Each word finds its mark. My mother dying just before I went to seminary. Marisol’s overdose I heard about third-hand. Jorge alone in that massive estate.
“You think I don’t—” She stops, presses her palms against her temples, then drops them. “God, I love you and I watch you do it even here—”
The words tumble out mid-sentence, not a declaration but shrapnel. She doesn’t pause, doesn’t give the love confession space to breathe, just keeps going.
“These careful distances. The way you divide yourself into pieces. Priest-Gabriel, Delgado-Gabriel, the Gabriel who fucked me in that sacristy. Always keeping one foot—you don’t protect people, Gabriel. You leave them.” Her voice cracks. “You’ll leaveme too. Just like Marisol. Just like everyone. So why shouldn’t I—why shouldn’t I get there first?”
The accusation sits in my gut like broken glass. She loves me. Said it buried in anger, wrapped in accusation, but she said it. And she’s right about the rest. I have no answer because it’s true. I do leave, I do run, I do dress abandonment as virtue.
When I turn and walk out the door, I’m proving her point with every step.
My church in Homestead feels foreign and familiar at once, like returning to a childhood home. Too small, too neat, too rundown, but somehow exactly unchanged. The incense smells wrong, sweeter, heavier, mixed with something floral my mother would have recognized. Gardenia, maybe—the scent she wore to Mass when I was young, before illness took her perfume away along with everything else. Crickets chirp from outside instead of traffic noise, and the light that spills through the stained glass windows looks somehow pure and innocent.
I sit in a middle pew. The wood is hard against my spine, catching my shirt when I shift. No softness here. Just a man and an altar and a God I need to fight.
I grip the pew in front of me until my knuckles ache. I’ve given so much to this institution, and for what? Was any of it real faith or just fear wearing vestments? Running to God because running from Elena wasn’t far enough?
My head drops forward. Sweat beads at my temples despite the church’s coolness. The original bargain rises in my memory. Twenty years old, Elena’s body cooling, my hands stilltrembling. The promise I made in my childhood church: take my desire, take my body, take my life, just make me safe. Make women safe from me.
But there were real parts. I force myself through the honest accounting.
Mrs.Álvarez in the third pew every Sunday, bringing me casseroles I didn’t want, gripping my hands after Mass because she needed to hold onto something and I was there. Real loneliness I really eased.
The teenager who came to confession about cutting. Week after week, the careful conversation through the screen, never pushing, just listening, until one day she said she’d stopped. That the words helped. My words. Real pain I really helped heal.
The baptism last spring. The Ramírez baby, finally here after three miscarriages. The way the parents wept when I poured the water. The way my own eyes burned because their joy was so pure it hurt to witness. I’d felt God in that moment. Really felt Him. Not performance. Presence.
Tomás. Every Tuesday coffee. The man who knew about Elena, knew I was running, and loved me anyway. Believed in my ministry even knowing its poisoned foundation.
“God uses broken tools,” Tomás said once. “Otherwise He’d have no tools at all.”
Even my own homilies surprised me sometimes. When the words came from somewhere deeper than preparation. When Mrs.Santiago said my sermon on mercy saved her marriage. When the Gospel felt alive in my mouth instead of dead on my tongue.
Real ministry. Real compassion. Real moments of grace.
My hands tighten on the pew. But even those real parts grew from poisoned soil. Every genuine moment traces back to that night with Elena—her breath slowing, stopping, gone. My hands on her throat, the twenty-year-old who lost control, who held onthree seconds too long because she asked for more and I gave it. The boy who became a priest not from calling but from horror.
Good work built on horror is still horror, even when the work itself brings light.
My fist slams into the pew. The crack echoes through the empty church. Pain explodes in my knuckles but I don’t care.
“Where were You? When she was dying? When I was destroying Marisol by leaving? Where the fuck were You?”
My anger at God builds volcanic, years of suppressed rage finally erupting—for the silence when I begged for answers, for Elena’s death that shaped everything after, for the collar that worked as a cage but never as a cure. I still wanted, still burned, still went hard at the sight of a woman’s throat.
“Eight years!” I’m on my feet, shouting at the crucifix. “Eight years I gave You everything. And You gave me nothing. No peace. No answers. Just silence and hunger and more fucking silence.”
My voice cracks. But even this fury is its own faith—fighting with Someone I still believe is listening. You don’t rage at nothing. You don’t scream at absence. This anger proves Someone is there.
I slump back into the pew, exhausted. Who am I without the collar and without the running? Not the priest—that part’s done. Not the Delgado prince—that was never real. Not the twenty-year-old who killed Elena—that boy died that night too.
Is there anything beneath all these identities? Or am I just empty architecture, all walls and no center?
The pew creaks beside me. Alma's familiar scent of coffee grounds and fry oil settles into the space before she does. Her rosary beads click against the wood as she crosses herself—faster than protocol requires, the way she always has. The edge of her apron peeks from her purse, hastily stuffed inside, still bearing a smudge of the day's special. The diner keys jangle as she sets herbag down, the sound of a business closed hours before it should be.
She’s always known where lost boys go to argue with God.
“Woman troubles,” she says, no greeting, no surprise at finding me back here. “Never seen a worse case of it.”
