This is fine. This is one day. Sera is leaving. The gala is a single evening. I can hold the walls for one day and one evening and then return to the collar that does its job.
I have survived this long. I can survive this.
—
Wednesday evening confessions are usually quiet. Mrs.Alvarez comes with her gossip that she frames as her ownguilt—I've learned to hear the loneliness beneath her words. Mr.Gutierrez struggles with his drinking but shows up faithfully each week; his effort alone deserves grace. I sit behind the screen in the dim light, listening for the person beneath the sin, offering what comfort I can. The routine steadies them. The consistency is what matters.
I'm about to close up when the door on the other side opens.
Not one of my regulars — they settle in with familiar ease. This person hesitates. The creak of the kneeler taken cautiously. The careful arrangement of weight. Then stillness.
I wait for the formula. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
It doesn't come.
Instead, she breathes. Just breathes, and the sound fills the narrow box like weather rolling in — controlled, measured, a woman deciding how much to give.
"I'm not Catholic," she says.
Everything stops.
I know that voice — immediately, cellularly, with a recognition that bypasses every rational thought and goes straight to the base of my spine. Low, rough around the edges, carrying that careful rhythm of someone who weighs every word before releasing it.
The woman from the diner. Sera. She's sitting on the other side of a screen in my confessional and she doesn't know it's me and I should say something — should identify myself, should acknowledge that we've met — but the words don't come because my body is too busy short-circuiting.
"I mean, I was Catholic. Once." A pause. "But I don't remember what to say."
"That's all right." My voice comes out steady. Professional. The priest voice, cultivated over time. "Words aren't required."
A soft laugh, bitter. "Then why am I here?"
I stay silent. Let the question hang. People answer their own questions when you give them space.
"Because I needed to talk to someone who can't repeat what I say." Her words come faster now, tumbling. "The seal. That's real, right? You can't tell anyone?"
"Nothing you say here leaves this space."
She exhales. The sound of someone releasing something they've been holding too long. A breath that seems to empty her completely, leaving her smaller somehow, closer to the screen.
"I don't know why I'm here. I've been driving for weeks and I walked past this church three times today before I came in."
I open my mouth to respond. Nothing comes out. I try again.
"This is a place for anyone who needs to be heard." My voice sounds steady. The rest of me is not.
"My husband died six months ago." The words come out flat, rehearsed — the way you say something you've practised saying until the edges are smooth.
I wait.
Then she laughs, bitter, cracked. "And the thing I can't tell anyone — the thing that's eating me alive — is that I'm relieved. He's dead and I can breathe and what kind of person does that make me?"
My hands find the armrest. Grip.
"Grief takes many forms," I begin, reaching for pastoral mode, but she cuts me off.
"No.I'm not grieving. I'm free." She pauses, searching. "The world got smaller around me, piece by piece. Choices disappeared. Friends disappeared. Everything disappeared except him and this life he built around us like a beautiful cage. And now he's gone and I should be devastated but I'm not. I'm relieved. I'm so fucking relieved I could scream."
The profanity in the confessional should scandalize me. It doesn't. It sounds like the most honest thing anyone has said in this box in three years.
