“It’s done,” I say into her hair. “Rafferty did it.”
She breathes out. “Good,” she says, and the word isn’t joy; it’s alignment. “Is he okay?”
“He will be.”
We lie there while the heat ticks the baseboards and the city pretends it sleeps. I tell her the short version she asked for—no names, no tools, just the shape of it and the part where I forgave a man who needed it.
“You were right,” I add. “About the rosary. About the room. About how to make men choke on their own words.”
She hums, the sound of a cat that knows it’s safe. “We’ll still do it,” she says, half-asleep. “For the rest who need to hear.”
“We will,” I agree. “But not tonight.”
“Not tonight,” she echoes.
Her breath evens. The tension in her back is gone, replaced by the old soft weight that says I can stop counting seconds. I watch the window, then the door, then her shoulder rising and falling and decide I can close my eyes for an hour.
Before I do, I slide my palm to her belly and anchor there. She covers my hand with hers, laces our fingers. The streetlight draws a white line across the wall. The house settles.
You learn things in rooms you don’t choose. How to breathe after the hit. How to count to one hundred and make it meansomething. How to walk a man to the end of his sentence without losing your own.
Tonight I learned the only thing I want is this. Not fireworks. Not applause. A house where the person you love falls asleep first and you’re the monster outside the door, not inside the room.
I can live like that.
20
CATERINA
St.Brigid’s remembers how to hold sound like secrets.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon—pale light, empty pews, the faint lemon-and-wax smell of floors that have outlasted arguments. I kneel in the same confessional box where once I didn’t confess at all.
Today I do.
I speak in a whisper that belongs to a younger self and a new one sharing the same throat. I say out loud what I’ve been carrying: the thought I had on a boat, the wish I made with teeth in it, the moment I loved my husband most and it scared me because of what he was doing with his hands.
The priest’s voice is gentle and conservative in his use of words. He doesn’t gasp. He doesn’t reach for lightning. He tells me God can sort through what I’ve brought, and that my job is to keep telling the truth and to stop mistaking fear for humility. For penance he asks for something that looks like study and something that looks like kindness. I promise both.
When I push the door open, the church is so quiet you can hear the candles think. The confessional door thuds closed behind me as if it were breathing all along.
Cayce is in the same pew he was the first night I met him.
He sits like he owns his bones again, stretched along the aisle-end of the fourth row where the stained glass makes the wood look bruised and lovely. Hands folded, not clasped. Jacket open. The ring gleams when the light finds it; my own feels heavy and right. I slide in beside him, and he turns toward me.
“Little saint,” he says, keeping the words low because this is a place for low, not because he has to.
“I did it properly this time,” I say. “A real confession.”
“How was God?” he asks, mouth thinking about smiling.
“Good at listening.” I lean back, eyes up at the ribs of the ceiling. “You?”
“Haven’t said anything yet,” he answers. “Been waiting on the girl who makes the room make sense.”
That gets me right where it always does, a direct hit under the breastbone. “Funny,” I say. “I was told the same, once.”
We sit in the kind of quiet that doesn’t have to be fed. Dust moves in the window-beam, performing for no one. I let my head tip so it brushes his shoulder, and he doesn’t move it away; he tilts into it a fraction like we’ve been doing this for a lifetime instead of a handful of weeks that rearranged everything.
