That’s rich.”

“I didn’t know what to expect. You have been hiding your text messages for weeks. You won’t make plans with me that require a longer than 30-minute commute. When I went to the café this afternoon, Mandy all but begged me not to come home—”

“You were at the café this afternoon?”

“Yeah?”

“So your… Thursday appointment… was cancelled?”

“Yes. And I came to see you—”

“So where the fuck have you been every other fucking Thursday?!”

It evidently erupts out of her. She claps a hand over her mouth as if it’s escaped. His brows shoot up. And his face, damnit, but he knows that his face is turning red.

“That. Right.” He lets out a sigh. “I suppose I should have told you from the beginning.” He winces. “Can we start this conversation over, maybe? With about three hundred percent more trust?”

She sinks down onto the settee and picks up the glass he’s handed her, takes her own contemplative sip. When she speaks, she doesn’t look at him, and her tone is very quiet—it’s the kind of utterance, he thinks, that she used to keep to herself. “Could you just tell me where you’ve been going?” she says. “Meetings with the bishop. Short-term cloistering. A second kind of therapy to deal with your copious regret. Some ex-girlfriend or illegitimate child who came out of the woodwork. You desperately needed to get away from me for a bit. I could keep going. I have thought every possible fucking thing. Say it fast.”

“Oh, fuck. It never occurred to me… I’m so fucking sorry. It’s none of that, nothing as… I hope it’s nothing as bad as any of that.” He starts speaking faster. “I’ve been taking classes. Psychology. Toward getting a counseling license the, er, the new-fashioned way. Without clergy status.”

“You want to be… but how would that work? With SPEAK and all?”

“Well, that’s, yeah, that’s the thing. I don’t know. I just know that I feel pretty goddamn alienated right now—and no, don’t look at me like that, I don’t fucking regret leaving the priesthood. Not… exactly. It just sometimes feels like all I do is read reports and shake hands with other people—donors, stakeholders, survivors of sexual assault. And when I get to connect with people, it’s all very one-way, like if the only meaningful talking I ever did in my last job was in the sermons. You know how I’m constantly giving ‘talks’? I’m at this-or-that school, I’m on this-or-that radio show. They like my, er, my story, my background in the priesthood, the fact that I’m also a survivor. They like that I’m fucking honest about it. But it’s… darling. It’s utterly exhausting. Because I just want to help people, and because I’m terrified of becoming a number-cruncher again. My soul is aching.” Nothing in his throat—not saliva, not the rosé—but he swallows again, hard. “I need to work with people directly. It’s what I’m still called to do.”

She lets out a breath he hadn’t noticed her holding. “OK. Why the fuck did you keep that a secret?”

“I think I felt like… maybe you would think I pulled a bait-and-switch? You know? ‘Come be with me, I’m going to run a charity and save the world,’ and maybe that the, er, prestige, and the press coverage was part of my, er…” He struggles to meet her eyes, for a second, then looks at her squarely with the full force of his vulnerability. “My sex appeal. And if I was just gonna listen to sad sacks talk about their problems for a living, knowing me probably with the NHS…”

She sets down her wine glass and puts her face in her hands, and he can see, vividly, how much he has fucking hurt her. When she takes her hands away, her make-up is smudged where she has angrily rubbed the tears out of her eyes. “So you’re telling me,” she enunciates clearly, “that I was imagining you desperately wanting to leave me for the widest variety of reasons… when what was actually true is that you just didn’t trust me to value your fundamental happiness above my own orgasms. You have a fucking shaky grasp of those, too, it seems.”

“That’s not it,” he says. He feels a little desperate, and sounds it. “It’s that I want you to have everything you want, and… No, that’s not fucking it. I want to be everything you want. I couldn’t bear the idea that you were… settling. A little bored.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, what cause could I possibly have to be bored? I didn’t even know where you fucking were one day a week! I was on the edge of hiring a private investigator!”

“You didn’t—” to his credit, he hesitates here, “—ask, though?” It’s a question.

“No,” she says, reaching for the wine again. “Obviously, I was afraid of the answer. And honestly, right now it feels worse than I imagined? It being the image you have of me as a fucking monster.”

