I like my solitude. There’s a baby grand piano in the middle of the parlor floor, where most people have a dining table. I don’t need a dining table that seats six. I eat at the kitchen island, or more often, while sitting on the sofa, watching television or listening to music.
And it's not like I'm actually alone. Barnaby takes up more than his fair share of my queen-sized bed, and between his sighing and snoring and rearranging himself throughout the night, I always know he’s there. But he's a dog.
He’s not someone who demands to be spooned while we fall asleep. He doesn’t sing old love songs in the shower or look up at me from on his knees with a wicked grin and puffy lips.
With Leah, I’d had a full share of intimacy, of partnership, of waking up next to someone who knew me. I'd been lucky to have her. Not everyone gets the kind of love we shared. I wasn't waiting for it to happen again.
Except that the night we put her in the ground, I reached for Victor in our living room and took something I had no right to take. And then I spent the next fifteen years telling myself it was grief, it was temporary insanity, it was a sin I could bury if I just never looked at it again.
I built my solitary life on top of that burial ground. I convinced myself I was content. And I was, mostly. Because the alternative was admitting that what happened with Victor wasn't just grief. That it meant something. That I wanted it to mean something.
Costa Rica dug it all back up.
Now I lie awake after Barnaby has settled, staring at the ceiling, aware of all the space in the bed that a seventy-pound dog somehow doesn't fill. I catch myself pausing in doorways, waiting for something. I notice the second toothbrush holder in the bathroom, still empty after all these years, and it feels like an accusation instead of just a fact.
I know what changed. I just don't want to look at it directly.
Because if Costa Rica meant something—if Victor means something—then that night fifteen years ago meant something too. And I've built my entire life around pretending it didn't.
Thursday night rehearsal is a disaster. We're working on the Gesualdo Tenebrae Responsoria, challenging pieces even when everyone's focused, which tonight, no one is. Calvin Kuliesczak, our second tenor, keeps coming in late on his entrances. Julian and I clash on the tempo in the third section. And I snap at Ben Calloway, our second baritone, for a pitch issue that, in fairness, was probably my fault for not giving a clear enough cue.
“Good Lord, Jason, what's gotten into you?" Julian asks during our break. The others have scattered to the coffee station in the parish hall or the restroom, leaving us alone in the chancel of Saint Sebastian.
"Nothing," I mutter. "Long day."
Julian gives me that look he's been giving me since grad school. The one that says he knows I'm full of shit but he's too polite to call me on it directly. "You've been off since you got back from Kelsey's wedding. Everything okay with her?"
"Kelsey's fine. She's great. Married life suits her."
"And the trip? How was Costa Rica?"
I think about the hot springs. Victor's smile when I suggested we spend the week allowing ourselves what we’d been denying for so long. The way he looked at me across the pillow in our shared casita, like I was something precious. The airport goodbye, his lips moving silently as he backed away.
"Fine," I say. "It was fine."
Julian's eyebrows lift but he doesn't push. He's known me long enough to recognize when I've hit a wall. "Okay. Well, if you want to talk about whatever's not bothering you, I'm around."
"Thanks." I mean it, even though I have no intention of taking him up on the offer. What would I even say? I slept with my dead wife's ex-boyfriend, who's also my stepdaughter's biological father, and now I can't stop thinking about him, but I'm too much of a coward to pick up the phone?
Julian would probably take it in stride. He's not Catholic and he doesn’t attend Mass here. He only agreed to found the Six under the aegis of Saint Sebastian because it was more convenient for formation and tax purposes. He wouldn’t intentionally betray me to Father Gabriel but I’d have to ask him to keep my secret and that feels wrong.
Not to mention that saying it out loud would make it real, and I'm not ready for that.
Will I ever be? I have no idea.
Sunday Mass feels different now, too.
I've played organ and directed this choir for over twenty years. Through Leah's illness. Through her death. Through the long, gray years of raising Kelsey alone and rebuilding a life I never expected to have. Saint Sebastian's has been my anchor through all of it. The music, the liturgy, the rhythm of the church calendar marking time when time felt meaningless.
But today, Father Gabriel's homily is about love.
Not romantic love. He's talking about agape, the selfless love of God for humanity and the love we're called to show one another. He quotes First Corinthians, the passage everyone uses at weddings. He talks about how love requires us to be vulnerable, to risk being hurt, to open ourselves to another person even when it's terrifying.
I think about Victor, three thousand miles away. I think about the way he held me at the airport, fierce and tender at the same time. I think about the text I haven't sent, the call I haven't made, the silence I've let calcify between us because I'm too afraid to break it.
Love is patient.
How patient? Fifteen years patient? Another fifteen years?
