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I lowered my head. My faith had not disappeared. It just resided in quieter places now. Perhaps faith had never been the collar. Perhaps it had never been these walls. Maybe it was the stubborn belief that after everything, something good could still be built from what remained.

I leaned back and looked toward the ceiling. For the first time in years, I allowed myself to think beyond tomorrow.

The future came hesitantly. A series of images without order. I saw myself at my family’s table, no longer seated like a guest who expected to be asked to leave. Raze would argue with Archie about something neither man truly cared about. Tone would threaten them both. Atlas would watch from the head of the table with the expression of a man reconsidering every decision that had led him there.

I would remain. That was the important part. I would remain through the noise. Through the arguments and the moments when old anger surfaced and forgiveness proved less permanent than we wished it to be.

I would learn my brothers again. Not as they had been when I left, but as the men they had become without me.

I would discover which of Raze’s silences meant anger and which meant fear. I would sit beside Atlas when the weight of holding the family together became too heavy for one man. I would allow Tone to rage at me until the rage was exhausted and only grief remained.

I would speak Alessio’s name. Not often, but enough to remember him.

I imagined Marigold growing older. The missing teeth replaced. The drawings becoming more detailed. Her questions becoming harder to evade. I would attend birthdays. School performances. Christmas mornings. I would endure endless explanations about things she assumed I was too old to understand.

There would be other children. Nieces and nephews who did not know me as the uncle who had disappeared before they were born. Children who would run toward me without hesitation. Who would climb into my lap, steal food from my plate and ask for stories their parents had forbidden me from telling.

I had spent years standing beside graves, learning how quickly a life could be reduced to dates carved into stone.

Born.

Died.

A narrow space between them, expected to contain everything.

I wanted more than graves.

I wanted scraped knees and crowded tables. Arguments over bedtime. Doors opening and closing. Children leaving muddy shoe prints where they had been told not to.

I wanted the ordinary problems of men who expected to live long enough to solve them.

And somewhere beyond those images, another future waited. It was more fragile than the rest.

I saw a house.

Not this church. Not the Cavalho estate. Something smaller. Quieter. A place chosen rather than inherited.

Morning light across a kitchen table.

Adriana standing barefoot near the window, her hair unbound, wearing one of my shirts. She would pretend not to notice me watching her. I would let her.

There might be children. The thought came carefully, as though even imagination feared frightening me away.

A daughter with Adriana’s eyes and my stubbornness. A son who asked too many questions. Small hands curled around my fingers. A child asleep against my chest, trusting me enough to surrender completely.

My throat tightened. I knew what men like us passed to their children. Violence and chaos. Sins inherited long before they were old enough to understand them. But perhaps inheritance didn't have to be a curse. Perhaps I could give them something else.

I could not promise children a father without darkness, but I could give them a father who didn’t make that darkness their burden.

In every version of the future, Adriana was there.

Sometimes beside me at the Cavalho table, her fingers resting against mine beneath the wood. In the garden with Marigold, laughing over something they wouldn’t let me hear. Asleep in my arms while dawn entered the room we shared.

At times, she’d be angry with me. Other times, frightened. Sometimes she’d be strong enough to hold me together and tired enough to need me to do the same for her.

I did not imagine perfection. I had spent too many years listening to marriages fracture inside the confessional to believe that love arrived devoid of pain.

I imagined truth. Hard conversations. Nights when I awakened from dreams of blood and found her watching me. Days when her father’s name reopened wounds she believed had healed.