This feels, to him… oh, fuck. Just. He knows he has erred, horribly. He lets the silence stretch a long moment, a moment in which he wants to give her every manner of reassurance. They all die on his lips. Why should she believe him? He’s the arsehole who didn’t tell her basic information about what he wanted from his life or how he was trying to get it.

“The children, though?” he says. “I know—you have every right to be furious at me, I’m the biggest idiot for miles. But would you please also clarify for me why there were half a dozen children under the age of five in our home today?”

“Yeah,” she says, and now she turns the full power of her unguarded vulnerability on him, a hint of challenge in it. “I told some of the ladies in the FCC that I didn’t know whether I wanted children. So they sort of… dared me to care for theirs, try it out. Thursdays, of course. It’s been two months. It’s fucking impossible to hide all the traces of them, by the way. Remember that day you, insanely, believed me when I explained the stickiness in here by saying I’d spilled white wine in six different places?”

He does, because he remembers the low-key dread that had accompanied his idea of how she might have done that. “Idiot. Like I said. But—hiding your text messages?”

“They’re relentless. Under the guise of informing me about parenthood, it’s every fucking thing—videos of children mangling the alphabet song, pictures of various household items they’ve advertently or inadvertently destroyed, angelic ones of them sleeping or helping or cuddling, some of the most graphic images of norovirus I hope to ever encounter… The ladies of the FCC are blunt and thorough.”

“And?”

“And…?”

“Did you decide. Whether you want children?” He tries to keep his tone neutral.

“This is not the fucking time for this—”

“Let’s just call this Full Disclosure Day and put all our cards on the table now, can we?”

She looks at him a long moment. “I want them,” she says finally, a bit resentfully, as if she thinks he’s going to make fun of her for it—the tone of someone who is still listening to a band whose lead singer has been cancelled.

“Right,” he says.

She squints. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means… I dunno, I just thought we’d already decided to do this. Years ago, even. ‘I’ll go up to three,’ you said.”

“When did I… I was flirting!”

“It was highly effective,” he affirms solemnly.

“You told me you’d picked out names for them, without ever asking me if I wanted them,” she accuses, now.

“Yes, and you said you wanted all that, the whole speech I made… and you just said again that you do?”

She wraps an arm around her chest. “You don’t want to, you know, think about all of our various kinds of baggage? Upcoming political turmoil? Climate change? Nuclear holocaust? And, I mean, there’s the labour aspect—babies are time-insensitive but teenagers—”

“I’m going to leave the atomic bomb out of it, but… what else has any of this, you know, extracurricular self-examination been about? Why have we been trying to get it so right, if we have no fucking faith in the future?”

“No faith in each other,” she says, a bit sourly.

“Each other! Yes, exactly. I didn’t tell you I was considering a career change. You didn’t tell me you wanted to start trying for children—when should we do that, by the way, and do you want to be married first?”

“Is that your idea of a proposal?”

“Actually, no, it’s not, why do you think I’ve been trying to talk you into buggering off on a holiday with me, to somewhere with an element of romance?”

“Oh, Jesus, is that why I’ve been subjected to five conversations about the relative merits of various coarsenesses and colours of sand?”

“Show a millisecond interest in any fucking beach on this globe, I beg you!”

“I’m actually,” she hesitates, “not really a ‘beach person’, I burn very easily and, um, I hate the way the ocean smells.”

“How the fuck was I supposed to…!” He throws his hands in the air. “Prague. Bogota. Nairobi. Kuala Lumpur, if it’s not too close to the smell of the ocean for you! Just name the place so I can tell you I want to legalise this infuriating relationship in order to attempt to guess what you’re imagining for the rest of my goddamn life!”

“Do you have a... ring?” she asks, very quiet, like this question has been hard to force through past the various wardens guarding her heart and brain.

He hears it, now. “Since about three months before you and your fiance left each other at my altar,” he says quickly. “I bought it one night after one of our counseling sessions. You made me laugh so hard I knocked over my bookcase. You said over your shoulder, on your way out, ‘if you like it then you should have put a ring on it.’” He smiles, the one that only lifts one half of his mouth. “The thought was irresistible. I felt like you were giving me hope.”

“I was,” she admits. “Well, or torturing you.”

“Same thing, really.”

“Yeah. Can I have it?”

“What, now?”

