Page 56 of Deacon

The answer hung between us stripped clean of ego, and I believed him. Not simply because he said it, but because I knew the man sitting across from me. I knew what it looked like when Priest carried something all the way down to the bone and pretended that didn’t mean it owned him too.

“Then you follow the rules,” I said. “You show up. Quit wearin’ ’em like armor.”

The advice came easy.

Too easy.

I had done the opposite. Built distance and called it mercy. Called it protection. Called it the lesser damage. Then I spent seventeen years living with Lila carved into me anyway and pretended that made leaving noble. I had heard enough that night to know her father was tangled in things that would rot her whole world if the truth ever reached her, and I knew if I stayed, she would fight for me. Fight her family. Fight the life she still believed in.

So I decided for both of us that leaving was cleaner than making her choose.

At twenty, that had felt like love. Now, with Priest holding Blue’s sonogram pictures and Lila’s sharp little smile still burning fresh in my head, it looked a hell of a lot more like fear.

Priest was still talking, and I forced myself back into the room. “It’s time you tell her,” I said.

His eyes narrowed slightly. “Tell her what?”

We both knew. I let my head rest against the pillow for a second before answering, because pain had turned every sentence into work and this one mattered enough to spend the breath.

“Where those rules came from.”

Priest said nothing.

“The parts you locked down,” I went on, quieter now, “because you were scared of what you’d turn into if you didn’t.”

That hit. I could see it in the way Priest looked away and his jaw set.

“You didn’t close yourself off because you’re cold,” I said. “You did it because you saw what happens when a man like Joker gets power. Makes a family. Gets people he thinks belong to him.”

Priest’s fingers tightened around the sonogram pictures.

“You didn’t want to build a life just to poison it,” I said. “Didn’t want to wake up one day and realize you’d turned into the thing you ran from.”

The room seemed smaller after that, the machines louder against the quiet. Priest still didn’t look at me, but he was listening.

“She deserves to know that,” I said. “Maybe not every detail. Maybe not every scar. But the truth of why you’ve been holdin’ your breath your whole damn life.”

Priest swallowed hard. “She already knows I don’t do easy.”

“That ain’t the same as knowin’ you were tryin’ to be better,” I said. “Or that every rule you made was you swearin’ you’d never be him.”

Priest looked up then. Really looked. “You think she’ll understand?”

The question struck deeper than I wanted because I knew it wasn’t really about Blue. Or not only Blue. It was about what happened when you handed a woman the ugliest truth about yourself and waited to see whether she still stayed.

I thought of Lila, eighteen and trembling but brave enough to love me before I had earned a damn thing. Then I saw the woman she was now, walking into my hospital room tired and angry while still unable to keep the care out of her voice.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that if you don’t trust her with the truth, you’re still lettin’ Joker make your choices.”

The words landed and didn’t move.

Then they turned around and came for me.

I had done the same damn thing. Not with Priest’s rules or in his exact way, but with fear, old rot, and everything I had heard about Lila’s father and the world that would open if I stayed. I made the choice alone and ran before she could stand inside the truth with me and decide for herself what she wanted to do with it.

I had called it sparing her. Maybe some of it had been.

Maybe some of it had also been me refusing to trust Lila to survive the truth of her own life.