“It feels like a circle,” I say. “Back where we started.”
“Different circle,” he says. “Last time I was hiding behind a screen and pretending I didn’t know what I wanted.”
“And now?”
“I know,” he says. “I want you and the life you’ll give me. Forever.”
We take inventory, not in a list, but in the shared way of two people naming constellations. Nan is fierce and fine and has adopted me so thoroughly I now fear for the linen closet of any enemy I point at.
Don Marco sits straighter in meetings and listens like he intends to be the last person in the room to make the wrong call.
Rafferty came to the house in the morning and fixed a hinge that didn’t need fixing because he needed to do something with his hands. Cayce let him, and later I found the hinge opening smoother like a tiny redemption you can feel.
“And your uncle,” Cayce says, not like a man giving a report, but like a husband checking the house for drafts.
“Is the past tense,” I say. That truth lands somewhere that isn’t victory and isn’t mourning, something like a closed book that will always be on the shelf. “I thought I’d feel more. Rage. Relief. I feel…space.”
“Good,” he says. “We’ll fill it with something that belongs to you.”
I thread my fingers through his, my thumb finding the Ogham marking inside the ring. The mark is where my skin knows it will be. Cayce finally told me that it spells our name. I know better than to think the word does the work for us, It just reminds us to do it.
The organ pipes are dark and a little dusty; the choir loft is empty except for a forgotten program and a pencil with someone’s teeth in the wood. This is not a Mass day. No one is here to make sure we behave. God is, but He’s busy and He knows us, besides.
Cayce turns his head, studying me like he needs one more angle, one more frame for the album we’re building. “Would you,” he asks, and I already love the shape of the question because he hasn’t asked me for anything he wouldn’t die to protect, “take my confession?”
I go bright. “Now?”
“Now,” he says. “If you want it.”
A nervous grin quirks my lips. “What about the priest?”
“He left a few minutes ago.”
I could make a joke about sacraments and boundaries, about blending the sacred and the foolish, about how we’ve beenwalking that line since the first time a screen tried to keep our mouths apart. I don’t. I stand and hold out my hand.
“In the box, then, sir,” I say, and he rises like a man obeying a commandment he’s relieved to find written down.
We cross the aisle without hurry. The confessional is wood and shadow and the kind of privacy humans invented before we learned to password our lives. I slip into the penitent’s side; he takes the other. The screen between us is thin as a line. I can see the outline of his jaw, the whisper of his mouth when he breathes. My knees remember how to kneel; my body remembers the last time I did and what came after.
I speak first. “Bless me,” I say, and it means a dozen things at once.
His voice is low enough to be a touch. “Go on.”
I hear him move, not to adjust, but to settle himself like a man who is exactly where he means to be. I slide my hands into my lap and feel the rosary I tucked there, the small weight of it, the smooth place where a thumb has made a path. The wooden lattice between us glows the color of old honey.
“What do you want to confess,” I ask.
“That I keep count,” he says, steady. “Of everyone who has ever hurt you or could. That if I live to be old I will still be making lists. That sometimes, when I’m quiet, I’m not planning violence. I’m planning how to keep you away from it. And sometimes I’m planning both.”
“Those are truths,” I say. “Not sins.”
“They’re both,” he says, with a humility that sounds like iron. “I want to be clever enough to stop using my hands. But to be painfully transparent, I also plan to use them.”
I lean forward until my forehead finds the screen and rests there. “Sometimes I want you to,” I say into the grain. “And sometimes I want to be the only thing you touch.”
“You are,” he says. “Even when I’m holding someone else by the throat.”
The sentence should shock me. It doesn’t. We have bled the scandal out of honesty.