“Is it not still ‘Full Disclosure Day’? Full disclosure: Yes. I’ll marry you. Soon. And, relatedly, I don’t want to do the marital counseling thing again. It takes too long, and we were too good at it the first time to need a repeat.”

He takes this in, considers objecting that the ‘first time’ was counseling for her and another man, quickly realises that that had simply been a harrowing pretext, and holds out his hand. “The register office it is, then. Come on.”

She follows him up to their bedroom, to his bedside table, where he rifles through to the back and pulls out a very small manila envelope, that says, “keys – past & future”. It was a hiding spot, in proverbial plain sight.

“Clever,” she says drily, but her eyes are smiling and her heart is in them. She moves to sit down on the edge of the bed, but he tugs her hand back to him.

“Let’s face this on our feet, shall we? I feel like we’ve sat for too much—all those confessions, all that… waiting. Though you know you can have me on one or both knees any day of the week. I’ll do it now, if you—”

“That won’t be necessary,” she manages. He opens the envelope and tips a simple gold ring into his hand, with twinned jewels clustered to each other—yellow diamond and ruby, certified lab-grown because he is familiar with the concept of blood diamonds and his family really has given him an absurd amount of money. It had reminded him of her—candlelight catching wickedness in chocolate hazel eyes, words bursting through crimson lips at the Quaker Meeting House.

And he’d had a lot of romance in his soul that night, had thought it might remind her of foxes. They’d meant less, then.

“Felicity, you are—oh, fuck, that’s it. I was trying to think of a word earlier. You are catalytic. You have come into my life like… like I was swimming in vinegar and you were a tin of bicarb. I am fizzing. I am changed. You are irrevocable. And I’m so fucking grateful.”

“It’s the same for me,” she says. “You know it is. Although,” she grabs his hand to press the ring between their palms, “we haven’t really been acting like it, have we?”

“Would you have let me go?” he asks. “If I'd told you I was regretting leaving the Church?”

“Not without a large amount of yelling and a medium amount of fire. Starting with the robes in the back of your closet.”

“I keep thinking there’ll be some use for those,” he muses, “Halloween costume or… tablecloth or something.”

“That they’re in our house, hanging there in plain view, has been…” She shudders.

“Let’s burn them, then,” he says against her lips.

She smiles into the words. “You said once, about the Catholic church, that there’s never been anything surer in human history.”

“I just meant in terms of, you know, millennia of staying power.”

“Think again,” she murmurs, and presses her whole body along his, lip, hip, tipping backward at the ankle as he reciprocates and bends into her. He feels her sliding the ring out of his palm and onto her finger. They consecrate the engagement on their feet, with some small amount of help from the wall.

He knows, she has told him, that she feels like a goddess when she breaks him. He feels, he shows her that he feels, like God Himself when she sighs, “I love you!” and sinks her teeth into his neck while she shudders all around him.

They have given each other this, he marvels, as he eases some of the rest of their clothing away from their bodies to kiss her shoulders, her ribcage, her navel. Pleasure, of course. But mainly he means belonging, and the certainty that comes from belonging. A rock beneath the foundations of a life. They’ll give each other their children here in this belonging they’ve made, if they’re able; and make their peace within it, if they’re not. He is overcome. Without thinking, he is kneeling and scraping gentle teeth down her sternum to her hips. “I love you,” he says, over and over, and over. And over.

He has made his adult life converting probabilities into judgments into speech. Now, he is out of other words. “I love you. Until we die, at least,” she says eventually into this litany, when it’s filled up some of her empty places.

“Oh, at the very fucking least,” he agrees.

She knows they require healing—they have skipped their usual gauntlet of confessions as well as a raft of mundane conversations. She realises he hasn’t yet told her anything, really. What certification is pursuing? Why was his class was cancelled this afternoon? How long will this course of study take? Are all his classmates half his age and do they tend more to being confused by him or obsessed with him?

And she should tell him what she’s afraid of, with respect to bringing new life in the world, and what she suspects he’s afraid of, or should be, or will be. She has impressions, now, from weeks with the children of the FCC; but also clarity about Claire and Lucy, recollections of her own mother, shifting relationships with her own mortality, and she has not begun to say any of it.

