I could kill her. I could genuinely, sincerely kill her and just seek forgiveness afterward.
I stand. I walk to the counter. The collar is doing nothing — worse than nothing, because the woman looks at it, then at me,and something flickers in her eyes that isn't the usual deference. Not dismissal either. Something more like: oh, that's interesting.
"Father Gabriel." I extend my hand like a man reaching into a fire.
Her hand is warm. Her grip is firm and brief and absolutely devastating.
"Sera." Just the name. No last name, no context. She holds my eyes for a beat longer than casual. Up close, I can see the amber in her irises and the faint circles under her eyes that say she hasn't been sleeping well. She smells like something warm — vanilla, maybe, or coconut — mixed with road dust and coffee.
"Welcome to Homestead." My voice sounds normal. This is a miracle.
"Is it always this quiet?"
"Always."
"Good." She says it like quiet is a commodity she's been shopping for. Then she looks at me — really looks, not at the collar but at the face above it — and adds: "You don't look like a small-town priest."
"What does a small-town priest look like?"
"Older. Softer." She tilts her head. "You look like you should be running something."
The observation lands closer to the truth than she could possibly know. I almost laugh — genuinely almost laugh, and it's been so long that the muscles feel unfamiliar. "I run a parish. It's enough."
"If you say so." She's smiling again, and it's the kind of smile that has a dare in it. Then she turns back to her pie, releasing me, and I stand there for a half-second too long before returning to my table.
My coffee is cold. My hands are unsteady. My heart rate is doing something that belongs in a cardiology textbook, not a diner in Homestead.
I put money on the table and leave. I don't say goodbye to her. I don't look at her again. I walk back to the rectory in the October heat and I stand under a cold shower for the second time today and I tell myself that she said she's passing through. She'll be gone by tomorrow. By tonight, maybe. She'll finish her pie and get back in her car and drive to wherever isn't where she was, and I'll never see her again.
The relief I should feel doesn't come.
Instead, I'm standing under cold water thinking about the sound she made when she tasted that pie. The small hum. The involuntary pleasure.
God help me.
Marisol calls at two, as if God has decided that today is the day He tests every wall I've built.
"Gabriel." Her voice carries Miami in it — sunshine and salt air and the hum of a city that never sleeps. "Please tell me you're not busy next Saturday."
"What's next Saturday?"
"The Foundation gala. Dad's too sick to go, and I need family there. The donors, the board — they need to see I'm not alone in this."
The gala. The word alone is enough to crack open a door I keep bolted. I can smell it — the scent of a Delgado event: champagne and orchids and old money and the expensive perfume of women in couture gowns. I can hear it: a string quartet playing beneath a hundred conversations, every one of them loaded. I can feel the weight of a custom suit on myshoulders, the way a room full of powerful people opens when you walk through it, the electric current of being someone who matters in a world where everything is beautiful and everything is dangerous.
I haven't felt that current in eight years. My body remembers it the way it remembers Sera’s hand on mine at the diner — instantly, involuntarily, with a hunger that makes a mockery of cold showers and five-mile runs.
"Mari, I can't—"
"Please." The word is quiet, stripped of her usual brightness. My little sister, who I left with my worst secret when she was eighteen and I was twenty. Who cleaned up a mess I made and then watched me disappear into a collar and a seminary and years of silence. Who has every reason to hate me and calls me twice a week instead. "I know it's not your world anymore. But I need my brother. Just this once."
I close my eyes. Behind them: marble floors, candlelight, the skyline of Miami through floor-to-ceiling windows. The world I was born into and ran from. Not because I hated it. That would be simpler. That would be survivable.
Because I loved it.
"I'll be there," I say.
After she hangs up, I sit alone in the church. The afternoon light filters through stained glass, painting the pews in colours that belong to another life. I don't pray. I just sit with it — the gala, Marisol's voice, the woman at the diner.