He loves to reassure her about her mortality, and she’ll let him; she loves to reassure him about his character, and he seldom allows it. But he will, tonight.

When he says, into her neck, “We should go out and celebrate,” Felicity rejects his first three suggestions of restaurant locations and, ignoring his half-hearted objections, takes him back to the one where they first met. (She hasn’t so much as walked past it since that ludicrously consequential night—it’s near enough to her dad’s place, but not in a direction that convenience or transport would typically point her.)

It's perhaps a little obvious, as a choice.

She calls and makes a last-minute reservation; late-ish on a Thursday, the restaurant is only half full when they arrive, although they do have to be reseated when the waitress from last time requests they be moved to another section.

When she starts to speak, to begin to close their little gaps, it’s so easy that she doesn’t feel the strain of trying. She has noticed before, and notices again now, that whenever she finds herself in a mood to orate, it puts him in a mood to listen.

They eat, and she discovers what she could not have known last time, when her mouth tasted of grief and lust and rage: the food here lives up to its reputation.

“It’s been three years,” she says, as he slides the bill away from her. “Does it feel like less than that, or more, to you?”

He looks up, shakes his head quickly—his sign that he’s rejecting the premise of a question and moving on to the next one; so it feels exactly like three years, to him, he felt every minute. “I wasn’t going to come, you know. That first night, when you… when we met. I picked up the phone to cancel, and my mum called, and it was a lot of nonsense about my dad’s upcoming birthday party and when I should arrive and how I should behave and what I should say if someone asked me about Paul… I thought, I could really do with a fucking normal family right now, so I didn’t cancel.” He laughs, to hear himself say that, and hence so does she. It doesn’t hurt either of them.

“I wonder if you would have assumed you’d gotten exactly that if I hadn’t come,” she said. “Claire would have hidden the miscarriage, you’d’ve peacefully smoked in the alley to relieve the tension of indulging my godmother’s admittedly very lively narcissism, and fucking no one would have gotten punched.”

He looks at the ceiling and smiles, stopping just short of winking at God. She’ll never tell him, but she loves when he does that, because it usually means she’s made him happy. “You know, I don’t believe in soulmates,” he says.

“The one exception to your credulity.”

“But,” he ignores her and lays his pen down decisively, “I mean, it’d be crazy not to wonder.”

“It’s no crime against science to wonder.” Her tone says she’s mocking him, but she sees him watch her swiftly squeeze the ring on her hand to be sure it’s there. And his eyes go dark with feeling.

They could take the tube, but they decide to walk a bit to get back on their bus route.

“Remember that night in Belfast?” she says, and he does, of course.

“I was pretending we’d been out for an anniversary dinner,” he says, in the tone of someone confessing.

She leans on his shoulder and he tightens the grip of his hand on her hip. “Let’s make it our anniversary,” she suggests. She doesn’t think before she says it.

“Must be about two months away,” he says. She slides out her phone. “It was, let’s see, your dad died on the 26th, so… wait. You won’t mind the association?”

“My association with my father isn’t confined to one day a year,” he says.

“The 28th, then. It’s a Thursday.”

“I suppose that settles it.”

It does. They feel smug about it.

The streetlight is out at the bus stop; he turns his phone’s flashlight to its side wall.

“You really were thorough along the number 10 route,” he says, half-admiringly, trailing a hand over his own phone number in blue marker, half-carved-over with a heart and some initials, beside an old “BUCK FORIS” graffito. She is well aware that he still gets these calls from time to time—drunks, mostly, the occasional lunatic, and on one occasion, an industrious seven-year-old. He talks to them all, of course.

“Hell hath no Sharpie,” she grins unrepentantly.

They see the bus approaching, far down the road. “Would you rather keep walking?” he ventures. “Grab a cab when we’re sick of it?”

Like him, she’s glad to draw out the night a bit longer. But then, up the road, they hear a low growl, and then another, higher-pitched. Both erupts into shrieks. They both know instantly: that sound is not feline.

“Let’s just take the bus,” she ventures with a slight sigh.

He shakes his head, walks a few feet past the stop, and holds out his hand.

“Come on. You don’t have to worry.” While she hesitates, the streetlight flickers back on overhead. “Come on,” he repeats. “I promise. We’ll be alright.”

THE END